Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today in the address-in-reply to thank the community that returned me to this parliament. I want to thank my family—long-suffering, obviously—and I want to thank my friends, but, most importantly, I want to thank the people who worked on my campaign.

I want to thank Henry Barlow, Vicki Fitzgerald and Jasminda Sidu, who managed me and the campaign across the many weeks. And I want to thank the Labor members and volunteers who worked so hard in the campaign. Stalwarts in particular were Susan and Stephen Foster, whose work on pre-polls is incredible over many, many years—in fact, many decades.

I want to thank the large numbers—the largest number of volunteers that I've had since becoming the member for Lalor—who helped on pre-poll, who handed out on election day and who did the letterboxing, the doorknocking and the street stalls, and they stood with me on train stations. My particular thanks go to Michael and to Matthew Potts and Henry Barlow for the yard signs that went up over weeks. To all of those people who volunteered to have yard signs, I say thank you once again. I want to commit here that I will continue to fight for our community; for those who voted for me and for those who didn't. I will fight in this place and beyond.

I want to make a few comments about the community that I represent. Obviously, we're in the outer south-western suburbs of Melbourne—sometimes referred to these days as the 'Avalon corridor'. Werribee, of course, is quite famous around the country as the point halfway between Geelong and Melbourne, and the City of Wyndham, of which Lalor is made up, is centred around the small country town that was Werribee when I was growing up.

I represent the suburbs of Hoppers Crossing, Werribee, Werribee South, Tarneit, Truganina, Little River, Wyndham Vale, Manor Lakes and parts of Point Cook after this most recent redistribution. This is a growth area, an area with a population now of 270,000 people in 2019 and with a forecast to grow to 489,000 people by 2041. It is the third fastest growing local government area in Australia. That growth has been considerable, dramatic and sustained over a decade. Currently, and these numbers keep going up, there are 100 babies born to a Wyndham mother each week. I'll let the House consider that for a moment, that's 100 babies born a week to mums in the community that I stand here to represent. We also had the highest number of dwelling approvals in Victoria between July 2018 and April 2019. And it is the only growth area where the median land price has not declined between May 2018 and April 2019, so the growth will continue.

Our gross regional product accounts for 2.29 per cent of Victoria's GRP. We have one of the largest jobs to workers deficits in Victoria, which of course means that many in our community are on the move, up early and in their cars, or on the bus, or off to the railway station, or on to the M1 winding their way through the electorate, through the city of Wyndham, to reach, I must say, our limited industrial precincts where those who are fortunate enough to have a local job may be headed.

There are 17,000 businesses registered in Lalor as of 2018 and that was up 32 per cent from 2016. The majority of those are single operator businesses, people working heavily with their own ABN and many of them spending their days toiling away as lone tradesmen.

There are really interesting things about the people that I represent. Fifty-eight per cent of the residents of the seat of Lalor are 35 years or younger. We are an incredibly young electorate. Almost half of all Wyndham's residents were born overseas and they represent 162 countries. On top of that, the Wyndham Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population is the largest in all of greater Melbourne. If you call 100 random Wyndham residents 53 of them will speak a language other than English when they answer the phone.

Together with the cities of Casey and Hume, Wyndham is home to the largest family households in all of greater Melbourne, and more than half of Wyndham households are families with children. So we are young, mostly we are young families. The majority of these households have children under 15 years of age. So it's an area with dramatic growth, it's an area with young families and it's an area where we turn housing developments into communities. People work hard at this. They get up and go to work early in the morning. They come home late at night. They pick up the kids from early education and child care or from after-school care. They get home and then they start the volunteering. Then they get in the car again and they take the kids to training. On the weekends they have got their kids at football, at netball, at soccer, at a myriad of sports, or they've got kids at dancing, or involved in the arts, or off to our fantastic libraries that Wyndham City Council has created. It is a vibrant part of our community. But it is also a community that is often under stress.

What we have in common in the seat of Lalor and in the community that is Wyndham is a desire to live well, to have secure work or to establish a business that provides security for our families. We have high hopes for our children that they will have security in their lives, that they can find a path. That means that education is at a premium in our community. The people value education above most things. They also, of course, value health services, because with young families and the anxiety that comes with a sick child they really value access to a doctor, access to the emergency department at our local hospital and access to our local hospital if needed. I want to commend our local hospital and state Labor government because the mercy public hospital in Wyndham opened its paediatrics unit just this past week and people are very excited about that.

