Jordon Steele-John (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Chair. I would remind the government that there is a fine line between humanity and cruelty. Your legislation, which you bring in here, has been condemned as imposing unnecessary harm upon migrant families. I do wonder at the psychopath who sits at the heart of a government who wakes up in the morning and decides that the day's agenda will be filled with plunging migrant families into poverty. More than anything else, I wonder about the nature of the soul that inhabits an opposition that, upon hearing of that plan, would wave it through.

Do you know what? I've spent too much time in my community in Rockingham, in Western Australia, talking with people who have been affected directly by your systematic cowardice when it comes to welfare policy to let you off this one. It was you lot who chucked single mothers and single parents off Newstart. It was you lot who got together and changed the impairment tables on the disability support pension. I have not forgotten that, and neither has the disability community.

What, ultimately, is the point in your political project if you are willing to engage in this kind of soulless, calculated politics? What is the point in you, as an organisation, if you are willing to trade the lives of vulnerable people for an enlargement of your electoral war chest? How dare you come into this place and attempt to defend it as anything other than the shrewd political manoeuvre it is. My colleague Senator Faruqi is absolutely right—you have no right to lecture anybody on the experience of migrants in this country. I want to commend my colleague Senator Rachel Siewert for the speech she has just given in this chamber. Rachel has spent a decade or more trying to work with you, constantly bringing your attention to the flaws in the legislation that you put forward or that you propose to support, and nine out of 10 times you bat it back. You say: 'Oh, it's too much trouble. There's this reason. There's that reason.' Well, I want to commend her for her work, for her ceaseless advocacy for those she has given voice to over the decade when you turned them away, when you decided that you would condemn them.

If ever there was a question in the minds of the Australian public, in the minds of all those who care about vulnerable people, as to whether there is a need for the Greens in this place and whether you can be trusted to act in the interests of the vulnerable people of this nation, I can think of no better example than this. And I pledge every fibre of my being, for every moment that I'm given here by the people of Western Australia, to hold you to account. You may well sit there playing with your phones, but we are on the watch. We will hold you to account. We will not let you forget.