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

You laugh, but let me just say to you that last year, as a result of negotiations agreed with the coalition, a bill was passed here that accommodated the issues. If I get an opportunity I will quote what Senator Mason said in this chamber about this being the result of an agreement. Then we had an election. Did the coalition actually say to the Australian people, ‘In addition to what we agreed last year, we are going to add another $300 billion to the budget and do what this bill says it is going to do today’? No, they did not. You did not fund it. It was not in your funding. You had a $10.6 billion black hole. You did not fund it in your program. You misrepresented everything to the Australian people through your election campaign and now you come in here and because you did not win the election you say, ‘That does not matter; we will simply appropriate from this chamber $300 billion to initiate an agenda,’ which you would not even have done yourself.

Let me be very clear. If you were in government now, you would not be putting this bill up because you have not funded it. You do not know where you are getting the money from and it cuts across all the ridiculous savings that Mr Abbott has been trying to find and his attempts to justify why he is not going to support the flood levy this week. He did not say to people, ‘We are trying to find some cuts here and we are trying to find some cuts there.’ He did not say to the Australian people, ‘But on Thursday we are going to debate a bill in this chamber which actually adds another $300 billion.’ This is fiscal irresponsibility and it is simply an attempt to sabotage the fiscal program of this government and sabotage us from returning the budget back to surplus. That is what it is about. It is about you using your numbers in here to do what should not happen. I think that is the reason why the Constitution does not allow bills that appropriate—