Doug Cameron (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

What we have in those who sit on the other side of this chamber is a government that is uncaring, a government that wants to hit the lowest paid in this country, a government that has a plan to introduce a GST of 15 per cent on the low-paid in this country. The government has had that plan since it came to government and it is doing it at the behest of big business.

You cannot trust this government. Go back and look at the last election, when this government promised so much to the Australian people and where it said that it would not do certain things. But, as soon as it came to government, it set about ripping at the pension and ripping at social welfare and trying to take the rights away from working people in this country. The government took $80 billion out of education and health. It had the rhetoric of 'lifters and leaners'. So if you got some support from government, no matter how well deserved, you were a leaner and you had to make your way as an individual. All the privileged people on the other side of this chamber, who come from privileged backgrounds, do not know what it is like to not be able to put food on the table for your family and do not understand what it is like to struggle to pay your mortgage.

It is quite clear why the National Party are so upset about this. The National Party should actually be standing up for poor people because poor people, as a percentage of the population, reside more in National Party seats than they do in other seats. Yet the National Party said absolutely nothing when that first budget was brought down. They just acquiesced to the ideology of the Liberal Party. They were in the true saying of how they are described here. They were the real doormats of the Liberal Party. The Liberal Party wiped their feet all over them in relation to that first budget. There was $80 billion taken out of health and education. Why was that $80 billion taken out? It was because they had a plan that they wanted to force the states to push for a GST. That part of their plan worked because some state premiers are saying, 'How do we get any extra money unless we have a GST?' The reason that they are arguing for a GST is that that rotten mob over there took $80 billion out of health, out of education and out of resources for state governments in this country.

They wanted to impose $7 on the poorest people in this country every time they went to see a doctor. They did not tell the public that when they went to the election. They wanted to increase the PBS. Every time you got a prescription you were going to pay more. They cut the pension. They cut the rate at which the pension would increase, which was an effective cut to the pension in this country, so retirees lost some of their benefits. Pensioners on the pension lost some of their pension. People on family tax benefit B lost money when their children turned six.