But mostly people in Wyndham want to pass on a better life to their kids and that's why cost of living issues are so important to the people in my community and it's why I need to take a moment to go through a couple of other things.

It became apparent this week that more than 8,000 homes in my community had had their electricity cut off in the last three years. I can't imagine the stress of that. Well, I can imagine the stress, having been a single mother raising three sons and working part-time for about six years on my journey with my family. I imagine the fear of it, but I cannot imagine the reality of it and the absolute, sheer stress of that. On top of that, we have very high mortgage stress rates in Wyndham, where most families are paying more than 30 per cent of their income on their mortgage, and we have the highest rental eviction rates in the state.

Most in our community live week to week, month to month. We pay our mortgages and our rent, and we save for our annual holiday, if we're fortunate. We pay the school fees, we pay the child care and we pay the kinder fees, where we need to. We get the kids to sport and cultural activities. There's not a lot of money left over for luxuries for most of the families who live in my community. Looking to the future, we will rely heavily on our superannuation contributions, in terms of a dignified retirement. Like hundreds of thousands of Australians, we have minimal savings. As I said, we do all of that. We live with all of those stresses—the stresses of the commute, the stresses of finding work, the stresses of keeping work, the stresses of trying to get off insecure work and into secure work, the fears that there won't be secure work for our kids. We do all of that and, at the same time, we build a great community.

But it is important to note how much the national economy impacts on our local economy and how decisions and actions taken or not taken in this place have a direct impact on the lives of those who live in my community. Cuts to penalty rates in our community don't just impact on the stereotypically young part-time worker. Many in our community work in casual or insecure work. Cuts to their incomes directly impact on our small businesses and our local economy. Cuts to pensions have an impact too.

We rely on and, in fact, we pin our hopes on our educational institutions—our early learning centres, our schools, our limited TAFE and our Melbourne universities—for the quality that will see our children pave their way.

We rely on Medicare for our health needs, and shocks to hip pockets because of health issues can disrupt family life. Needing an MRI in our community can mean $400 out of the weekly budget or the savings or a trip to the city to access a Medicare fully rebated MRI. Labor's commitment, which we took to the last election, to grant a fully rebated MRI licence to our local public hospital, the Mercy hospital, was valued highly by our community, and this government's failure to match that commitment is something that my community fails to understand. It has left them feeling forgotten by the government. Worse was the news that this government made a commitment for a third fully rebated MRI licence to the city of Geelong, which is just down the road from us. We are larger than they are, in terms of population, yet there is no access in Wyndham, and this government has shown no sign of changing that in the near future.

Decisions in this place impact directly on our lives. The 2018 budget created an urban congestion fund of $1 billion. That has been raised to, I think, $4 billion now. There has not been one cent, other than the $17 million that was spent on advertising during the election campaign, from that fund. In my community, that decision matters. It means that we are not getting the Wyndham West Link, which would save people 20 minutes getting from Tarneit to Wyndham Vale to take their kids to our local basketball or netball courts. For most people who live in my community, it would save them 25 minutes getting onto the M1, if they're driving, or getting to a railway station. This is about a $50 million spend for one of those bridges and possibly $50 million for the other.

We've got an urban congestion fund there, but we have a government reluctant to use it. And, when it does use it, I'm sure the people in my community think that they'll bypass us and take the money to the south-east, to some other electorate, as they have done with the car parks at stations. There was no commitment from this government to alleviate the issues at the car parks at the stations in my electorate, but there were commitments made to other areas, some of them in inner Melbourne, where there are three or four different options already on the ground for people's commute, whereas, where we come from, it's the train or it's your car; there isn't a third option. There are no buses to the city. There are no trams that connect to anywhere else.

In our community, household budgets are tight. People work hard. Most travel, as I've said, out of the city. Most do that travel because the jobs are not available. Again, the people in my community feel that this government doesn't care about them, because there is no commitment to—no interest at all in—job creation in the city of Wyndham. My community needs a government that understands how the national economy impacts on their lives, how a soaring cost of living, if not met with matching wage or income increases, leaves people feeling vulnerable, leaves people feeling forgotten by this government.

