The challenge we've got is that the Government does not have a working majority. They don't.

No doubt, you've got a parliament now - I mean, Malcolm Turnbull says he'll work with the parliament he's got. He's got a parliament where a majority of the members of parliament want that law to be changed. He's got a parliament where there's a majority in each House who have publicly said they want to have a Royal Commission into banks.

It's a bit much describing it as a moral challenge from a government that's tripled the deficit and added $100 billion to net debt.

The Government in their own terms, for example, they banked the income for the backpackers' tax. But they had a process attached to the backpackers' tax of review that they wanted to go through. What the Government's saying now with this bill is any process, any detail, any reinvestment that Labor had as part of its package, we're meant to ignore all of that and it's only the cut part of it that we're meant to be committed to.

There are serious budgetry issues that need to be worked through. Playing a game of lying about what's in the content of legislation isn't going to get them anywhere.

The truth is I was Labor's last immigration minister and you have a right to hear directly from me about what that job involved, the choices that involved and how that lends us to think very carefully when we use words like 'compassion, [that] we actually know the exact context.

We're going to prevent politics from abusing the parliament and going off playing politics around the country when they should be here at work.