Lee Rhiannon (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I acknowledge that interjection from our National MP from Queensland, showing his caring attitude to students who have every right to be able to go overseas for whatever needs that they have identified. It was only for six weeks. Your payment was not cut off by Centrelink. That was one of those reasonable things so life can work in a more humane way and people are able to deal with whatever comes up and with whatever challenges that they might face. But that is to be removed. Again, it is another measure that Labor has decided it is time to axe.

The sum total of what Labor has done here is a monumental deal. Just in higher education alone, it amounts to $400 million that they are cutting from student support. That is on top of what this legislation will mean for people with disabilities and for a whole range of families, particularly single parents, as well as students. My colleague Senator Rachel Siewert, who has led for the Greens on this issue, has spoken many times on it in this place and has addressed many rallies, met with stakeholders around the country and identified what it will mean very clearly when she spoke today. What we are seeing here is that these are the people being loaded up with the costs because, in the May budget, this government—with the work of the Treasurer, Mr Hockey, and signed off by the Prime Minister, Tony Abbott—came up with a very ugly budget cutting out billions of dollars. The money has to come from somewhere, and it is loaded onto ordinary people by cutting the entitlements that they have every right to.

This is where we need to identify what Labor is doing. How did they come up with this plan? Do the Labor senators in this chamber know anything about this, or has it just been handed to them on a plate by the Leader of the Opposition, Bill Shorten? These are very relevant questions, because yesterday the government was on the run. Labor actually had some backbone on this very issue. The fight was on. The message of the bust-the-budget people was being heard here by, from what I could see, the majority of senators. Then, all of a sudden, Mr Shorten caved. We have seen him do that on the terror laws. We have seen him do it on the war in Iraq, and I heard today that he is starting to do a bit of backtracking there by saying that there could be mission creep going on. The leader of the Australian Greens, Senator Christine Milne, identified long ago that mission creep was one of the first things that would happen. It is good that Mr Shorten has caught up with that so he is starting to look for a bit of wriggle room. But he did sign off with the government, and he signed off with the government on these terrible so-called antiterrorist laws that deny people so many basic rights and risk them being abused by this government. Now we have another one on higher education—