Patrick Gorman (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Our country has a new-found appreciation for essential workers, but I think we also have a new-found appreciation for the fact that every Australian is essential. In that regard, I welcome the commitment by the government today to further expand our focus on mental health, because I think there are far too many Australians who are finding this current period of time just that little bit too much to handle and, as I said, every Australian is an essential part of our community.

My community of Perth has a new-found appreciation for the people who make our society tick. I share the view of the member for Wentworth, who said that our supermarket workers are everyday heroes. They have done so much. I give a shout-out to every Coles and Woolies employee in my electorate and those who are at the IGAs in Highgate, Northbridge, Maylands, Mount Lawley and further afield. These staff have put themselves in harm's way and they have also worked around the clock, many working more hours than they ever have before. Some have told me they have worked harder than they do at Christmas. It has been an incredibly challenging time for them. They have stepped up to the challenge. They deserve not just our appreciation; they also deserve appropriate pay and the protection of their rights and conditions at work. So to all retail workers I say thank you.

We also have an appreciation for the essential service of Australia Post. Australia Post makes sure that we stay connected in more ways, particularly when we can't necessarily be with those people that we love. Indeed, my state of Western Australia has adopted what some people love, which is a hard border. But the reality is that it does mean many families, including mine, are split across different parts of the country at certain times.

Having said that, I note that Australia Post did make the very difficult decision, and one I was incredibly critical of, to close the North Perth post office in the middle of this pandemic. It is ridiculous that you would close an essential service now. I'm not saying the management of the North Perth post office was perfect—far from it. But to close a post office in the middle of a pandemic and lock people's mail and parcels away was just a terrible decision. I wanted to put on record also that I'm grateful Australia Post have since, due to a lot of community pressure, reversed that decision and set up a temporary post office with full postage and mail collection facilities, because it really did leave thousands of people and thousands of businesses in my electorate in a really dire circumstance in April. So I'm grateful that has been resolved.

But now we must talk about what happens next, and the reality is that it's going to be a slow rebuild. It is not going to be a snapback. 'Snapback' should go in the same bin as 'fightback'. We can't snap back to having 100,000 Australians have nowhere to call home. We can't snap back to increasing and increasing casualisation and insecure work. We can't snap back to having hundreds of thousands of Australians in poverty because Newstart is too low.