Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Most of them Howard era tax cuts, as you well know, for people in the middle class who could have done without it. There is money in the budget for your pet projects but nothing for people suffering from homelessness.

The thing that I brought in here to Senator Fifield for question time is that you are keeping every homeless support service, crisis centre and shelter in the country on starvation budgets that roll forward a year at a time. So you have told them, effectively, that there will be no guaranteed funding commitment till after the budget, which occurs in May, and their funding falls off a cliff at the end of this financial year, at the end of June, which means they are looking at redundancies, cannot sign rental and lease agreements for properties and cannot put people into long-term care or long-term programs if the funding is not guaranteed. Imagine if the rest of government tried to work this way. Imagine if you made the defence department work this way. You go to the defence department and you say: 'We don't know what your budget's going to be on 1 July. In fact, we don't know if there's going to be any funding for defence at all. We may have to make savage cuts, and we won't tell you until May.' That is gargantuan incompetence and indifference to the plight of people who need better from us. They need better from the government and they need better from this parliament.

So, as these groups whose funding you so casually cut on Christmas Eve last year come into parliament over the next couple of days, we will be seeking answers from this government as to what it intends to do, and we will be seeking funding certainty.

Question agreed to.