Kate Ellis (Adelaide, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In almost 10 years in this place I have never seen the level of community sentiment and outrage that I have seen in response to this year's federal budget. Having the chance to be back in the beautiful electorate of Adelaide over the weekend between the two sitting weeks I saw people going out of their way to make sure that their concerns were heard and to plead with me to stand up against this budget and against the cuts that will have such a devastating impact on the lives of many low- and middle-income families in Adelaide. That is exactly what I intend to do.

I intend to make sure that the over 21,000 pensioners in the seat of Adelaide know that I will stand up against the changes to the pension that will impact on their cost-of-living expenses. I intend to stand up for all of those who were told that there would be no cuts to health and no cuts to education and are now seeing these critical and vicious cuts to both the health and education sectors. I will stand up for the over 5,200 families who were eligible for the school kids bonus, the 23,000 Adelaide residents who were eligible for the low-income super contribution, for the self-funded retirees and for those on Newstart. It is my pledge that I will represent them in this place.

This budget does not just confirm that many Adelaide residents believe they were lied to repeatedly in the lead-up to the election. People were telling me on the weekend that they believe that this is a budget that will change Australia and it will change the notion of the fair go. It will change looking out for one another. It will change many of the things that we hold dearest about our community and the Australian way of life.

I also need to point out that, in terms of the Adelaide electorate, there was funding in this budget for the local infrastructure upgrade of South Road. I know that the member for Hindmarsh has been out there. He has had posters up. He has had people along the side of the street. We are very glad that the residents of Adelaide won this ongoing battle, but the member for Hindmarsh is behaving like someone who stole your dog and is trying to claim the reward money when he brings it back. This project was funded under the previous Labor government. This project has been unnecessarily stalled for over eight months.

It is fantastic that this project will get back underway. It will get back underway only because the local residents stood so firm, only because the state Labor government stood up and made sure that this was a priority and only because we have been working tirelessly with our local community to make sure that funding was secured. So we welcome the funding for South Road, but say it is far too little far too late.