Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I note that we have some young people here with us who are visiting from school. I am not quite sure what school you are from, but you are paying great attention to the debate that is happening here, and I thought I might commence my remarks by explaining what is happening here. I used to be a teacher, and one of the things that teachers do from time to time is set homework. When you go away and you do your homework, you are responsible for returning it to your teacher and, in a way, what we are talking about is some homework that was set for the government. There is a budget and there is also a thing called MYEFO, which is the budget that happens at the end of each year; so we have the budget in May and then we have the MYEFO in December. In the lead-up to that MYEFO in December, the government made some decisions about more things that they were going to cut. We know that they got advice from very important people who advise the government—that is, the Department of Health—and we also know they got advice from the Department of Finance.