Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I have an interjection of 'Rubbish!' from the member opposite. We remember last year's pension changes, where she voted to decrease the payment to pensioners. For a year she defended that, and then finally, when the political pressure go so much and the pensioners were lining up to tell the member for Bass, 'We're going to kick you to billyo,' and the members in these marginal seats lined up to say, 'You will be gone at the next election,' they suddenly changed. So we had a 2015 budget that was less cruel. That is the best you could say about it: less cruel. That is about the biggest praise I could put on it: '2015, coming at you less cruel than the year before.' But it is still on that bedrock of cruelty, with $50 billion cut from hospitals and $30 billion cut from schools, and freezing the super of 8.4 million workers and then cutting the pension for families.

And who is impacted most when you cut funds for education and schools? Middle-class families and the poor, because education is the opportunity to get a job. That is if you have an industry, and I heard the member for Wakefield's brilliant exposition about the government forgetting the jobs in Adelaide.

Mr Nikolic interjecting—

We had laughter from the member for Bass about 10,000 people losing their work. Go to the streets of Salisbury and tell them about how good it is to lose their job. We saw—

Honourable members interjecting—

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