Michelle Ananda-Rajah (Higgins, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm a little concerned that this MPI has a subtext, and the subtext is that, somehow, we in the Albanese government do not care for families. Well, nothing could be further from the truth. We are here to govern for everyone. The Albanese Labor government—in fact, all Labor governments—do not carve out Australia into favourites. We are here to support the young. We are here to support the old. We are here to support singles. And we are here to support families.

We recognise that families all throughout Australia are doing it tough. The inflationary beast is a global phenomenon, and Australia is not immune to these pressures. The response so far has been one where inflation has been bludgeoned by interest rate hikes led by the independent Reserve Bank, but it requires something more, and that's where we have stepped in, with surgical precision. We have provided targeted cost-of-living relief while laying the foundations of our future prosperity. Those foundations include skills, the energy transformation and investment in onshore manufacturing—the future that our children, the children of the families of today, will inherit. That future is there for them to seize.

In terms of the short-term cost-of-living relief—it has already been discussed, but for young families we delivered $4.7 billion in cheaper child care in the October budget. That is flowing now to 1.2 million families around Australia, including 4,400 families in Higgins. We know that the highest costs for families are mortgage repayments, the car and child care, which is actually third in those early years.

We recognised that at the outset, and it was one of the key reasons that young families voted us into government.

The second intervention was, of course, paid parental leave, which is designed to break those gendered norms that box in men as breadwinners and women as homemakers and actually last for decades. They start in that early period, when baby comes home, but they become entrenched and they last for decades. We want to smash those norms.

In terms of the middle years, a more universal area is health care. As a doctor, I was so heartened to see in the last budget a tripling of the bulk-billing incentive—a $3.5 billion investment. What does that mean? It means that more Australians can benefit from universal health care—Medicare. The reason I sit on this side and not on that side is because I believe in Medicare. It has been my life and my career.

In addition to that, in a few months from now, we will be delivering 60-day dispensing of medications to Australians. Eleven million Australians have chronic disease in this country. It's about 50 per cent of the population. Cheaper medicines through 60-day prescribing will benefit around six million Australians. That's going to halve the cost of their medicines. That's a significant cost-of-living benefit. It will deliver not only cost relief but also convenience. It will also improve compliance with medications. Why? Because when people run out of their medicines, they stop taking them and they deteriorate. If you have a chronic illness, whether it be diabetes or chronic heart failure, when you deteriorate, what ends up happening? You end up in hospital in the emergency department. You can see how a policy like this will pull one lever that will have economy-wide benefits not just to the individual but to the rest of the country, and it will have a knock-on effect—a virtuous cycle.

In addition to this, we know that families have been struggling with the mental health impacts of this pandemic. Parents are completely exhausted. Children have struggled to recover from the lockdowns that we had, particularly those in Victoria. I recognise that, and I hear it from my constituents, and this is why we committed over half a billion dollars—$586 million—towards improving mental health in Australia.

One of the key initiatives is removing the bottlenecks to psychology training. We need to have more psychologists. We also want to improve mental first aid so that anyone can deliver it.

While they are a party of division, we are a party of doers, and we are here to govern for this whole country.

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