Josh Burns (Macnamara, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to rise and speak about the appropriation bill. This is a great Labor budget, and I'm proud of our Treasurer and finance minister and the entire economics team of the government, too, who worked extremely hard to put this budget together. It comes as Australia faces difficult economic circumstances and Australians face real pressures in the cost of living. Australians right now are facing high inflation. At the moment unemployment is low, but for a decade we had low wages as a deliberate design feature of the Australian economy, and that resulted in Australian families and Australian workers having wages being outpaced by the cost of living and by the cost of doing business in this country.

Thankfully, after a decade where nothing was done about it, our government is getting wages moving again. Of course, you can't point to a single measure of the previous government when it comes to wage increases in this country. There is not one measure where those opposite, in their almost decade in government, did a single thing to increase the wages of the Australian working people. That changed as soon as we got into government. Obviously the first thing the Prime Minister did was put in a submission for an increase in the minimum wage. We supported a wage increase for aged-care workers, and of course we have the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Secure Jobs, Better Pay) Bill 2022 that hopefully will get through this parliament in time for a Christmas wage increase for Australian workers. Those are the difficult circumstances in which this budget arises, so it is important that we align fiscal and monetary policy to make sure that we aren't making high inflation harder for longer. This budget is responsible. It banks a lot of the increases in revenue to ensure that Australia has the capacity to support Australian people long into the future or in the next situation.

It also took some pretty big and responsible fiscal decisions around the sort of expenditure that we want to make. There's over $20 billion in this budget for reallocated or ceased programs of the former government. Take my electorate, for example, in Macnamara. The previous government allocated $15 million to build car parks near a train station. The only problem was that they didn't talk to either the state government or the local council. Had they had a simple phone conversation and picked up the phone, they would have found out that the $15 million that they'd allocated for the Balaclava car park fund was actually for land already designated for social housing. There are countless and countless examples of the previous government making budgetary decisions in their political interest, not in the interests of the Australian people. We have taken a big pen through the budget, line by line, examining it and making sure that we end the rorts and end the waste.

The other big decision we made and the other big reallocation of funds was to ensure that the federal government and the federal budget are allocated to and focused on investing in renewable energy. The previous government fought renewable energy and still fights renewable energy to this day. They put too much stake in carbon capture and storage, a technology that isn't the answer. They put too much stake in their so-called gas led recovery, something that wasn't going to produce the energy or the jobs of the future in the way that renewable energy will. Of course, now they're on their crusade about nuclear energy, which is a whole other story. We'll come back to that another time.

This budget has the biggest allocation towards renewable energy or the facilitation of renewable energy in our country's history. There is the $20 billion Rewiring the Nation fund, the single biggest piece of public infrastructure that's going to connect up different parts of new renewable energy to the grid. We've already seen a great deal done between the Tasmanian government, the Victorian government and the federal government on the Marinus Link, to bring renewable energy from that small island off the coast of Victoria up to the mainland, making sure that Tasmania stays connected and that Tasmania can benefit from their huge capacity to generate renewable energy. There are a lot of naysayers on that side of the House who say that 100 per cent renewable energy can't be achieved. Well, Tasmania's already achieving it. They're already there. And, over coming years, they'll start exporting clean renewable energy into the mainland, and we are ready to welcome Tasmanian energy as well as invest in some major bits of renewable energy infrastructure.

One of the best days of the campaign was when the Minister for Climate Change and Energy joined me in Southbank to announce that an Albanese Labor government will deliver a community battery in Southbank, right in the top corner of my electorate. That was budgeted for in this budget, to deliver a community battery. The reason why it's so important and why we're doing it in Southbank—Deputy Speaker, you'll be interested to hear—is that a lot of people living in apartments don't have the ability to put solar on their roofs, and so the solar that will be fed into the battery will be able to be utilised and extracted by local Southbank families. I'm expecting this to be an oversubscribed program. I'm expecting that in the future there are going to be a number of community batteries right around the country, but I'm very proud that the Albanese Labor government will deliver 400 community batteries, and one of those will be in Southbank. I'm already in discussions with the minister about the next round.

We're ending the previous government's rorts, we're fighting to lift wages, and now I want to take you through some of the other fantastic local programs and projects that we've got in my electorate of Macnamara. In Macnamara, one of the iconic parts of my electorate is the magnificent Albert Park Lake, where we have the Formula 1 zooming around once a year, which does obviously attract a lot of attention. While I know that there are mixed feelings locally around the community about the Grand Prix, the truth is that a lot of local businesses benefit from having hotels full and restaurant bookings up. There is another side of this that does actually help a lot of the local businesses in my electorate.

