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

The Prime Minister and the Treasurer should come to my community of Rankin. They should go door to door and explain to the good people in my area why they deserve to pay almost four times more for this unfair budget than the people in their own electorates of Warringah and North Sydney. The average slug in my electorate is $533 a year; in the Prime Minister's electorate, it is only $144 a year.

My community is the hardest hit in Queensland, and that is because this budget rests on a brutal truth: the most vulnerable people in our community and in our country pay more for this budget; they carry the can for this government's heartless ideology.

This is not an accidental or unavoidable outcome of this budget. They are dividing people in our nation, not by accident but by design. They are hurting people in my community, not by accident and not by design. They are tearing and ripping at the social fabric of Australia, not by accident and not by design. They should stop pretending this budget is about anything other than that.

It is my electorate in Queensland which pays for their broken promises. They pay more for the doctor, for uni, for petrol, for medicine, and to get their cancer imaging done; and they get less in return: less payment, less for their schools and less for their hospitals.

This is the most divisive Prime Minister with the most grubby and divisive budget since Federation. If he thinks my community or our communities will forget it, he has got another thing coming.