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

It is extraordinary to rise to speak after a speech given by a former minister from a party that was in government for the better part of a decade and from a party that came to parliament with an urgent recall in December to put a cap on power prices and voted against it. Yet he's just spent some of his precious speaking time trying to suggest that the Albanese government has done nothing to deal with rising energy prices, having voted against the measure to reduce rising energy prices and having been part of a government—as a minister, no less—where a report that was given to the government before the last election, in May last year, about increasing energy prices was—what was it, again?—hidden from the Australian public.

This is a minister who was a minister for housing, and eight months after his tenure we are facing a housing affordability and accessibility crisis. He somehow thinks that the people in his electorate and the people of Australia are going to believe that that just sprang out of nowhere in the last eight months and had nothing to do with the bad policies and lack of policies of the government he was part of.

I know it's the last day of two weeks of sitting, and we're all a little bit tired because we've been working so hard—we want to go home—but it's not really an excuse for the member for Deakin to come into this chamber and spend more time personally attacking the Prime Minister than actually talking about the issues that matter and acknowledging what's happened this year. Cheaper medicines came in from 1 January, the biggest cut in the price of the PBS in 75 years, and cheaper child care starts on 1 June or July—anyway, very soon. These will have a huge impact on the cost of living.

What happened after we got elected last year? Because we made submissions to the Fair Work Commission and were brave enough to say that workers on the lowest incomes needed to have more money, the minimum wage went up. Returning to the energy price cap, the evidence so far is that the increases in energy prices have been reduced because of the urgent measures that we took in December, which the opposition voted against. So to imply that this government is not dealing with cost-of-living pressures is fanciful Alice in Wonderland garbage, to be completely frank with this chamber.

What have we done this week? What are our priorities? They are: the Housing Australia Future Fund and the National Reconstruction Fund. We've got a safeguard mechanism and paid parental leave. Only one of those four got support from the opposition. We are in a crisis of affordable and accessible housing, and we've all been talking about it for a long time. I've told this chamber a number of times about this amazing young man Jack in my electorate, who was homeless and is now a social worker with the council and is part of a campaign for more youth crisis accommodation in my electorate. I talked about it all through the last term of government, which did nothing about it.

I was so excited this week to see that the state Labor government has stepped up and is investing in this space. Our excellent state member for Frankston, Paul Edbrooke, announced that the state government is delivering more than $50 million in funding to provide safe and stable accommodation for young people who are at risk of homelessness. Frankston is going to be home to one of 10 new youth housing projects that received funding, and this is huge for my community. We have a state government that is stepping up to break the cycle of homelessness and to talk about and deliver safe, secure housing, particularly for young people, as well as a federal Albanese Labor government, which I'm proud to be a member of, with the Housing Future Fund, which is going to make a massive difference. It is a $10 billion fund. And we have an opposition that is voting against it and a Greens party that apparently doesn't support it, because they want to do other things. It's unbelievably wrong.

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