Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Curtin for her question. I'm proud of the budget that we brought down last night because it does provide that strong foundation that we need going forward, taking pressure off families, targeted at the most vulnerable, whilst not adding to inflationary pressure. That's the task that we set ourselves as an expenditure review committee. That was led by the Treasurer and the finance minister. One of the things that I said during the election campaign, when I was asked about JobSeeker, was that Labor is the party that will always look after the disadvantaged. We will do more when we can, and last night we did.

We didn't just do JobSeeker. We did rental assistance. We did single parenting payment. As a result of our energy price relief plan, some five million Australians will pay less on their power bills—up to $500 less on their power bills. As a result of our childcare plan, more than one million families will pay less for child care. As a result of our Medicare plan, 11 million Australians will pay less to see a doctor. We put $3½ billion dollars into making sure that Medicare is strengthened. If you are a recipient of any social security and your kid gets sick, we want to make sure that you can get access to see a doctor and that it will be bulk billed. That's why, in addition to that, we want to expand access by having an additional eight urgent care clinics on top of the 50 that we'd announced already.

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