Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for the Digital Economy) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

During question time, sometimes the Minister for Human Services and I engage in back-and-forth. He does the back and I do the forth! The other day he asked me why I hadn't asked him a question. The problem is that I don't have one question; I have a lot of questions to ask, like: why should older Australians dig into meagre savings while waiting for an aged-pension application to be approved? Why, for example, have they not been able to find a way to hand millions in Medicare rebates back to families? Why do they keep cutting jobs and contracting out services? Why can't they reduce complaints? Why does it take so long to get through to Centrelink? Why is it that if a person is hit with a robo-debt they can't use, 'I cannot recall' as a defence, but a minister of the Crown can use that when they're in a court of law? Why is it okay to be big on compliance as the Minister for Human Services, but the same minister can, apparently, decline a request from the Australian Federal Police to provide a witness statement?

It's typical coalition: big on law and order, selective when it comes to them. If a Labor minister refused to provide the AFP with a witness statement, the coalition and all their conservative cronies in the media would be baying for blood. So the final question I have is this: why is there one rule for the coalition and something completely different for the rest of the country? It's unacceptable.