Matt O'Sullivan (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you for bringing me back, Madam President. This is about the amount of time that these communities will have to consider this bill. These are busy people. To just rush this bill through and not allow for proper consideration of this bill is disrespectful to those people, particularly the people that this bill is going to impact the most. We hear a lot about consultation; we hear a lot about the need for it. Well, I know that, since the election—unless something has changed in the last five days since I spoke to people up in the northern Goldfields—no-one from the government, Senator Chisholm, has been in the Goldfields to discuss the cashless debit card and its abolition. Now, this is a real shame. They should be given the full opportunity to put in thorough submissions that will detail very clearly, very accurately, what their views are on the abolition of the cashless debit card.

There does seem to be a very ideologically driven approach to this from the government. We know that members of the government, when they were in opposition, called this policy racist. They called this policy racist. So there is an ideologically driven approach to this policy, rather than a focus on what is necessary.