Bob Baldwin (Paterson, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Tourism) Share this | Hansard source

It is good, but the minister should have actually put some forethought into this before rushing in here with legislation, because so urgent was it to grab this money, particularly the $700 million in the financial year 2012-13 to prop up the bottom line accounts.

I do not intend to hold the House up any further on this other than to say that we will be supporting these amendments because they are common sense. But I think the bill as a whole, even though it was passed, stinks, because it is the wrong thing to do to Australians to rapidly access their money when there was nothing wrong with the time frames that were there originally. This government need to get a little better at their housekeeping if they want to be the government they purport to be and the financial managers they purport to be. The record has shown that they have not been.

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