Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a tough thing to get job ready, particularly if you are going into a tough physical job. Not everybody can do it. I doubt the minister or many of the backbench could work in a packing shed, pick fruit or any of those things. Rather than getting people job ready, this government just wants to persecute and beat up on the unemployed. That is the one thing they have not given up, at least rhetorically, in this budget. At the same time, they are taking out these zombie measures. But, in that later part of the budget, there is a sting in the tail of this rhetoric, which is all about dividing the community and preventing us from making progress. In this sense, the budget is entirely consistent with what they have been doing for the last 1,000 days, and yet we have this surrender this morning. Perhaps that is why the minister had nothing to say. Perhaps that is why he is stunned into silence. He could not work this in with their normal—

See this speech in context