Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I do not know if it is going for growth but we certainly had the enlargement of a voice, which was approaching screaming, here in the chamber. I think that it is a sign of that great Shakespearian saying, 'Methinks the lady doth protest too much.' This shouting, carrying on and nonsense is a distraction. This government want Australians to be distracted from what they are actually doing in terms of ripping away the fabric of this very society.

Yesterday the Prime Minister stood up in the House of Representatives and said, 'This budget is the budget that the Australian people elected us to bring down.' He could not be further from the truth. But there is something very powerful about his budget. It reveals the values of this Liberal-National coalition party and how wantonly and desperately they are under the influence of an ideology that would seek the destruction of Australia's social fabric—our egalitarian fabric about moving forward together.

This budget from this government reveals a complete lack of care for fairness—and we can see it most clearly in the questions that we asked today and the inadequate responses about the differences between people in the bush and people in the city and about failures of consultation with key stakeholders, including the National Farmers Federation and the Country Women's Association. Believe you me, when Nola Macleod, president of that great Australian organisation, the Country Women's Association, says, 'Warren Truss certainly didn't speak to us,' I will believe her every day over the stream of lies that the Australian people have now come to expect is the level of communication they can get from this federal government.

With particular regard to the answer given by Senator Abetz in response to my question about paid parental leave, it is not surprising that the minister was so quick to shoot down dissent from his own coalition partners, the Nationals, this question time. It is not surprising that the Nationals are standing up for their electorates as they watch the golden rivers of Tony Abbott's signature Paid Parental Leave Scheme flow into the inner city Liberal seats and only trickle to the regions.

Sadly, it is also not surprising that the Prime Minister and Senator Abetz are so quick to try and shut down any public dissent from the Nationals. But they are failing in that as much as they are failing this nation. With 700 women on the northern beaches of Sydney, in the electorate of Warringah, eligible for up to $50,000 in Paid Parental Leave payments and only one-third of that number eligible in the electorate of Wide Bay, the Nationals have a right to be bemused by the equity of this Liberal Party policy. That is why we are seeing the complete unravelling of a dysfunctional, arrogant government that is not listening to the people of Australia and is still insisting on the budget that it brought down, the budget that is set to undo Medicare, the budget that takes money away from pensioners.

This budget is not the one that Australians believed that they were getting. It just reveals over and over again the big gap between what Australians think is fair and right and what this government is willing to inflict on ordinary people. The regional electorates were forgotten when this government came up with this policy. It did not consult. It does not care to. There is a constant failure of consultation. There is a constant failure to address the reality that inequity is absolutely in the genes of this Liberal Party, which is leading its coalition allies by the nose to a disgraceful position of inequity in Australian public policy.

With regard to school funding, in the time that remains to me I would like to put on the record that I am proud to be a New South Welsh woman when people in New South Wales—including the Nationals, at the New South Wales conference—are seeking to hold this federal Liberal government to account to honour its six-year commitment to school funding and to reverse the cuts. We had questions today put to the Minister representing the Minister for Education here in the Senate, Senator Marise Payne, who continued to roll out misinformation to try and deflect from the reality that an exit of $30 billion of education funding has been confirmed. She might try and play the game with the pea and the thimbles, where you shift money around—they tried to get away with that with $1.2 billion in education—but the reality is: this government is taking money from the poor— (Time expired)