Terri Butler (Griffith, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is also a bit of a surprise to me to rise to speak, given that there were two coalition speakers scheduled to speak. But nonetheless it is a very great pleasure to rise to speak today. Being elected to this place was a very great honour and being re-elected to the first time was also an honour, so I want to take this opportunity during this debate to say thank you to some people.

To everyone who lives in Balmoral, Bulimba, Camp Hill, Carina Heights, Coorparoo, Dutton Park, East Brisbane, Greenslopes, Highgate Hill, Hawthorne, Kangaroo Point, Morningside, Norman Park, Seven Hills, South Brisbane, and Woolloongabba, and to those who live in the parts of Annerley, Cannon Hill, Carina, Holland Park, Holland Park West, Mount Gravatt East, Murarrie, Tarragindi and West End that are in Griffith, thank you very much for again placing your trust in me to be the southside's representative in our national parliament. I also want to thank the Leader of the Opposition, Bill Shorten, and Chloe Shorten and Labor's leadership team for pitching to the Australian people an alternative government that would put people first, as Labor will always do. Thanks also to all shadow ministers and colleagues who visited Griffith in recent times: the members for Grayndler, Port Adelaide, Sydney, Scullin and Moreton, and Senators Moore and Wong and the now senator, Senator Watt, who at the time he visited during the course of the election campaign was not yet a senator.

I also want to thank the great Labor movement involved broadly. I think the RTBU Queensland and the national office. Thank you to the Queensland CPSU and the CPSU national office. And thank you to the ETU. Simmo, I am so glad you are heading back to work—in fact you are now back at work. We are not letting you off the hook that easily, mate. I am pleased that you are very well on your way to recovery.

Thanks also to United Voice, the Services Union and Together, including the ASU part of Together, the Meatworkers, the AMWU, the AWU, the CFMEU, the MUA, Teachers and the Independent Teachers, the Nurses, the Plumbers Union and the Plumbers Union National Office, the FSU, the Alliance, the NTEU, and the NUW, the TWU, the firies and the aviation firies. All of them were so supportive because they want to see a Labor government, because they want to see a government that stands up for working people. Also, thank you very much to the QCU and the ACTU.

I also want to thank Evan Moorhead, Jon Persley, Lucy Collier, George Wright, Paul Erickson, and Ben Coates. Jackie Trad, Di Farmer, Mark Bailey, Joe Kelly and Shayne Sutton are the best local colleagues anyone could ask for. And Annastacia Palaszczuk is inspirational. I also thank Kevin Rudd, who was a great source of advice and someone who deserved the respect and support of this government that the now Prime Minister was regrettably too weak to deliver.

I would also like to thank Carolyn, Jo, Mark, Elly, Clare, Laura, Larry, Vicki and Paul, Jenni, Bernice, Cath, Helix, Nicole, Matt, Kerryn, Richard, Rod, Brendan, Sam, Charis, Samuel, Ray, Linda, Justin, Mary Rose, Fina, Jonathan, Garry, Wendell, Jason, Irene, Valma, Jo, Vivienne, Owen, Kate, Kathleen and the 700 or so other supporters and volunteers who worked on my election campaign. I thank Angus, Lincoln, Emily, Ben, Finn, Lisa, Tom, Charlie, Chad, Sue, and Steph. I also thank my family: Alison, Larry, Lisa, Brad, Jesse, Bailey, Susan, Linda, Marguerite, Graham, Kate and Pete, and of course Troy and our darling children, April and Isaac.

The course of this recent election campaign was one in which we focused on a range of issues that were really important to the Australian people. In my electorate we focused on issues important to the local area. I particularly wanted to talk about one of the election commitments that was made in my electorate of Griffith. We called again and again on the Turnbull government to commit to funding the cross-river rail project, which is an essential project to reduce congestion in this growing city. In its 2014 budget the coalition government cut federal funding for this project. This critical infrastructure project would add a much needed second rail crossing of the Brisbane River in the city CBD. The existing Merivale Bridge will reach full capacity within five years. The resulting bottleneck will constrain economic growth in Brisbane, which, remember, is of course Australia's third-largest city.

In 2013 the former federal government—the Labor government—committed to funding cross-river rail after the independent Infrastructure Australia rated it ready to proceed, but the incoming coalition government cancelled the investment, along with all Commonwealth investment in public transport that was not already under construction. It is time this Prime Minister took practical action to support public transport and to reduce congestion in our cities, including my city of Brisbane. Infrastructure Australia warned earlier this year that traffic congestion would cost the nation $53 billion a year in lost productivity without government action now. The clock is ticking and it is time this government supported this important Queensland project, because we are already seeing the consequences of congestion on our roads in Brisbane; we are already seeing the consequences of congestion caused by inadequate rail capacity, the pressure that it puts on buses and the domino effect that you see on roads.

It is particularly exacerbated in the inner suburbs in my electorate, where the congestion on roads is something that is in and of itself a problem but also, with the amount of development that this Liberal council is waving through in Brisbane, locals are becoming more and more concerned about the pressure on infrastructure as a consequence of the growing population of the inner suburbs. We want to see more people living close to services. No-one is against development, but development has to be appropriate for the local area and has to be sustainable, and due regard has to be given to making sure that infrastructure keeps up with the pressures that are created by increasing populations within inner suburbs.

