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

I have the extraordinary privilege of representing the electorate of Lalor in the people's house. It is going on five years since I was elected to this place to represent the community I was born in, the community I was raised in and the community where I raised my family. It's a diverse and growing community, as I've said here often. We're now at 88 babies being born every week. We're currently at a population of over 250,000 people, with projections for the City of Wyndham's population to increase to 435,000 by the year 2036.

The people in my community are people who are attracted to our affordable housing—people who come to start their lives. We have what we call the old city, if you like, and then we have the growth that is attracting people from around the world. That means people in my community work incredibly hard at building their communities, small and large. It means that our schools work incredibly hard at developing culture, as well as developing academic capability and developing creativity in our students. It means that in our schools we work every day on building great citizenship, building great communities and building a great society.

I was thrilled in the break we've just had to attend Tarneit Senior College to meet some young people there who are going into the Victoria Youth Parliament. The Tarneit Senior College team of Agnes, Jumess, Khaled, Arpan, Raiane and Aisha have been hard at work drafting their bill to promote rooftop gardens on inner city buildings. It was a pleasure to meet with them. Next week, they will join 20 teams from across Victoria to debate their bill and others in the chambers of the Victorian parliament. It will be a pleasant change to become an observer in the parliament next week and to go and listen to them as they present their speeches and learn so much about our democracy in the process.

As someone who worked as a teacher in the electorate for over 20 years, I'm incredibly proud to see these young people engaging in the way they are. But the proudest moment was when the formalities were finished and the discussion was done and I had a chance to chat quietly to those students on their own. They wanted to talk to me about how proud they are of their community and how overwhelmed they felt over the January period when we were verballed by the state opposition, verballed by our Prime Minister and verballed by senior ministers, because our community was in the news for some other young people's terrible behaviour. These students wanted to say to me how much it means to them to be a member of that community and how proud they are of their efforts. One person said to me that when she's at family gatherings in other parts of the city and they're talking about their lives and aspirations and the things they're doing at school and cousins say to her: 'So where are you going to school?' and she says, 'Tarneit,' people get a look on their face. She said, 'It just makes me more determined to make this the best place to live.' That's what I'm proud of about my community—their fighting spirit. I applaud their fighting spirit, particularly when I think about what this government has managed to do to my community over the five years that it has been in power, when I think about what's gone missing from our community.

When I think about the failings of this government when it comes to young people in communities like mine, I think of the students that I met two weeks ago who will, hopefully, be off to university next year, and I think about the $2.2 billion cuts to universities across this country and what they mean locally. I think about the $270 million cut from TAFE, on top of the $3 billion already cut from TAFE, and I think about these young people and their opportunities. This is what I think about when I think about aspiration. Aspiration, for me, means that those young people can aspire to be the best they can be, by getting themselves an education, and can aspire to live in a society that is fair, to live in our great egalitarian Australian dream. I think of those young people and the $17 billion that is being cut from schools and what that means to Tarneit Senior College, going forward over the next two years.

I also think about what this government has failed to address, which is the housing affordability crisis. My area is known as being an affordable place, but the average price of a house in Wyndham Vale is now $450,000. That may not seem a lot to those who live on the North Shore of Sydney, but $450,000—in what is supposed to be the most affordable suburb in Melbourne—is beyond young people's reach. Young people in my community deserve better. Young people in my community deserve a government that will address housing affordability, that will take brave decisions like the Labor Party has in terms of the way it will address that. It will address that by making things more equitable, by allowing young people to be in a position to afford a house because they'll be able to accrue their penalty rates again, because they will be able to get the education that they deserve.

We are also a community with thousands and thousands of families—young families. With 88 babies born a week, you can imagine how many young families we have. This coming Monday, the government will make it harder for the most vulnerable families in my community to access early education, and 4,337 families in my community are set to be adversely affected. That's almost one in four families. The complex set of rules that families will need to satisfy to qualify for government assistance will knock thousands of low-income families out of the system and their children out of early education. It will widen the inequity. It will mean some children will be more school ready than others because of the family they were born into, because of the arrangements of that family, because of people's ability to get full-time and permanent work.

The activity test that this government will introduce views early education as childminding, and the Liberals seem to think that, if you aren't working in a full-time capacity, your child shouldn't have access to early education. In the federal electorate of Lalor, nearly 10 per cent of people work between one and 15 hours. That's not by choice. That demonstrates a significant shift towards casualised employment. It further demonstrates that this government is seriously out of touch when it comes to its new unfair childcare package and its unfair hurdles, keeping kids out of early education. These economic geniuses have said that they are going to put downward pressure on childcare fees. Well, that's been absolutely blown out of the water this week. You can't reduce funding to give people 12 hours of access and not understand that there's going to be a structural shift in the way the centres do their service provision. There's going to be a cost if people are sending their child for only six hours a day rather than eight hours a day. It impacts on the business structures of those centres and, as a result, they are needing to put their prices up.

There are some other areas of critical importance that impact on young people in my electorate and on families in my electorate. We had many speakers in here today, during our three-minute constituency statements, talking about the impact this government is having on older Australians, but I want to focus on a couple of other things. I want to talk about the digital divide that my community suffers enormously from. I want to talk about the fact that this government doesn't have a plan, in fact has introduced a 'fraudband' and then not made the NBN accountable for their service provision. That has impacted families all over my community. We are tired of the ever-widening digital divide; people in the outer areas and in new areas are waiting up to two years for any kind of internet connection.

I also want to address the conversation that we've been having in this place this week. Those opposite are claiming we are the highest-taxing country in the world. Let's put some facts on the table. Our overall tax take is the lowest in the OECD. Our corporate headline tax may say 30 per cent, but our average corporate payment of tax, the actual rate, is between 17 and 24 per cent. They want to reduce the headline rate to 27 per cent. Most companies in this country are paying no more than 24 per cent. That's the fact that my community needs to understand. They also need to understand that, when it comes to their personal income tax, one per cent of the people in my community earn over $280,000, and they'll get a better deal under Labor.