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

I don't disagree with much of what the member for Barker said about the generosity of Australians, giving and why DGR status is important for charities. I would also, though, urge Australians to continue to give to charities, regardless of whether they get a tax deduction for doing so, because I am sure the member for Barker's electorate is like mine and like many others. There are many groups out there doing a lot of good work on the ground, and a donation goes a long way whether or not you get a tax deduction as a result of having given a generous donation.

I want to speak to a number of the schedules of the Treasury Laws Amendment (2021 Measures No. 3) Bill 2021 and the second reading amendment. The first schedule implements changes to thresholds related to the Medicare levy. Of course, like everyone on this side of the parliament, I am absolutely proud of the Labor legacy of Medicare and of our public health system. There are two things in this legislation that are fundamental human rights that we have to protect. One goes to housing and one goes to health, and they often cannot be separated.

Health and access to decent health services is a fundamental human right. By and large, we are very lucky in Australia that people have access to and their rights are fulfilled because of our public health system but we are a long way from it being as good as it should be. Our universal public health system is not always universal. My electorate of Dunkley, which is outer suburban, compared to many other places in Australia, is doing well. We are not remote Australia. We do not, by and large, live in the Third World conditions some of our First Nations communities live in. But we do have very low outcomes on a number of health measures that we shouldn't have, including life expectancy, including dental, diabetes. We have significantly higher drug and alcohol problems in a number of my local communities.

We also have a real problem retaining GPs in bulk-billing clinics, the very clinics that are supposed to be fulfilling that promise of universal healthcare and a public health system. I have spoken in this place a number of times about clinics, particularly those in Carrum Downs and Frankston, where a combination of an inability to attract Australian trained doctors to completely bulk-billing clinics and the fact that we do not qualify for some of the government schemes for overseas GPs means that my clinics are really struggling to serve the health demands of some particularly difficult socioeconomic areas. I will continue to implore the minister for health to look at these issues and address them so that my community can get the health services they need.

There is a new issue that has arisen very recently that I have recently written to the minister about, and I'm hopeful that I'll get a positive response from him soon. We have in the Bayside shopping centre—the big mall in my community—a Medicare bulk-billing facility, which in particular looks after people who come into the mall who are exhibiting dangerous, strange or difficult behaviours and who otherwise would be taken by security and marched out of the mall for public safety. But, because of the extraordinarily community minded centre management and this medical centre, people are often taken to this medical centre to get a mental health consult.

Dr Vahedeh Naseri worked at this centre, the Myhealth Bayside medical centre, and has been described by patients, by the management of Bayside and by the medical centre as just a godsend and an amazing woman—a single mother who is working as a doctor, has become an Australian citizen and is single-handedly helping people with difficult mental health issues to stay in the community. But she's not able to continue to practise because the impact of COVID has meant that, while she's been working towards the requirements for fellowship to be able to continue to be registered, her last exams were postponed—through no fault of her own; it was because of COVID. She's waiting for some results and waiting for a provider number, but that can't come because of the delay. So she can't practise, so people aren't getting that medical attention and she, a single mother, is not getting an income, because the clinic cannot keep paying for her. It seems like a simple bureaucratic matter to solve this so that someone who is so important to a section of my community can help serve the community and can also continue to practise her profession and look after her daughter.

