Kate Thwaites (Jagajaga, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

[by video link] Tonight I am joining you from lockdown in Melbourne. I must begin by acknowledging all the people in my electorate tonight who are doing it tough because this is an extremely difficult time for all of us. We are tired and we are anxious. We have a little bit of deja vu. We have a lot of worry about what is to come next. We are people doing home schooling and trying to juggle that against work. We are people worried about our businesses. We are worried about our relatives in aged care. As I said, we are people who do not know what is coming next.

I know people in my community are doing everything they can to pull themselves and to pull those around them through. It is not made any easier by seeing government members on the other side failing to acknowledge their role in where we are right now. It is not made any easier to have a Prime Minister who told us it wasn't 'a race' to get vaccinated. Well, now we are not vaccinated and the virus is running through our community. Our relatives in aged care are vulnerable. We don't even know how many workers in aged care have been vaccinated. None of that is helping people in Melbourne at the moment. The failure from government members to acknowledge their responsibility, to explain how they are going to pick up and fix these gaps they have left, none that have is helping any of us in lockdown here in Melbourne at the moment. We are looking for accountability. We are looking for a government that owns the problems it has created and works out how to fix them and fix them quickly, because we can't do this for too much longer. We need a government that is acting on our behalf and a government that understands what we are going through.

I do though want to try to look for some of the positives that may come from this pandemic. As we all adjust and continue to adjust to what the pandemic brings to us, there are things that we should consider as positives and things that may be useful for us to take forward. Tonight, for me, appearing in this way, one of the big things that I think is positive is our use of virtual parliament. It is an important update to the procedures and to the way that we run the parliament as a more modern and flexible workplace. I know, for me, there is no way that I would be able to do my job in the middle of this pandemic, represent my constituents and look after my family without this option of having virtual parliament. So tonight I have come back into the office to give this speech after ducking home to make sure I could support doing toddler bath time, baby bath time, getting them into bed, coming back into the office and giving this speech. It's really important for me to acknowledge that that's what I've done and that's what I'm able to do, because I think too often one of the things that stops people from seeing themselves in our chamber, that stops people from thinking that they might be able to put their hand up and be a representative in the federal parliament is that what happens in the chamber looks nothing like their lives. What happens in our lives is that we are in Canberra often for half the year. There are a lot of people in our community who can't set up their lives like that. They can't think, 'I can be away from my family, from my caring responsibilities for half the year.' Particularly a lot of women think like that because, let's be honest, it is women who do a lot of the caring in our community. I think that hurts us all because it means that our parliament can draw from a smaller group of people than it should be able to.

When we look in our parliament, we don't have enough women. A lot of us are white. A lot of us come from certain backgrounds and the same backgrounds. We could only be improved by having more diversity in our parliament. Embracing things such as virtual parliament and the opportunities that it brings for people to be flexible the way they work yet still represent their community and still have their voice heard in parliament is really important. As I said, it's particularly important for women. We have seen this year what it looks like when we don't hear women's voices in our parliament, what it looks like when women are not in the ears of government, when women are not in the top positions in our community. What it looks like is a government that forgot women, a government that didn't get that women were being harmed in our building. We need to understand that the more representative, the more flexible our parliament can be, the more likely that women can see themselves there.

The saying is you can't be what you can't see. I very much hope that we can find a way post-pandemic to keep some elements of the flexibility that we have introduced into the parliament during this pandemic. It has made a difference. It is making a difference to those of us who are there now, but I very much hope it will make a difference to the people who can see themselves being there in the future.