Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I first acknowledge the work of the member for Bruce on the Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit.

What is it to be an adult? For those of us who have worked with children and young people most of our lives, it's a really simple thing: you demonstrate that you're an adult when you're prepared to admit mistakes, take responsibility for them and change your behaviour. What is it to be an adult government? Being an adult government is when you can admit your mistakes, take responsibility for them, and change your behaviours.

This report demonstrates to us clearly, once again, that the former government are still not capable of taking those adult steps either individually or collectively. The report goes through a damning litany of what's colloquially known as pork-barrelling that occurred under their watch. We saw the headlines. We read about it every day. We spoke about it from the opposition benches every day, because there wasn't just the joy that some communities had because there was an announcement of a grant that was made, as strange as that grant process might have seemed to people, or people having questions about whether the recipient of that grant process was worthy in a competitive environment. The other side to that coin was the hundreds of thousands of Australians in communities who received nothing, who were locked out of grant programs by reason of geography, not by need.

In my community, this was felt deeply, as it was in a community like the member for Hawke's, where growth is happening every day. When I first came to this place in 2013, I represented the entire city of Wyndham, and I now represent about half of the city of Wyndham, because we are now at 300,000 people. This is a city that struggles to get young people to play sport because we are battling to get the playing fields, courts and pitches rolled out in time for new housing development. Imagine what the people in my community thought about the Stronger Regions Fund, from which we were locked out, granting $10 million to the inner-city North Sydney pool. You can imagine how that was felt in my community. As the chair's foreword in the report articulates, that didn't just result in disappointment; that resulted in a loss of faith in government, a loss of faith in democracy and a loss of faith in the institutions that keep our democracy strong.

This isn't the only case that we have found since we took government when we have looked back. We've seen it with the robodebt. Time and time again, I rose in this place to outline the unfair impacts that was having in my community. Yesterday and the day before, what have we seen from the opposition, the former government? A denial of responsibility for that program. Similarly, here we have a denial of responsibility for the programs that saw, quite bluntly, an absolute travesty of justice.

In my community, the former Gillard and Rudd Labor governments introduced the Regional Rail Link, at great expense to the federal government. In my community, where new train stations are and where an extra 100,000 people now live, was there money for a car park? Was there money for car parks at either Tarneit station, Wyndham Vale station, Williams Landing station, Werribee station, or Hoppers Crossing Station? No, there was not. Yet, as the audit found, there were car parks committed in Victoria, in the seat of Kooyong. They were never built, strangely enough. They never came to be.

Imagine you're in voter land and you live in Wyndham Vale. There they are on the television screen saying: 'We're going to more commuter car parks in Kooyong, where most residents already live 800 metres from a train station, a bus stop or a tram stop. We'll give them some commuter car parks because they might need to drive the 800 metres and park their cars for the day.' Meanwhile, in my patch, people live five kilometres from a train station and they can live up to three kilometres from the closest bus stop.

Imagine the disrespect they now hold for this place.

Our first job as government is to make sure that the Australian public understand that we will clean this up and that we will take the recommendations from this committee report and enact them to ensure that the public can have faith that there has been due diligence in these processes and that there has been a demonstrated need—not just a demonstrated need because I want it—against other needs in other communities. The worst of this is that we had 10 years where my community missed out because need wasn't taken into consideration. When analysis was done, as was reported at the time, decisions were made not based on need or demand or how you might best enhance someone's life but based on how you might win an election. They were based on partisan decisions around marginal seats and safe seats that did not take into consideration the needs in seats like mine that were Labor seats across the last decade.

Every day now I work in my community to make sure that people understand that this government will not behave that way and that this government will ensure that growth areas like ours are at the table—hence the meetings that we've had up here in government where my local council have been present. The mayor has been in meetings with ministers, and the Treasurer visited our electorate quite recently so that they were given the time to actually lay out the things that are so desperately needed after 10 years of a government that didn't look at us sideways.

The now opposition, the Liberal-National coalition, have a duty of care in this space now too. For the Australian public to believe and to rebuild their faith in the Australian government—in the Commonwealth—they need those opposite to take responsibility, to do the mea culpa and to do what we ask people to do every day. They did the wrong thing. In secondary schools, we say it all the time: 'Are you sorry, or are you sorry you got caught?' Tell me what the difference is when a young person actually sits with you and says, 'I'm really sorry because I understand the impact of what I did,' rather than, 'I'm sorry because I got caught.' The opposition now need to look us in the eye across the chamber and tell us, yes, they're sorry they got caught, but they're also sorry that they did this—they're sorry that they denigrated the public's faith in this institution, not just now, but time and time again.

We can start with the Leader of the Opposition. He can start by stopping backing former prime minister Morrison, saying that robodebt had nothing to do with him. He can start by calling that out. He can come to the dispatch box today at any point during the day and, on indulgence, say, 'These are the things that I'll do differently from my predecessors. These are the things that I will do differently as a leader.' It starts with, 'We made mistakes.' It starts with, 'We did the wrong thing.' It starts with, 'I will take responsibility for the actions that were put in place by a cabinet that I was a member of.' Let's start there. Those opposite can choose to join us in rebuilding the public's faith in our institutions and in our programs, particularly around our spending, or they can choose to go down in history and be left behind and called out for leaving vulnerable people behind, targeting vulnerable people and leaving communities like mine to be adrift for a decade.

Debate adjourned.

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