Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We did not need the recent NATSEM modelling to know that the Abbott government's shameful budget was unfair. It screamed it from the dispatch box on that very night—attacks on the low paid, pensioners, families, people on disability pensions, veterans and anybody under the age of 30. We on this side knew it was unfair and the people knew it.

Mr Hutchinson interjecting—

But if there was anyone out there, including the member interjecting, who had any doubt at all, the NATSEM modelling lays it all bare. Tony Abbott's vision for our nation is that the poorer you are, the more you have to pay. It is no accident either that 16 of the 17 electorates that are worst affected by this budget are Labor electorates. They have not imposed the savage cuts on the people they represent; they have imposed it on the people that I represent.

In the Prime Minister's electorate on average a person will be $144 worse off in 2017, even after you take into account the abolition of the price on carbon. In my electorate of Parramatta, it will not be $144 or $244 or even $444; they will be over $640 worse off—4.5 times more again than people in the Prime Minister's electorate, even though the median income in my electorate is $400 a week less than that in Warringah. This budget is unfair and we on this side of the House will fight it to the end.