I also want to talk about the importance to my local electorate of community sporting organisations. They are the glue that holds the community together. Just like so many other volunteer organisations, just like our not-for-profits and just like community support services, local sporting organisations are incredibly important. Take for example my local AFL club, the Morningside Panthers, an incredible club that recently had a great deal of premiership success in the QAFL. I am very proud to be a supporter of that club and am very grateful to the club for the support they give me. They are working to build up their own facilities and are also very keen to open up their facilities for more female participation in AFL. So I was very pleased during the course of the election to announce a commitment that, if elected, a Shorten Labor government would be providing financial support for that club.

There is another AFL club in my electorate that is already doing incredibly well when it comes to female participation in AFL. They are a club that recently held the QWAFL Women's League premiership for three years running. They are a feeder club for the Brisbane Lions women's team. They have a great future in both women's and men's AFL. They are the Coorparoo Roos. I was so lucky: on Friday night I went to the Coorparoo Roos to hear about the successes they had had in the junior teams—men's and women's, boys and girls—throughout that year. What was really amazing about that visit was to actually hear about the work volunteers had put in and the club management committee had put in over the course of the year to grow the club. So I am so lucky to have such great sports clubs. Again, we were pleased to make an announcement during the course of the election campaign that, if elected, a Shorten Labor government would make a financial commitment as well.

But of course there is plenty of sports, there are plenty of local community organisations that it is important to support. Another that I would like to mention is the Clem Jones Centre. The Carina Welfare Association has an amazing history. It was established by Clem Jones himself and it has been providing sporting facilities as well as a range of other facilities and community supports for a very long time in Carina. I see that the member for Bonner is here. His constituents would use the centre as well. It has an amazing sports centre, but the differentiation for that sports centre and others is that they are required, under their constitution, to offer the lowest fees in the area for access to the sporting facilities. There is everything from gridiron to swimming to basketball. In fact, the new Brisbane Bullets are going to be based there—absolutely fantastic. I had the opportunity to meet the coach earlier this year, and some of the management. The centre also has swimming facilities, for elderly people, disabled people and very young children. Member for Bonner, I suspect that you have taken your kids there to swim. I have certainly taken mine.

As the development occurs in the local suburbs, as the population increases, it becomes very clear that there is a lot of pressure on infrastructure. It is not just road and public transport infrastructure but also community sporting facilities that come under pressure. The Clem Jones Centre has a really fantastic plan to grow. During the course of the election campaign I was very pleased to make an announcement that, if elected, a Shorten Labor government would support financially the growth of that centre. And I know that the member for Bonner is a great enthusiast of the club, so he might have a word to the Prime Minister about matching the $2 million commitment that we made in the course of the election campaign—not for the centre itself but for the benefit of the local community—because the Camp Hill Carina Welfare Association is such an important service and facility for people across the local community, including people who are on low incomes, people who are suffering forms of disadvantage. They really rely on that, not just for sports, not just for the health benefits but also for the social benefits of being in touch with friends and colleagues from the local community.

In speaking in relation to the appropriation bills I also want to mention that there was also, during the course of the election, significant argument and debate about Medicare and healthcare funding. The feedback I had in the electorate was that people did not want to see a couple of billion dollars worth of cuts to Medicare funding; they did not want to see a $600 million cut to funding for pathology. People are worried about the idea that if you need to have a scan for a melanoma or to have a breast scan then suddenly you could be paying in the hundreds of dollars or more for those scans. They did not want to see the change to the PBS that would have seen an increase in the price of medicines for everyone, including pensioners. Those were the significant concerns I heard from people in the course of the federal election campaign. They are concerns that I hope this government will take on board, although today's events and the voting against the motion raising those issues do not fill me with confidence in that regard.

I believe that the reason we came so close to winning the election nationally is that people supported Labor's much more community focused and people focused policy of supporting Medicare, of defending Medicare and of believing in and continuing to press for a universal healthcare system where your access to health care is determined by your Medicare card, not by your credit card.

We took to the election very strong policies in relation to superannuation. In the 2016-17 budget, the government has, unfortunately, very much failed on superannuation because of the surprise measure that included retrospectivity back to 2007. It is fair to say this was a really salutary lesson on how not to do superannuation taxation reform in this country, because the surprise proposal went down like a lead balloon, including in my own electorate. Labor, on the other hand, went out well in advance of the election—months in advance of the election—and talked about why we needed to revisit the superannuation taxation concessions. We talked about the fact that those taxation concessions are a very large cost to the federal budget. We also raised very moderate proposals in relation to responding to those concessions and reforming them. Even after the coalition's surprise 2016-17 budget measures on superannuation, the Leader of the Opposition, Bill Shorten, offered the government a compromise proposal that would have been prospective rather than retrospective, giving certainty to the industry and superannuants. We put that offer to the government, but, sadly, the offer was rejected by the government.

We also took to the election very strong policies on reforming negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount. We did that because what is really clear, if you look at the recent history of the Australian economy, is very low inflation and, therefore, very low interest rates as the Reserve Bank has responded to that low inflation. Of course, that has been low inflation in consumer prices. If you looked at asset prices, you would see that house prices have been growing very sharply and much more quickly than the rate of growth of consumer inflation. So it is quite clear that house prices are fast getting out of the reach of ordinary people. In fact, the price-to-income ratio is the highest it has ever been. The consequence is that it becomes more and more difficult for Australians to buy their first home or a home; it becomes more and more difficult to raise a deposit. The flow-on effect is that, once they can afford to buy a house, they are taking on record levels of private debt. We are seeing that in the private debt figures that are showing up now.

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