Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Oh! Now you have to ask the Nationals whether that is right! What absolute nonsense. They come into this place and they say: ‘We’re going to push through a bill which appropriates $300 million in this chamber’—which is unconstitutional—‘but we’ve got no idea where we are going to get the savings from.’ We did not hear Mr Abbott this week say, ‘Oh, by the way, we’ll find another $300 million to pay for the bill we are going to push through the Senate on Thursday, that is going to add $300 million to the bottom line’. We did not hear him say that; he was silent about that. He is scrambling around trying to find a dollar here, trying to find a dollar there, with no idea about funding this. He simply says, ‘I might have the numbers in the Senate; let’s just appropriate from this chamber $300 billion—