Jim Chalmers (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank all of the good people from my community I spent time with on the weekend at a Medicare really in Browns Plains. I also went doorknocking in the great suburb of Meadowbrook with a couple of our state candidates, Linus Power and Shannon Fentiman. Some of the people I spoke to rejected this budget on the basis of the lies they were told; some of them rejected the broken promises, some of them rejected the attacks on the cost of living, but most people rejected this budget on the basis of all of those things. What really rubbed salt into the wound for the people in my community was hearing what the Prime Minister said in question time yesterday about how this is the budget the Australian people elected them to bring down. As if it was! This was only one of four clangers that the Prime Minister dropped in here yesterday. He said he wanted an egalitarian society in Australia. As if! He said it was a fair budget. As if! He said this was a government that kept its promises. As if!

The people I spoke to are onto him. They know that if he kept his promises we would not have changes to pensions, we would not have $80 billion cut from hospitals and schools, we would not have cuts to the ABC and we would not have him making it harder for good people who are just trying to make ends meet. The symbol of the unfairness in this budget is the Paid Parental Leave scheme. It says everything about their warped priorities that they will give $21 billion to the wealthiest parents in the country and cut people who are vulnerable. I thank the good people I spoke to on the weekend for raising all these issues about this unfair budget.