Michelle Ananda-Rajah (Higgins, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Endometriosis is a really common disease. It affects one in nine women, and diagnosis takes seven years on average; that is far too long. It doesn't take seven years to diagnose cancer. Patients also typically wait between one and four years to see a public specialist like a gynaecologist. That's way too long and is like adding insult to injury.

I recently had the privilege of visiting one of the 22 endometriosis clinics that this Labor government has funded, something spearheaded by Assistant Minister Ged Kearney. At the EACH endometriosis and pelvic pain clinic in Ringwood East, the wait time is not four years but 14 days. The EACH clinic is a patient centred clinic delivering essential services to women and girls who suffer from chronic pain. Patients walk in, often with wads—files—of notes. Many of them have had years of surgeries and they come in desperation, having wandered from pillar to post in search of answers.

There is no cure for endometriosis but there is care—care to help women navigate their lives and find options that may enable them to remain productive and fulfilled, and not be defined by pain. Using a multidisciplinary approach, patients are met with empathy and expertise. Such is the reputation of this clinic that patients from regional areas like Gippsland are coming through word of mouth. Medical and nursing consultations, counselling support, pelvic pain management, physiotherapy, dietetics, onsite ultrasound—very unusual—and hormonal treatments, including Mirena insertion and removal: these are the services this clinic provides and these are the services our Australian women need not just in Ringwood East but all throughout this country, something we are pushing.

The only ask of me from this clinic was for more space. What a good problem to have. They are so overwhelmed with business that they just need some money to expand the clinic. I would like to thank the clinic for its professional staff and for providing high-quality care to our women and girls. Keep going.

Bowel cancer is reaching down to younger and younger Australians. It is the reason we have expanded access to free bowel cancer screening to include people aged between 45 and 50. There are 1,716 Australians under the age of 50, each with a name, each with a story, each with loved ones, who are diagnosed with bowel cancer. That's 11 per cent of all bowel cancers, and the numbers are accelerating. They are going up for a multiplicity of reasons. We are not clear why this is happening. Three hundred and fifteen people under 50 die from bowel cancer each year. Imagine that—people at the peak of their lives. That's nearly six per cent of all bowel cancer deaths.

Over 86 per cent of people diagnosed with early-onset bowel cancer experience symptoms. The majority of these patients actually have symptoms, and they often go and see their doctor with them, sometimes with bleeding, a change in bowel habit or pain. Yet what do they hear? They hear, 'You're too young to have bowel cancer.' The signs and symptoms are attributed to haemorrhoids or to maybe food intolerance. 'It's a normal part of your recovery from having a baby,' or it's the result of having a hectic lifestyle. How many times have these narratives been going round and round? It's led to deaths and poor outcomes. And it's a tragedy, because, if a polyp is found early, it's removed. It's snared through a colonoscopy and it's removed. Gone—bowel cancer stopped dead in its tracks.

I would like to thank Never2Young, a bowel cancer patient advocacy group, for campaigning for the change to the bowel cancer screening program and spearheading this push for greater recognition. This Labor government, thanks to Mark Butler, the health minister, has listened.

Aged care was a shambles when we came to office, defined by a royal commission report titled Neglect. Thanks to the reforms championed by Minister Anika Wells, we have seen time spent on direct care for residents actually increase, and a whole range of other measures to increase the quality of aged care and restore confidence in the sector so that, when the time comes for Australians to enter aged care, they know that they are going to be looked after—that there is oversight and that there are now benchmarks that must be met so that they get the care they rightfully expect. Right now, residents are getting 204 total minutes of care, up by more than 20 minutes per day from 2020-21.

We promised to ensure a registered nurse was on duty at all aged-care homes 24/7. As of July this year, this has been achieved, on average, 99 per cent of the time. That is remarkable. We were told it would never happen because of skill shortages. But you legislate and you create the benchmark, and this is the change.

We said we'd establish a food, nutrition and dining hotline where older people in aged-care homes, their families and their carers can ask questions, get advice and make complaints about the food. This is available on 1800844044, Monday to Friday, 9 am to 5 pm.

We're funding 24,000 more home-care packages, to give older Australians more choice.

It's pretty clear from the two years of consultation we have done with the community that Australians know what they want. They want to have autonomy, they want to have a say in what happens when they age and, ideally, they want to age at home with independence and a little bit of extra support. They do not want to end up in residential aged care if they can help it, so we're giving them some options.

We've also changed deeming rates. Deeming rates are percentages set by the Australian government and used by Centrelink to predict how much you will earn over the next 12 months from things like super and investments. They provide an estimate of your income for the next year so you can work out if you are still eligible for the age pension. We will continue to freeze social security deeming rates for a further 12 months, to June 2025, to provide continued relief for around 876,000 income support recipients across Australia. The first $103,800 of your combined financial assets has a deeming rate of 0.25 per cent applied. Anything over that amount is deemed to earn 2.25 per cent. In Higgins, this will support 2,815 income support recipients.

One of my favourite topics is career pathways and options for young Australians. The world is their oyster and there are so many options. In fact, they are going to be spoilt for choice. Every student needs good career guidance to make informed decisions about their future; however, we all know, having been through school and having visiting schools, that the quality of that career advice is often quite patchy in schools right across Australia. It doesn't matter whether you go to an independent school, a private school, a public school or a faith-based school, career advice remains patchy, so let me give you some tips from an insider: if you're not thinking about energy, you're not thinking. Energy, energy and energy—one, two and three.

Then, of course, there are the defence industries—submarines, autonomous robots, hypersonics, counterhypersonics, nuclear science and electronic welfare. Advanced manufacturing is coming. The world's most efficient solar panels are going to be made right here in Australia, backed by $1 billion from the Albanese Labor government. There will be green hydrogen projects and solar thermal. Solar thermal is where you have a column of salt surrounded by mirrors, and the salt is melted and becomes a source of heat. These projects are not science fiction but projects that are already funded by us and underway. There's quantum computing. Then, of course, there's cyber. We need to raise an army of cyber defenders who can decode the noise and turn the hunted into the hunters. There is AI.

There is anything related to the net zero transformation—transport, road, aviation, agriculture, the built environment, the circular economy. Waste is sexy because waste is now an industry, and we want to learn to manage it and turn it into a resource. There are future fuels. Then, of course, there's the care sector. We need people to care for each other, whether that be in teaching, nursing, social work, disability or mental health. Then, of course, there is construction. Without the human capital, we are not going to get to build 1.2 million homes, which is our ambition. Over the next five years we are going to need a lot of people in construction—blue collar and white collar.

Young Australians have heeded the call, with 500,000 having already taken up fee-free TAFE courses. With that, we've got 20,000 places in construction and interest-free loans of up to $25,000. If you complete your course, we will shave 20 per cent off those loans, and there are incentives for apprentices as well as for employers.