Shayne Neumann (Blair, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Yesterday the Prime Minister told question time: 'This is the budget that the Australian people elected us to bring down.' Deputy Speaker, I can tell you that that is not the budget that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people expected from this Prime Minister, who raised their expectations before the election. The New South Wales and ACT Prisoner ThroughCare service is just one of many victims of this budget of betrayal. Last week, when the minister cut $534 million out of the Indigenous portfolio, he repeated that this would be a budget about inefficiencies and red tape and bureaucracy. Well, the New South Wales and ACT legal service was notified by the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet that its Prisoner ThroughCare unit would not be funded after 30 June 2014. The minister has had the nerve to give this service just two weeks notice of its defunding. Employers generally give workers at least four weeks notice.

The minister has been going around the countryside saying that no front-line services will be cut. This is the start of many, many services, groups and organisations around the country, from Fitzroy Crossing to Newcastle, to Melbourne, to Ipswich to Torres Strait to Cairns, which will receive funding cuts from this government. The Prime Minister said he is committed to closing the gap; it is a joke and a fake.