Stephen Jones (Whitlam, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Rachael Woods is a 24-year-old young Australian from my electorate. She has been living and working in the United Kingdom for 18 months. She's stranded there. When the pandemic broke, she thought she had a choice. She had a good job in London, working in the hospitality industry. She could continue working and paying her way or she could, in her words, 'return back to Australia and be on the dole'. She decided to do the right thing; she thought her job was going to continue. Unfortunately, the lockdowns hit London. She is now without a job and her plane ticket home has been cancelled; she's literally stranded. She has racked up thousands and thousands of dollars in debt on her credit cards. And she's not alone. Around 18,000 Australians, as we know it, are registered and attempting to get back from abroad, with no visible or immediate means of getting here.

We need a plan. We need the government to come into parliament this week and explain what it is going to do to assist these 18,000 Australians, most of them young Australians, like Rachael, to find their way back home. If you have a look on the website today and try and price a ticket from London to Australia, you can be paying anything between $10,000 and $24,000 for a one-way ticket. That is prohibitive. As a part of a plan to get young Australians back home, we need the government to be working with the airlines to ensure that those tickets are priced at a rate that young Australians can afford.

It's not just young Australians. My electorate office has been dealing with people from as far abroad as Peru, China—all around the world. Many of them have families stranded abroad. You can imagine what the cost of a $24,000 ticket, times four or five would be; it's simply cost prohibitive. We don't just need a plan to bring the people home. If that can't be done in a short period of time, we will need to have a plan on how we will support our Australians abroad. I want to make this point: it is unrealistic for us to expect that other governments in other countries are going to be more generous to our citizens than we have been to theirs. That is unrealistic, so what's the plan to bring them home? And what's the plan to look after them until we can get them back to Australia? The Prime Minister needs to explain this today.