Matt Keogh (Burt, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Defence Industry) Share this | Hansard source

We've come back to our first full sitting week after the federal election and what have we found before us? We have found a government that is bereft of agenda and is really all about being mean and nasty to the people of Australia. Let's look at some of the things that it claims to be an agenda for how it wants to run this nation over the next three years. It has an agenda of keeping in another country legitimate refugees who have decided to settle, to stop them from coming to Australia, whatever legitimate reason they may have—'No, we're going to be mean to that group of people.' Surprise, surprise!

And then we have from this government what I like to call selective freedom, because they've decided that they want to remove from union members the legitimate freedom to decide who their union leadership should be. They're happy to leave in control of businesses people who steal wages from our lowest income earners—they're happy to leave that—but they want to remove the freedom to decide who runs a member based organisation.

Then of course we have a pretty mediocre change to the deeming rate. It's just mean and nasty from this government. We have what we saw in the budget: the continued underfunding of the NDIS—not providing the full funding. They are continuing to be mean and nasty. Let alone what they're serving up to ordinary working Australians: anaemic wage growth. Then there's the underfunding of education under this nation. Last, but absolutely not least, they are not moving an inch on Newstart.

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