Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to urge the Chamber and the government to spare a thought for local people who will be doing it tough over the holidays. Christmas and New Year is a wonderful time for so many, but it is a difficult time financially and emotionally for so many families. Every week my office is contacted by people who are struggling.

I am proud to represent the great City of Greater Dandenong in the parliament, but that city is also the most socioeconomically disadvantaged in the whole of metropolitan Melbourne—a city of five million people. In my office we see single parents seeking help. I was raised by a single parent myself and know just how difficult it is to make ends meet. We see people who have lost their jobs and are facing Christmas with no work; some of the 1.2 million Australians who, under this government, are in casual and insecure work, who just don't have enough work to make ends meet; age pensioners trying to work out how to pay their bills, struggling with the miserly cuts to the age pension that have accumulated from this government over recent years; asylum seekers with their lives stuck in limbo, with Peter Dutton's cruel cut, taking $247 a week away from them, which was all they had to live on while the government refuses to process their paperwork; and ordinary working families who are struggling with medical bills and school costs.

We do our best to connect these people to local services, and we hear every week of the demand for food banks increasing and the demand for financial counselling not being met. There are too many to name them all locally, but I want to call out and praise South East Community Links in Dandenong, Springvale Park and Nobel Park for the work they do; the Casey North Community Information & Support Service in Narre Warren; and the Endeavour Ministries at the Andrews Centre in Endeavour Hills, who do outstanding work and never ask for anything from government. I wrote to the minister asking for some help, and we got nothing. I also want to particularly mention the Doveton Neighbourhood Learning Centre—I was down there a few weeks and saw how the demand for their food bank is outstripping what they can now provide; the local legal centres; and, of course, the good staff at Centrelink—those who are left, who have not been sacked or privatised. But the truth is that services cannot keep up with the demand that we are seeing in the community for support due to the accumulation of funding cuts, funding frozen in real terms and the lack of care by the Liberal Party.

I believe that government should be trying harder to help those in the community who need help most. But, instead, this Prime Minister and the Liberals are actively making things harder. We see the cuts to penalty rates, which will impact casual workers over the summer and holiday period. They are being paid less under this government, because of the government's refusal to restore penalty rates. We saw cuts to the National Disability Insurance Scheme of $1.6 billion, chocked in to prop up the flimsy surplus, while they gave themselves a tax cut. We saw the bill being debated yesterday, which passed this House, shamefully, to cut the age pension and to cut Newstart, which affects 13,600 people in the City of Greater Dandenong and Casey.

So I say to the government: if you've got time to reflect over summer, think about your priorities. You should be focusing on the most vulnerable people, not helping yourselves.