Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

It's exactly why we reintroduced the bill today. But it is what we've come to expect from the party of robodebt. The same ideology that produced robodebt still drives the Liberal Party. Their gut instinct is always vindictive, always seeking to punish those who are less well off. Blocking affordable housing for women and children escaping domestic violence is just extraordinary.

Now, on Monday, they put out, in their vehicle that's open to them on a daily basis, the position that they wanted to block increased help for single parents, for people on rental assistance, for JobSeeker recipients; the extra JobSeeker for those over 55. They put out there that they were going to block that. But of course that courage didn't last until lunchtime, and the Leader of the Opposition had to reverse the position that he'd put out in the morning on the front page of the Australian. It didn't last four hours. But what is constant is their ideological obsession with punishing the most vulnerable, and of course we saw that with robodebt. It's horrifying enough to think that the one lesson that they took from robodebt was that they didn't go hard enough. It is a pathology of cruelty from those opposite, who are determined to make things as bad as possible by standing in the way of legislation that will make a difference because they think that that will give them a political advantage.

Well, I say to them that we need to deal with the issue of housing supply. We need to build more houses. There is legislation that is before the parliament that will enable just that to happen, and it should be passed by the Senate.

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