Zaneta Mascarenhas (Swan, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The thing is, we need to understand our history so we know where we're going. We need to understand that so we don't repeat the mistakes of the past. On learning about the member for Cook's secret ministries, he said that if he had to do it again he would. No leadership and no accountability was the order of the day.

When it came to the cost of living, we saw a government that was actively avoiding doing anything to soften the issue, including not looking at economic productivity. When this government promised a $1-an-hour pay increase to our lowest-paid workers, the member for Cook labelled the opposition leader a loose unit. We were talking about $20.33 an hour. Under the previous Liberal governments wage growth was at low records. The former finance minister, Mathias Cormann, described low wage growth as a deliberate design feature of our economic architecture—very intentional. It was a neoliberal, intentional policy design which was basically designed to—I can't think of a parliamentary term—basically stuff Australians over.

Australians had been doing it tough because the previous government failed to have a plan. Under the previous government inflation rose by 2.1 per cent in the March 2022 quarter, the greatest increase in inflation in decades. Yet each day, in this place, they ask a question about inflation, wilfully ignorant of the biggest hit to our community that occurred during their watch. What's the coalition's signature of a cost-of-living policy? It's $14 billion worth of JobKeeper payments to businesses turning multimillion dollar profits and having no expectation for them to pay it back and, simultaneously, chasing individual JobKeeper recipients with debt collectors because they received a few dollars more than they should have. We need to have a look at accountability mechanisms and get the measures right.

What do people doing it tough get when the coalition is in government? Announcements but no policy, handouts to the top end of town and the demonisation of JobKeeper and JobSeeker recipients. Doris from Carlisle wanted Labor to invest in skills for the future. Under the previous government there was no investment in TAFE, yet when we invest in education and skills we build a better future.

So what are we doing for the people of Swan? A part of it relates to cheaper medicines. We have introduced 60-day dispensing. This will happen from 1 September. It's really great policy and will save money in people's back pockets. We're also introducing cheaper child care. I know that some members, on the other side, also have children and may see this as a positive policy that will increase our nation's productivity. It also means we unlock more workforce in our communities and see increased incomes for households and great education opportunities for our children.

We're also strengthening Medicare. We learnt during the WA pandemic that when you get health outcomes right you get good economic outcomes. That's the reason WA kept the economy going. In Swan, I met with Dr Nick Bretland and Anastasia from Rowelthorpe Medical Centre in Bentley. Their patients are largely from the aged-care sector or are pensioners with a disability. Most of their patients are bulk-billed, but it has become financially unviable for them to bulk-bill patients. The first thing they told me when we met was that the Medicare rebate for GPs had only increased by 1.6 per cent in 10 years. This is one of the most important parts of the Australian identity, of what makes us different from other countries, having a strong bulk-billing system, and we didn't have good processes in place.

General practitioners are also at the forefront of preventative health care in this country. Preventative health care is really important for us to invest in, because it saves us costs in the future. In the mining industry, we call that preventative maintenance. The same principles apply to human bodies. The interpersonal work that GPs do with their patients allows for better health outcomes. Labor's $3.5 billion investment, tripling the bulk-billing incentive, is an immediate injection to support patients and general practitioners and strengthen the heart of Medicare. Labor built Medicare and will always protect it. The fundamental reason for that is we believe that all Australians should have access to universal health. There are 72,621 people in my community who will directly benefit from the largest bulk-billing incentive in Australian history.

We're also working at raising JobSeeker and improving rent assistance. What Labor's doing is part of a bigger picture: investing in training and jobs for the future. When we invest in skills for the future it means we have jobs for the future. One of the things industry has been telling us is that they need more skilled workers, and the thing we didn't have under the previous government was management of how our economy works.

One of the reasons we had the Jobs and Skills Summit was that we needed to bring workers, employers, unions and community leaders together to think about a vision for the future and go, 'How can we work together?' The truth is, the Albanese Labor government has been looking at unifying Australia rather than dividing the country, because what we can achieve together is so much more compared to when we're divided. So, we had the Jobs and Skills Summit; we had concrete outcomes from that. Part of that related to paid parental leave provisions, which we're expanding. We're also increasing the flexibility associated with that.

Another thing we're also doing is looking at industry of the future. One of the things we saw during the pandemic was supply chains breaking down. We saw a lot of people want a lot of toilet paper—amusingly, we manufacture most of our toilet paper—but we also saw critical things that we needed in Australia that we didn't have access to. When we went to manufacturers and said to them, 'We need your help with building face masks because we need to keep our health workers safe,' local manufacturers actually went out and designed this. And the thing that we haven't seen done in Australia is building our manufacturing capabilities so that we can build more things here to increase our resilience. We also need to make sure that we have high-skilled, good-paying jobs that are actually competitive with other countries. One of the things I hear from some manufacturers is that they are cost competitive for products, but they're not actually getting the opportunity to participate in procurement for the supply chains, so that's something we also need to fix.

We've also been talking about action on climate change. This is a moment where Australia can be united. Unfortunately, under the previous government, this was something that was politicised. The thing I would say, taking a worldwide perspective, is action on climate change is not political; it's just science. So my question is: do you accept the science of gravity? Great! That's why we're here on earth.

Did I hear you say that climate science is a cult?

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