It's just cut and paste of last year's budget: Sherry Rehman.

Islamabad -- Addressing the Senate in her budget speech, PPP Parliamentary Leader in the Senate, Senator Sherry Rehman said, 'Parliament can only act upon on what is in front of it and the budget which has been laid before us has been made on another planet and is devoid of any reality.

It is a cut and paste of last year's budget to just get the accounting exercise done to appease the IMF. It is a cruel and unusual budget as it completely ignores the crisis that is hitting the country. It was time to heal polarities and to make difficult and structural decisions as the country is adrift in a time of acute emergency without a roadmap, but we have been given the message that we are on our own.

She said, 'The country is going through a crisis, a national emergency. Yet we have not received a crisis budget. The budget appears to assume that the Covid-19 threat does not exist and lacks any roadmap for economic recovery. Other than paper-statements, both the opportunity or the challenge presented by Covid-19 has not been reflected reflected in the budget'.

'All we hear are justifications of what was inherited. The budget has been presented at a time where we are going through a pandemic but the Federal government has used Covid-19 as a mask to hide its failures. We should not underestimate the impact of Covid-19 on the country's fragile economy but we must not lose sight of the fact that our...