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

I thank the member for Bonner for putting forward this motion, much of which is absolutely on the mark, about the need to increase financial literacy. It's just a shame that the government he was a part of negotiated the National Curriculum while it was in government and didn't do this, over 10 years. I don't know: perhaps the member for Bonner asked them to and they didn't listen, so he's hoping to get a better reception from a government that is very serious about supporting financial literacy initiatives across the country.

I want to tell the Federation Chamber about a remarkable program that operates in my community that showcases the value of financial education. It's the Brotherhood of St Laurence's Saver Plus program, which I first became aware of after I was elected and was visiting Aldercourt Primary School in Frankston North with the Brotherhood. Saver Plus is a financial education program for families and individuals who are on a tight budget, to develop lifelong saving habits. It sounds kind of simple, doesn't it? But it's not that simple for many people. One of the stories we heard during the visit was from a local mum who spoke of the difference a course like that had made not just to her but to her child and to their life—something as commonplace, for many people, as enrolling your child in swimming lessons. She knew her finances weren't good. She knew she needed to work on them. But she just found it too complicated—a single mum, too busy, too overwhelmed, who didn't know where to start and so didn't start. But she did start the Saver Plus program. Her goal was to save up enough money so her child could do that most basic thing in Australia: learn how to swim. Her story was remarkable, because Saver Plus provided her with the capacity and knowledge she wanted and needed. Not only was she able to put her child through swimming lessons but she was able to get her finances back on track and to talk about the changes she had made in her life and the way she dealt with her very tight finances to ensure that there was enough money for those 'extra' things like swimming lessons and saving for a rainy day.

Certainly in Melbourne there have been a lot of rainy days lately, but that metaphor of a rainy day, I think, extends to what people are calling the cost-of-living crisis at the moment. Lots of people are experiencing rainy days, and financial literacy is such a fundamentally important tool for people to have before they hit those rainy days. There are literally hundreds of people on the Mornington Peninsula and in Frankston who have taken advantage of Saver Plus. There was another program I learnt about while I was at Aldercourt, which is the HIPPY program. This program also empowers parents. It provides them with the tools, knowledge and confidence to engage in their child's education, and that's having a profound impact as well on the community. Again, it's not solely for single mothers, but single mothers in particular are finding ways to support themselves and their child's development and setting up their families for healthier and brighter futures.

These are the sorts of programs that I want to see governments invest in, because they're programs that help people invest in themselves, including people who come from circumstances where they haven't been unable to invest in themselves before and who just need that bit of assistance. This is why the government that I'm proud to be a part of has introduced a number of measures in the last 12 months that go towards helping people who are caught because of a lack of financial and other literacy by scams and online frauds, for example—not just in terms of pursuing the people who are doing it but in terms of helping to educate people how not to be caught. It's often the other end of the age scale—not the young parents but older members of our community—who get caught by those online scams. I almost got caught by phone calls from someone pretending to be from my bank. They're very sophisticated and that's also a very important thing to do. There was also an announcement this week about regulating buy-now pay-later services to help people only spend the money that they can afford or only borrow the money they can afford to pay back.

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