Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Innovation, Technology and the Future of Work) Share this | Hansard source

I really appreciate this opportunity to speak today on the appropriations bill. Labor has made the decision not to block supply, so I'm speaking in support of the bill. This is really my first contribution to parliamentary debate since the election, and I wanted to use this opportunity to speak a little bit about my community and what happened around the time of the election and to say my thankyou to the people of Hotham for bringing me back to this chamber.

It is really an incredible thing to be given the opportunity to speak for others in this parliament. I think all of us in this chamber feel such a deep sense of a relationship with our communities that is built on trust. It was an amazing thing to fight in this election campaign for the Labor values that we on this side of the chamber are so committed to. During the election campaign we knocked on thousands of doors, we made thousands of phone calls and I spoke to thousands and thousands of people on pre-poll. I really want to thank each and every person in my community who took the time to have a conversation with me.

I think a lot of people don't realise that we spend so much of our time talking to people. The people that we represent are so generous in the way they share their stories with us. There aren't many jobs in the world where you can knock on someone's door, ask them how they're going and then five minutes later be talking about their child who can't access the National Disability Insurance Scheme or another kid with learning difficulties who is not getting the help they need at school or an aged parent who isn't able to get a healthcare placement that they need. These are the stories that are shared with us so openly and so honestly. It was an incredible thing to have all of those conversations during the election campaign.

I'd like to thank my amazing team of volunteers for the work that they did during the election campaign. We would never have been able to speak to even a tenth as many people as we did without the support of this dedicated group of people who, out of the goodness of their hearts and their belief that our country can be bigger and better, decided to contribute their time to our campaign in Hotham. We probably had about a dozen people who were with me most nights of the week working the phones and talking to people and who were coming out every single weekend—we would do two doorknocks a day, sometimes on both days of the weekend. The commitment that these people have to the Australian Labor Party is incredible. Some of them were branch members and some of them we hope will join up. I really want to say my thankyou to them.

I pay tribute to my incredible staff, who worked with us during the campaign. My staff are the most amazing people. I am always telling people that I reckon I've got the best team around the parliament. I really want to say thank you to my staff for their support and for the commitment that they show to our cause.

I can absolutely make the commitment today, as I did during the election campaign, that, despite all the things that go on in this building and all the hifalutin business that goes on in politics, my first commitment to being in this parliament is to represent the people of Hotham. I'm so grateful for the opportunity to do that again. I will do everything I can to make sure I'm speaking for you faithfully and that I push the issues that you raised with me during the election campaign.

I'd like to touch on some of the issues that came up during the campaign. As I mentioned, I really did speak to so many thousands of people, and there really were some big themes raised that I thought were worth bringing back and relaying to the chamber here today. I want to say something about the National Disability Insurance Scheme to start with. I think families that aren't touched by disability are probably not always conscious of the profound effect that this has on families that have been touched by it. It's amazing how many doors you knock on where the person inside has got a brother or a sister or a parent or a child with a disability, and that really is the main thing in their life—how are they going to provide safety, security and a life of value for the person in the family who is affected by the issue?

The National Disability Insurance Scheme has the potential to change the lives of almost every single one of those families. When we look back on what this parliament has achieved in the last 15 years, this is the big thing. This is the big opportunity for us to do something that is life-changing and life-shaping for millions of Australians who are either affected by disability or have a family member who is. We are not getting this right at the moment. It was quite rare during the election that I spoke to a family who is having a smooth and really positive experience working with the National Disability Insurance Scheme. There are some families, I know, who are receiving support that weren't getting any before. I'm really, really grateful for that. But to hear of families where you have issues like a child with a permanent disability who's being asked to reprove their disability—reprove that they have Down syndrome. What an offensive thing to ask of someone. There are issues where we see families with a child with a serious disability who is waiting months to get appointments with the NDIS for their initial assessment. Once they're told that they'll be eligible for certain types of supports, they're waiting again for six months or longer for those supports.

This is not the vision that Labor had for the National Disability Insurance Scheme. Our concept was an insurance model, which I see is being adopted, but one that is properly funded. There's no point having an insurance model if the money's not there to give people the help when they need it. We were intensely disappointed, frustrated and angry to see that just prior to the election the government trumpeted around what they considered to be a brilliant notion of having a government surplus when, in fact, billions of dollars of that are coming from underspend on the NDIS, when we know that in my community and in the community of every single person in this chamber there are people who are waiting on supports because they can't get the resources that they need. Something is very off here, and it's brilliant to see that we've got the member for Maribyrnong who is now going to be front and centre in this discussion in keeping the government to account. One thing I do know, and I can certainly say this to the people I represent in Hotham, is that we will not stop until this scheme meets the vision that Julia Gillard, that Kevin Rudd, that Bill Shorten and that Jenny Macklin had for this scheme. We will not stop until that vision is met and until the people in my community who deserve and need those supports get them at the appropriate time.

I want to also just address some of the issues around health and education that came up during the election campaign. Labor made a commitment to some pretty significant increases in expenditure in health and education that were so desperately needed. I have to say, the doorknocking I did during the election really confirmed to me that this is a very important thing for us to look at again as we go forward into this next term of parliament. I spoke to so many people who are on waiting lists in public hospitals for elective surgery, to people who are paying enormous out-of-pocket expenses, and even to people who are not taking the medication they need that their doctors are advising them to take, because the out-of-pocket costs associated with it are so significant that they're not looking after their own health. In fact, they can't afford to provide for their own health care.

