Michelle Ananda-Rajah (Higgins, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Part of the reason I stand in this chamber as the first Labor member Higgins is that the people of Higgins agreed that the former Prime Minister took no responsibility. The thing is: that outbreak of not taking responsibility has spread. It has spread like a contagion and infected everyone on the opposition benches. There is an inability to take responsibility for the chaos and neglect of the last nine years. Now we as a government are the adults in the room trying to clean up this mess.

What I witnessed yesterday was incredible—sitting in this chamber and listening to a budget delivered by our Treasurer, who then followed on with the National Press Club address. Honestly, it was a master class in fiscal responsibility. At its core was generational investment—not electoral bandaids like suspension of the fuel excise, which led to a liability on the heads and shoulders of Australians, but investment in our people and our future.

At the heart of that budget was something very close to my heart: cheaper child care, an investment of over $5 billion in women, in children and in our economy. Unlike those opposite, we see cheaper early childhood education and care as a force multiplier. It doesn't just benefit children; it enables women who have skills, knowledge and talent to re-enter the workforce, because what happens with the motherhood penalty is that they are held back. Suddenly they hit the dirt and the brakes come on and they lose traction. If things go really badly for them, they completely skid off the road altogether. I talked about this in my maiden speech. Years go by. Ambition is dimmed until it is snuffed out altogether. That almost happened to me, but what saved me was getting a grant from the government and re-entering the research economy.

So cheaper child care matters. It matters to people in my electorate. Higgins in Victoria pays the highest cost for child care, and that statement is based on a study from Victoria University. As I walked around my electorate, people were telling me, as they were clutching their babies, that they were paying $165 a day or $200 a day. In one case, unbelievably, a mother disclosed that she was paying $2,000 a month for child care. She understood that there were intangible benefits of working, but I can assure you that the warm glow of charity is not one of them. So it is incredible that this government has now stepped in to fill this void and we are giving our women a chance—a chance to get back on track, advance their careers and contribute to this economy. For too long women were deprioritised by those opposite. So that is a very real, tangible reform that is going to drive down the cost of living.

Among the other things, of course, is paid parental leave, which is going to be boosted from 18 weeks to 26 weeks—that is, six months—over the next four years. We're also investing heavily in affordable housing. In my electorate, South Yarra has a median house price of $2.2 million. No-one can afford that, yet I have thousands upon thousands of young renters living there because they love living there. It is a village. So it is incredibly heartening to see that we are investing in a million homes to be built over the next five years. That is going to make a real benefit for thousands and thousands of Australians around our country.

But we're not stopping there. We're also introducing cheaper medicines, something I know something about, having prescribed a lot of medicines in my life. I understand that people ration medicines, and when that happens there are always downstream consequences. Diabetes is out of control. Hypertension is out of control. People get heart attacks or strokes. They end up in the emergency department with sugars of 50 instead of 7. So we are going to be bringing that in in January, and it's going to save lives. This is the kind of policy reform that is going to put our country back on track, drive down cost-of-living pressures and give the generational investment our country needs.

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