Sam Rae (Hawke, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am very fond of the member for Riverina, and I think he does, under the circumstances, in a nonpartisan sense, an exceptional job of representing his constituents by and large. I never cease to be frustrated, though, when honourable members come into the chamber, clearly paying very little attention to the substance of the motion at hand and seeking to score some cheap and poorly articulated political points at the expense of the substance of the matter that we're seeking to discuss.

The reality here is that Scott Morrison and his Liberal government set the conditions for our country to face an unprecedented cost-of-living crisis. This is best exemplified, as the member for Riverina very honestly points out, by the trillion dollars of Liberal debt that Scott Morrison's government stacked up on behalf of the Australian taxpayers and, ultimately, left for generations of Australians, regardless of where they live or their socioeconomic circumstances, to pay down. They had nine years, nine budgets and nearly a decade in government, and across the course of that decade they did not deliver a single budget surplus. They had nine budgets and, despite the mugs crowing about their economic prowess, they did not manage to deliver a single surplus; in fact, there were nine budget deficits. Nine times they spent more money than they saved. So the country is left with a trillion dollars of Liberal debt.

We face a series of very unstable international economic conditions, and the Australian people have been suffering. People in my own electorate of Hawke have been facing very challenging household economic conditions. Our government, the Albanese Labor government, can't fix everything. We don't pretend for a second that there's a silver-bullet solution to these challenges that will ultimately set aside this history of reckless fiscal management by the Liberal Party as well as some very challenging economic conditions, but there are some things that we can do that will serve working people, in terms of taking some of the economic pressure off them at a household level while, at the same time, meeting our broader social obligations and, indeed, ambitions as a community.

Our cheaper medicines policy is a great example of this. This is a policy that is specifically designed to ensure that working people can affordably access the health care that they require. It takes economic pressure off households. They now effectively get twice as much medicine for their money, so the price of medication is halved. Indeed, it takes pressure off our broader public health infrastructure, in that it ensures that people have ongoing health support and that they can afford to pay for their medicines. Accordingly, they don't find their health conditions slipping over time while they try to save money and try to make very difficult considerations about the priorities in their household and family budgets. When their health care goes on the backburner, all of a sudden we have an epidemic of very serious health issues that have been poorly managed for, frankly, unreasonable economic reasons.

This policy is specifically designed to do two things: take pressure off working people and their household budgets and, at the same time, ensure that we have a healthy community that is able to access the medicines and the health care that it requires in order to remain a healthy community. It doesn't matter where you live in this country and it doesn't really matter what socioeconomic circumstances you come from. In this regard, the cost-of-living crunch has been unusual.

I well understand that the member for Riverina considers himself—with some credibility, I think—a warrior for regional people, but he is not the only regional MP in this building. Indeed, I assure you that the Nationals are not the only party that represents regional people. I represent regional people as well, and I can tell you right now that regional people all across my electorate have been overwhelmingly positive on this policy. In pharmacies in all our small towns people can now access the health care that they need, and they're doing it at half the price they were previously. We know that our regional health infrastructure is under pressure, and this is one approach to taking that pressure off.

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