Richard Di Natale (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

What we are seeing is half a billion being ripped out. The great surprise here is not that the Liberal Party has proposed this change, because after the last budget nothing could surprise me about the cruelty that could be inflicted on the poor, the sick, the elderly and the vulnerable by the coalition. The great tragedy is that we have got the once proud Labor Party—who stood up for the rights of the poor, the sick, the vulnerable and the young—now doing a grubby deal with the Liberal Party in a backroom and ramming these changes through. This was the party who stood up and said, 'We will stand against this cruel budget and we will fight against Abbott's changes to education and health care and so on.' Now they have done a deal with them!