I say again: in the case of the NDIS and in the case of Medicare this is not what a world-class universal public healthcare system is meant to provide. The whole point of this is that we provide brilliant, First World health care for Australians at a price that they can afford. No-one in this country should be not taking medical treatments that they need because they can't afford to. Yet that's what we see and that's what we hear in a lot of households around the country, and that has to change.

I had so many incredible conversations in my electorate with people who are mums and dads of school-aged children. There are, I would say, a lot of anxieties in this parent group at the moment—and I certainly share some of them myself—about what the future looks like for these young people. I think parents absolutely get that our economy has changed in very significant ways since the time they were at school and they were entering the workforce. It's much harder for young people today to move from study into a job that they can rely on, a job that they can count on. I think they're also aware that technology is changing so fast that the kids who are in primary school today are probably going to work in jobs that don't even exist at the moment.

Labor talked a lot during the election campaign about education. We talked about early learning, this crucial opportunity that we face in the first three years of the life of a child to set them on the right course and how we were going to make sure they got the proper education that they needed at that time. But we also talked about making sure that we improve the performance of our school system. The data points we have tell us that although our system is really good—it's very high quality—there are lots of countries around the world that are improving the outcomes in their education systems much faster than we are. If we want our kids to get the great benefits of growing up in the Australia that I grew up in, we're going to need to make sure we start to make some big improvements to that system, and more funding is inevitably a part of that question.

Climate change is a crucial issue for the people in my community. I heard during the election campaign a lot about disengaged voters and whether people are paying attention and that sort of thing. I have to say, when I was doorknocking, especially in the weeks before the election, I would knock on people's doors and they would literally say, 'Claire, it's so wonderful to see you. Here are the five issues I'm thinking about going into polling day.' In that type of engaged community, climate change was almost always on the list of things people are very worried about.

It's honestly quite gut wrenching and disappointing to see we're going through another term of parliament where the understanding of the Australian people about the issues facing our climate and about solutions is going to be so far ahead of this parliament. It's very worrying for me that it's obvious that we're going to go through three more years of not taking action on climate change. Governments come and go, and Labor wins elections and we lose elections, but there are some issues where delaying and not having that time we need to make big policy change is actually really costing us, and climate is one of those. The longer we take to take action on climate change, the more expensive it's going to get for the next generation to deal with it. My community really gets that. I hope that this parliament is able to wake up to those issues and that those on the other side of the chamber pay attention to the scientists and the rest of the world, try to wake up a little bit and take some action on these issues.

I'd like to just finish up talking about the economy, because that's obviously crucially important for whoever is in federal government. One of the great mistruths of Australian politics is what's consistently put forward by those on the other side of the chamber—that somehow the Liberals are better at managing the economy than the Labor Party. We absolutely know that's not true and history is the best evidence of that.

We're now entering our 28th year of economic growth in our country. I mean, isn't that an incredible thing, Deputy Speaker Wicks? If you are under 40 in this country, you really have never worked through a recession and we're so lucky to have that privilege. But that didn't happen by accident. A big part of that was good policy and most of that good policy that has created 28 years of economic growth has come not from those on the other side of the chamber, who like to talk themselves up so much about their economic management, but in fact from things that Labor prime ministers and Labor treasurers have done.

When Hawke and Keating came into government in 1983, our economy was calcified. It was slow-moving. We were not getting productivity growth. Inflation was out of control. The big reforms that they took were difficult, they were hard, they had often quite significant short-term costs, but what they led to was a period of unprecedented economic growth. That was followed up by the truly remarkable work that was done by the Rudd and Gillard governments in their management of the global financial crisis. For Australia to be the only advanced economy to get through that period without a recession is something we should be so proud of—something that we should be trumpeting all over the world. Indeed, when you go to global forums and talk to international economists, they are staggered, really, at the speed and the effectiveness of the Australian response. People can denigrate that or sneer at that if they want to, but the truth is that the way Labor handled the global financial crisis kept literally hundreds of thousands of people off the dole queue. Hundreds of thousands of people would have lost their jobs if we had not gone down the path that we did. We're rightly very proud of that on this side of the House.

I think the economy is going to be a very important issue of debate over the coming three years, because the truth is we've got some big issues facing our economy at the moment. We've got interest rates at emergency levels. We've got a government that has no plan for the economy—in fact, no plan for anything much at all. Indeed, for the first time in Australia's history, we've got an economy that's growing, but ordinary Australian households are going backwards. That is an extraordinarily significant thing for our whole history so far. The way we have provided a better quality of life for Australians has been to improve the overall performance of the economy, and ordinary Australians have benefited from that through various other social programs and education programs that we've had. Now we've got this very important difference in the way that our economy operates, and yet those on the other side of the chamber have no ideas for it and no idea about what to do with the incredible privilege of running this country. So we really look forward to taking the fight up to them over the coming three years, and I'll do that proudly as the member for Hotham.

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