Rob Mitchell (McEwen, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

No, you cannot. Learn your standing orders while you are still here and stop wasting time. Today we again heard the Prime Minister talk about people earning less than $87,000. He said, 'We actually want to help people earning less than $87,000.' They don't. They want to punish them. The Prime Minister said, 'You're rallying against people who are successful.' In the eyes of the Liberal National Party, people who are out there defending our country, police officers, nurses and all those earning $87,000, are failures. By their own words they should be hanged because of this. People earning less than $87,000 are not failures.

I will tell you what a failure is. A failure is someone who goes and sits on the government benches like you lot and talks about Whyalla being wiped out, talks about $100 lamb roasts, tries to take the energy supplement from pensioners, cuts funding from needy schools and drags Medicare prices up so that people cannot afford to go to the doctors. It costs $75 to go to a doctor on a weekend in Mernda. Who can afford that? Certainly not people who are earning low incomes and certainly not families.

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