Rob Mitchell (McEwen, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

B MITCHELL () (): It's good to be back again talking about the Address-in-Reply and all the wonderful things that have been done by this government since coming to office back in May. We were talking about GPs and the change in distribution priority area for places like Wallan and Whittlesea and other MM 2 areas of McEwen. We started doing this before the election by going to the Senate committee, where we actually had local doctors talk about the problems they were facing—the shortage of GPs and the inability to attract and retain GPs—because of the changes that the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison governments had made over the previous three years. We promised to fix that, and we did. We addressed that straight away to make sure that we could have more doctors and more opportunities for doctors in our country areas. As I said before, it ends the hypocrisy of what is being said by those opposite that we're taking doctors out of regional areas when in actual fact the decisions that we made mean that we can have more doctors in there.

Part of the problem we've had with doctors also has been due to the pandemic, which is nothing unique to us. It's right across the globe and right across the nation. I was sitting there yesterday as we listened to the contrite speech by the former Prime Minister, Treasurer, health minister, Minister for Home Affairs, minister for Industry, Science, Energy and Resources and, potentially, environment minister—those titles are a bit of a mouthful!—as he claimed that he was the sole reason for getting through the pandemic. I'll say this to the member for Cook: all elections since COVID have shown that in times of need people turn to Labor governments—in South Australia, WA and Queensland and again in Victoria, as well as in May on a federal level. It just goes to show that people know that when they're in trouble they can rely on us to get things done. They can't rely on those opposite, and that's what we had.

I want to turn to some thankyous for people that came out and did so much to help stop the scourge of an LNP government continuation: my family, who support me every day, especially my partner, Lisa; Carmel Barrott, who we call the McEwen matriarch—I reckon she's on par with you, Deputy Speaker Claydon, as someone you don't cross—our office team of Adam, Gareth, Jeni, Cath, Josh, Kobe and Rod; and to our pre-poll warriors, like Deb, who stood there every single day. Every single day she had to put up with the member for La Trobe and the member for Hume coming down there, while all the time they were hiding the power prices and sitting there saying, 'Power prices will be cheaper under an LNP government', something they've never apologised for. They've never apologised for deliberately hiding this—

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