Don Farrell (SA, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Trade and Tourism) Share this | Hansard source

Senator McCarthy is here. We can ask her all about the people she spoke to in the Northern Territory. She can answer for herself. But I can tell you that what she will say is exactly what I told you: Senator McCarthy, Mr Gosling and Ms Scrymgour travelled around the Northern Territory; they spoke to people about what they wanted. We put a proposition to the Australian people. There was no equivocation about the proposition that we took to the Australian people. Shadow Minister Burney, as she was then, made it unequivocally clear: 'If you vote in a Labor government, then we will abolish this card.' Why did they do it? Because they spoke to people in the Territory and other parts of the country, and that was the message that came back to us: 'We want you to abolish the cashless debit card.' We spoke to the Australian people. We said, 'Will you support us on this?' The unequivocal answer was, 'Yes, we support you.'