While the Prime Minister talks and talks and ignores the negative trajectory of the national economic indicators, people in my electorate sweat. Anxiety builds about not just their future but the future of their children. On their behalf, in this place, I call on this government to act, to take the advice from the Reserve Bank governor and from business and to use the levers at its disposal to stimulate the economy, through infrastructure spends and by putting back people's penalty rates. This would make an enormous difference in my community.

I urge this government to watch closely the figures of people who are working in labour hire, in casual situations. This can be going on for six, seven, eight, nine and 10 years. Think about young people sitting at home waiting for the text message at 11 o'clock tonight to say whether they've got work tomorrow. Think about how that's impacting on a 26-year-old's life plan. There is no security. Many of them are still living at home in my community because they don't know if they've got work tomorrow. If they've left home, they return. They may have left home, found themselves in debt—in debt to payday lenders, in debt in all sorts of ways—and wind up back with mum and dad.

This government needs to act because, while mortgage holders watch the official interest rates plummet three times in three months, to a record 0.75 per cent, and wait for the banks to pass on the savings, they know that, while this might mean some savings for them, without government action the trend could set in and mean a slowdown that sees job losses and the flow-on to the 17,000 small businesses in our community, who would also then feel the pinch. It's not difficult to imagine. If you're a landscaper, no-one's redoing their garden if jobs are on the line. No-one's redoing their garden if they don't feel secure. No-one's building the extension if they don't feel secure. No-one's upgrading their house and getting that second investment if they don't feel secure in their job.

There is absolutely no way for this government to avoid having themselves held responsible for this. We know that the IMF's World economic outlook has slashed Australia's economic growth forecast to only 1.7 per cent in 2019, down from 2.1 per cent last year. Australia's growth this year is now expected to be slower than that of the US, Spain and Greece. Economic growth is at the lowest levels since the GFC. Household living standards and productivity have declined under this government. Wages are stagnant—people in my electorate absolutely understand that. This government is presiding over the worst wages growth on record.

Almost two million Australians are looking for work or for more work. Many in my community are looking for work and for more work. Household debt has surged to record levels. Of course, that's reflected also in the mortgage stress that I'm seeing in my community. I want to pay tribute to the hard work done by our local community legal centre, WEstjustice, for the work that they have done across the last few years, having saved 400 people from losing their home and being turfed out onto the street.

Business investment in this country is down 20 per cent since the Liberals came to office and is now at its lowest level since the 1990s recession. This is a list of agony for a community like mine. Consumer confidence, not surprisingly, is down over the past year, and consumption growth is weak. Australia became one of the two fastest-growing economic in the OECD under Labor and the eight-fastest when government changed hands in 2013, but under the Liberals we have dropped to 20th.

All of this makes people in my community feel nervous. What it does for me is absolutely motivate me to get on my feet in this place as often as I can to convince the government that they need to act. They need to act to ensure that in an area like ours, a growth area, to which people come from all over the world because of affordable housing to set up their families and live, we get a quality education for the children and we have a quality health system to ensure that people dig in and stay in our communities. That is absolutely imperative. On another note, the government need to pay attention to the fact that it is not an accident that there are 162 languages spoken in my electorate. They are our migration policies. We need to support those people. They need to be not waiting four and five years to become citizens under this government. They need to be able to get their citizenship and buy into our country—to have a vested interest in their communities—not feel completely insecure about being able to stay where they have transplanted their lives, had their children and set up their homes.

Those who are fifth-generation Australians need to feel secure too. They need to feel economically secure. They need to know that their kids are going to be able to get a job. They need to know that they're going to have a job next week. Many in my community just want to know that there are good jobs coming and that if they are skilled enough and make a good enough application they will be able to access full-time permanent work.

In conclusion, on behalf of the people in my electorate—those who voted for me and those who didn't—I call on the government to act, to govern for all Australians, to include those in the outer suburbs in their thinking and to pay as much attention to the growing outer suburbs where their policies see dramatic growth but people struggling to forge secure lives. I want them to pay as much attention to the Avalon corridor in the south-west of Melbourne as they pay to the regions and to the cities. I ask for the government to think every day about the people who live in my electorate, about their lives and about the impact that the actions and inactions of the government have on their everyday lives.

Debate adjourned.

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