But one thing has been missing over a long period. Sprinkled around the Albert Park track is the home of one of the most incredible community sporting precincts in Melbourne. There are ovals, soccer pitches, basketball courts, running tracks and baseball fields. There's a whole network of community sport, and, frankly, for too long that community sport has gone underfunded.

So we made a commitment to work with Parks Victoria and with the state government, who are the custodians of that piece of land, as part of their broader master plan to help fund and make sure that people, especially young girls and other females who are playing community sport at Albert Park, have appropriate sporting facilities, appropriate change rooms and other things. We're going to do some planning work, and I'm working with the sporting association and other great, wonderful local organisations on the rollout of that commitment. It's going to be a really excellent part of Albert Park once we complete that work, and, hopefully, there'll be more to come. The job won't be done, but it will hopefully make a big start and benefit a lot of the wonderful sporting organisations in Macnamara. I thank the minister for trade, who joined me on the campaign trail to help kick a footy around Albert Park and announce that commitment.

One of the proudest election commitments that we made, which is also funded in this budget, is around the Yalukit Willam Nature Reserve. This is a project in Elwood. It's right on the border of Macnamara and Goldstein, where there used to be a golf course called the Elsternwick golf course, or, as we locals liked to call it, Royal Elsternwick. It was a funny little nine-hole course that, unfortunately, like many inner-city golf courses, was a little bit compact and probably had had better days. There was a whole big community process where the community was asked: 'What do you want to do with the land? What should go there in place of the golf course?' What came out of it resoundingly was that the people of Elwood and the surrounding suburbs wanted to create a really unique nature reserve that was about gifting back to the environment one of the largest pieces of land inside Melbourne.

What has occurred there since—the vision for this nature reserve and the work that's already started—is around planting indigenous plants to provide safe habitats for local wildlife. We're already seeing the naturalisation of the park as well as some really brilliant ecological design to bring back wildlife and to help give back to the environment a huge piece of land. In fact, I think it's the largest piece of land in an Australian city to be given back to the environment ever. It's extraordinary, and I encourage people to come and have a look.

I have been working with the member for Goldstein on this; we share a border on it, and I want to thank her for her collaboration with this. We're working through the details. Our commitment of $10 million for the Yalukit Willam nature reserve actually comes off the back of the previous member for Goldstein, who committed $5.5 million. It is a huge piece of land and it will require every cent, but the $5.5 million from the previous government and our $10 million commitment combined with the efforts of the local council, Bayside City Council, will mean that this will be an extremely special place. I may not be in this place when all of the flora and fauna is at its full strength and all of the trees are at their full height and all of the local wildlife has a sanctuary there upon its completion in decades to come, but I'm very proud to be starting this. I'm proud of our commitment to that area and I'm looking forward to delivering that project with a number of local community groups.

There are other commitments we've made that will be funded as part of this budget. We are going to deliver one of the Medicare urgent care clinics in and around the Alfred Hospital. The Alfred is truly one of the great hospitals in Australia. The staff at the Alfred are extraordinary. This clinic will be in and around the suburbs of the Alfred. It will be bulk-billing clinic and hopefully some of the people who would currently present at an emergency department will be able to access a GP clinic and get the potentially preventative care that a good GP clinic can provide as well as the medical support that they need. We're also going to be delivering a headspace in South Melbourne.

We have made a number of other commitments to some of our local multifaith groups. The Hare Krishna temple in Middle Park—if you ever want a good meal, go down to the Hare Krishna temple where they will provide you a vegetarian meal with a good bit of chutney spice. Honestly, that is one of my favourite things to do in my electorate and I'm getting a little bit hungry now just thinking about it! We're very proud to make a small contribution to the Hare Krishna temple. They do incredible work. One of their philosophies is that they want to feed people within a 10-kilometre radius of the temple. No matter who those people are, if they're hungry the Hare Krishnas will feed them. It's a beautiful, simple concept and I'm proud that we're going to give a little bit of money to that.

The other one is the Baha'i Soul Food program. The Baha'is are a very peaceful group of people who are discriminated against right around the world, especially in Iran. They have a wonderful local community in Macnamara, and I am very proud to know them. I've also had a number of meals with that community! We're proud to support their Soul Food program.

We'll also be making a contribution to the St Kilda synagogue. They have a beautiful dome and a few other things that the state government is supporting them to do, and we're going to support some of their community infrastructure as well. So there are lot of good things happening in Macnamara.

We made a number of election commitments, and I'm really looking forward to delivering them. This budget is responsible. This budget builds on our election commitments that we made, and the Australian people gave us the real privilege of being in government to try to help deliver on them. And this budget also aligns fiscal and monetary policy to try to ensure inflation is brought down as quickly as possible. It complements our work to increase wages in this country. It is the budget that Australians need, and I'm proud it's the budget we are delivering. The first Labor budget in over a decade; hopefully, we will have many more in the decades to come.

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