Fiona Phillips (Gilmore, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Brisbane for bringing this motion today. I welcome the opportunity to talk about all the ways that this government is cleaning up the mess the former Liberal government made. It is perhaps also a good reminder, for the members of the Greens speaking today, of how we got here. The spiralling cost of living, the rising inequality, the state of our economy—they all lie squarely at the feet of the former Liberal-National government. If the Greens want to see what it really means to do nothing to address these issues, they need look no further than the nine years before the last election. In fact, the former government made this problem worse at every turn. If, instead, the Greens want to see what responsible government looks like, they should really pay attention to what has happened over the last five or six months. The Albanese government has hit the ground running. We have done everything possible to immediately address cost of living and rising inequality.

I'll happily provide a few examples of just how we are doing that. In December 2021 the former government cut the ability for local psychiatrists in my electorate of Gilmore on the New South Wales south coast to deliver bulk-billed video telehealth consultations, and it was not just in my electorate but across regional and rural Australia. This had huge ramifications for people in our community. We have had years of drought, bushfires, so many floods, and a global pandemic. But the former Morrison government decided it would be a good idea to make it more difficult for people living in regional Australia to access a psychiatrist. One local person who lives with bipolar told me how they could no longer afford access to prescriptions for their medication. It was simply awful. But we have gotten to work fixing this problem.

I was proud to announce with the Minister for Health and the Assistant Minister for Rural and Regional Health that from 1 November local people could once again access these bulk-billed video telehealth psychiatry consultations thanks to the Albanese Labor government. We restored the Liberals' cuts to this vital mental health support and made it affordable and accessible once more. Days after the announcement, Sharon wrote to me to say: 'Thank you, thank you, thank you for your work in helping to reinstate the mental health rebate for telehealth psychiatric sessions. I have been in a very dark place and this gives me hope.' That is the difference this government is making in local people's lives—helping those who need it most. That's what we're doing.

There are so many ways that the Albanese government is addressing cost of living and attempting to combat the inequality that the former government created. We're strengthening Medicare, establishing Medicare urgent care clinics across the country, including in Batemans Bay, to take pressure off our hospital system. In a community like ours on the south coast, health costs can quickly skyrocket. We've got an ageing population. We've got a health system struggling to cope after years of neglect. So we've made medicines 29 per cent cheaper, saving someone who is taking one medication a month as much $150 a year. We've also given 44,000 more older Australians access to the Commonwealth seniors health card, meaning that they will now pay no more than $4.70 a week for their medicines. This will make a real difference.

Another one of our top priorities is delivering the largest pay rise for pensioners in more than 12 years. Thanks to the Albanese government, the service pension, the age pension, the disability support pension and the carer payment have all risen by $38.90 a fortnight for singles and $58.80 a for couples. We've also increased the JobSeeker payment, the parenting payment, the war widow and widower pension—I could go on. We are helping the most vulnerable in our community with the cost of living, and it was a change we made in just a few months of government. When the Liberals spent almost a decade watching costs for pensioners go up and up, watching health costs go up, watching our aged-care system fall apart and watching it get harder to see a GP, harder to find a house you can afford and harder to get by, they kept wages deliberately low and they turned their back on regional communities like mine. This government is repairing that damage as quickly as we can. We take that responsibility seriously, and I will keep working every single day to make sure local people in my electorate get the support they need when they need it.

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