Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Davoren Park—which used to be called Elizabeth West—is a proud working-class suburb. It is a suburb where people have worked hard to scrape together enough money for a house, and enough money to settle, to go to school, to go to university, to go to work and to live proudly. I am thinking about people like Betty and Caesar Alberton—Caesar, who worked at Holden, and Betty, who has been a tireless advocate for the community and has worked hard for the community. The people of Davoren Park had to wake up yesterday, open The Advertiser to page 5 and read the headline 'Davoren Park is bludger central'. I have rung the Adelaide Advertiser about this headline and I have rung the journalist concerned about this headline about the damage it does and about the vicious nature of this headline. I have expressed my contempt for that headline.

That headline would never have occurred were it not for this minister. This minister comes into this room and talks about 35,000 hardworking staff—and they are hardworking and they are decent Australians. The problem is that they have an incompetent clown minister at the wheel. He is presiding over all of these disasters and then coming in here and hectoring us and asking for your protection like he is some sort of delicate flower, and yet he is rolling out these smears on working-class Australians and their suburbs. What does that do for those areas? What does it do for the northern suburbs? What does it do for Davoren Park? Does it do one ounce of good? Does it give anybody any hope? Does it make anybody get out of bed and say, 'Gee whiz, I'm going to try extra hard today'? It does not do any of those things. It is all about this rancid, vicious, nasty politics of smear. You should be ashamed of yourself. It is not just Davoren Park—

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