Peta Murphy (Dunkley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to start by acknowledging the hard work and sacrifice of all the people in my community of Dunkley over the year 2020, which has been so much more than a challenge. I acknowledge your solidarity and sense of community in pulling together to help those who are finding it more difficult than others to deal with the public health pandemic and the economic recession that we find ourselves in. You have all been magnificent, and I know that you will continue to be so as we work our way through this.

For a short time, it appeared that the Prime Minister and his government had heard the plaintive call of Australians for political leaders across jurisdictions, for people from all parties and political backgrounds, to work together in the public interest. It did. Granted, it took a global pandemic, and the Prime Minister couldn't find it in himself to include the federal opposition in this 'cooperative approach' no matter how many times we offered to be part of it.

The Prime Minister's words were that there is 'a strong sense of unity, cooperation and purpose'.' So Australians I think for a little while saw a glimmer of hope. They really did. They thought they had a Prime Minister, a Treasurer and a health minister who were holding out the promise of working cooperatively with anyone who wanted to deal with the imperative before them. As the Prime Minister said in March: 'Everyone's working together…no quibbling…that's what we owe to you.' That's what he said to Australians: 'That's what we owe to you.' Sadly, tragically in fact, it seems that that commitment had a use-by date, or maybe it was just all words after all. What we have seen in Victoria lately, what my community who are working so hard to put those words into practice have seen, is a litany of political attacks, and personal insults and attacks—from federal ministers, cabinet ministers—against the state government. As we are working hard to suppress the second wave and get through it, we've seen a federal government, notwithstanding that the Treasurer said in August that he wasn't, 'serving Australians or Victorians by engaging in a slanging match', doing just that. The Treasurer was right then when he said it and he's right now, that that is not serving Australians.

In the spirit of cooperation and purpose, of working together in the national interest for all Australians, I have a list of things that the Treasurer and the federal government should have been focusing on when they were instead playing political games. It's not too late to adopt any or all of these suggestions. I invite the government to do just that for the sake of my community in Dunkley and for the sake of all of Australia. In no particular order, just off the top of my head, here's a list. You could restore JobKeeper to Victorian childcare workers. You could support Victorian businesses and workers by keeping JobKeeper at its initial level, by extending it to those people who missed out and by helping us get through the second wave and come out of it. You can commit to keeping JobSeeker at decent levels after December and not return it to below the poverty line at $40 a day. You can provide targeted support to the travel industry for travel agents who, through no fault of their own, have lost all of their business for now and the foreseeable future and were left out of the federal budget. You could provide support for workers over 35 who've lost their jobs and can't see where their next job will come from. You could make sure that this federal government lets Victorians leave the country to say goodbye to dying relatives in other countries. You could help Australians and Victorians to come home when, through no fault of their own, they've found themselves in another country—no job, no family, no support and they can't come home. You could find a credible woman, because I can guarantee you there are lots of us around, to explain why the budget not only is not gender neutral but abandons women and female dominated industries to look after themselves through the biggest economic and health crisis in more than a century. You could invest in affordable child care as an economic and a social imperative. You could have a real climate change policy, an energy policy that you stick too for more than 22 seconds and make sure that Australia is a renewable energy super power. I've got so many things and I'm not going to get to say them all in this short time. You could ask the arts minister to actually come up with an arts and cultural policy and support the $111 billion industry that's been decimated. You could actually invest in the public service to have capacity to plan for disasters and the future. The list goes on. I can tell you if you come and talk to me. (Time expired)

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