Warren Truss (Wide Bay, National Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure and Transport and Local Government) Share this | Hansard source

Madam Deputy Speaker, I made that point right at the beginning. We need to have a suspension of standing orders so that these matters can be brought to account before the parliament goes home for a week’s recess. Labor is telling us that a family that needs a modified vehicle for their disabled child is rich, that a family that lives in a remote community with a dirt road and needs a four-wheel drive is rich, and that a family that earns $75,001 dollar in a six-month period is too rich to have some help with their baby. This is in fact a budget that will hurt the poor. It is Robin Hood in reverse. It will be the poor who will suffer when one million extra people are put on the public hospital queues because of Labor’s tampering with the private health insurance. It will be the poor who will suffer, because this budget does nothing about food prices and petrol prices and will certainly do nothing when people have to pay higher mortgages as a result of the increased interest rates that it will deliver.

And what if you are one of the 140,000 that this government is calculating will lose their jobs—the 140,000 this callous government thinks are dispensable and whose jobs are not important? This budget delivers nothing for pensioners and self-funded retirees. There are no tax cuts for them, just higher grocery prices, higher petrol prices and longer hospital queues.

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