The second schedule of this bill relates to the Family Home Guarantee measure from the budget. Before I talk about that specifically, I want to congratulate the member for Indi on her second reading amendment, and I support what she says in that—that the government needs to 'take a leadership role in urgently addressing the housing supply crisis by working proactively with local and state governments to unlock creative solutions, including incentives for private developers to build more affordable low-cost housing stock at scale'. But I want to add to that so that it says 'including by actually investing, as a federal government, in public, social and affordable housing themselves'. I'm a member of this House's Social Policy and Legal Affairs committee, and we've completed an inquiry, and there will be a report soon, on homelessness and housing in Australia and the evidence that we heard about the lack of affordable housing across this country. There are almost no adjectives to describe how disturbing it is to sit there and hear witness after witness—service providers, individuals who have been made homeless, community advocates, academics, researchers—talk about all of the groups in our society, in our rich and prosperous First World country, who can't find safe and secure housing. Women fleeing domestic violence, First Nations people, migrants—we know that these people are struggling. But you've got to add on top of that students, people with insecure and low-paid jobs, people who work as nurses and paramedics and are heroes of the pandemic, who can't afford to live near their work because of the cost of housing, who can't afford to rent near their work because of the cost of rents, and whose situation has been made only worse by COVID and continues to be made worse by government policies that do not much more than push up the cost of housing.

As a party, we won't stand in the way of this measure in the budget that is said to help single parents get into the housing market. But it has to be said that there was a lot of splash and a lot of attention for what is a very small policy which may perhaps help 10,000 people—out of the some million single-parent families across Australia—to get a mortgage. But it also does nothing then to help the single-parent families—predominantly single mothers—and it certainly does nothing to help the older women who are single mothers to be able to service these mortgages. Their wages aren't going up, because the work they do in child care, aged care and cleaning is so fundamentally undervalued in our society that they don't earn enough to be able to service a mortgage, even if they have help to get a deposit. Short, tiny little measures might get headlines in the newspaper, but they are not structural reform that will help the people who need it the most.

Every time I give a speech in this place and talk about housing affordability, I get more and more people from my community contacting my office to say: 'Hey, Peta, you were talking about me. The story you told about Lisa from Langwarrin; that's also me'—or their mother or granddaughter or father or brother—'because we can't find anywhere to live in Dunkley where we can afford the rent, let alone buy a house. This is me.' These are my people. And it's not just about these tiny measures. It's about affordable and social housing where people can live a life of dignity while also working day in, day out to put their children through school, to build a future for themselves and their families.

That's why the announcement in the Leader of the Opposition's budget reply speech about a Housing Australia Future Fund is so important and so transformational, because it actually is a vision for a country that cares about people who don't have mum and dad to help them buy their first investment property, who don't have five or six investment properties by the time they're 35, who will never be able to have an income between $85,000 and $150,000, because of the sort of work they do, their lack of educational opportunities, their disabilities or their caring responsibilities. These are the people that need to be looked after and assisted to have great lives, and that's what the Housing Australia Future Fund policy of the Leader of the Opposition does. That's what the role of government is—not to pontificate in speeches in the parliament about your academic understanding of the use of superannuation or the free market. It's actually to be part of a parliament that says, 'These are people who, through no fault of their own, often through accident of birth, just need some assistance to have the same sort of life of dignity as those of us who were born into more prosperity and opportunity have had.' It's about giving back, and that's why people in my community come up to me every time I talk about affordable housing and say: 'Keep talking about it, Peta. Keep talking about the need to have a federal government that will actually invest in building, repairing and maintaining housing that we can live in. Keep talking about it, because that's what we need.'

I live in a community where there's no youth crisis accommodation at all and where there are so many community groups helping homeless people because there are so many people who don't have anywhere to live. I live in a community where people aren't thinking about how they're going to buy their third and fourth investment property; they're thinking about how they're going to find a rental property to live in next week. The people that do have the opportunity to have investment properties understand how fortunate they actually are and that it's not just something that you should think that you're entitled to. That's why stakeholders across this country who understand the importance of housing and that housing is actually a human right have slammed this federal government for pretending in its budget that it is going to help those who hurt the most—that it's going to help low-income families and predominantly women. It's why organisations like National Shelter say that, when you actually look at this government's package, it will put home ownership further out of reach for the many while benefiting the few. The role of government is the opposite; it's to make things like the fundamental human right of safe and secure housing closer to reach for the many. It's to benefit the many, and that's why I won't stop talking about it.

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