Doug Cameron (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the proposition that has been put forward by the leader of Labor in the Senate, Penny Wong. Labor is absolutely committed to building a better society and to building a better community in this country. We do want secure jobs, and that's why we have said that you need to resolve the issue of climate change so that we can get investment in this country into renewable energy and create jobs for these young kids that are listening to this debate today, because that's the issue. We don't go back to coal. We don't go back to the era where coal drove everything in Australia. We need the opportunity to bring this country into the 21st century.

We do need fairer wages in this country. Under this rabble of a government that we have, under that weak Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, we've seen wage stagnation to the extent that the Reserve Bank is saying that we need some process to lift wages in this country. And what was the first thing this government did? It actually cut the wages of the parliamentary cleaners, the people that clean the toilets after this rabble of a government. They had their wages cut under this government.

We want to make sure that we tackle rising power prices, but you need certainty. You need investment. You need new investments in this country to deal with that. We want to invest in education. Seventeen billion dollars is what you lot have cut from the Gonski agreements around the country. We want to make sure that there is not only a school system that we can be proud of but a TAFE system that we can be proud of. And what we see around the country is the National Party standing back, watching austerity budgets cut back on TAFE around the country. We want more apprentices. We want more opportunities for young people and we want opportunities for older people in regional and rural communities to access TAFE. These are the issues that we see as important.

We want more health care. We want better health care. We want a focus on health care. We don't need more $7 fees added to people who are going to see the doctor, as this lot did in their first budget. We want to deal with housing affordability. We want these young people that are here listening in today to be able to afford their home in the future. But, while this mob defend capital gains tax exemptions and negative gearing for their rich mates who put their money in their back pockets for their election campaigns, we are always going to have a problem with capital gains tax exemptions, negative gearing and the use of self-managed super funds to push young people out of housing affordability in this country. We will deal with that.

I want to finish on this issue. The coalition are obsessed by the Leader of the Labor Party, Bill Shorten, and I know why: because it's the 16th or 17th poll—they raised the issue of the polls—that we've seen the coalition way behind Labor in the polls. And then you get Senator Macdonald come up here, again with that obsession, and talk about Beaconsfield. He has not got a clue, obviously from what he said, about Beaconsfield and Bill Shorten's involvement there. He hasn't got a clue what happened. He should come here and apologise to the people of Tasmania, who watched one of their fellows down there die at Beaconsfield, trapped in a mine, dead. And we had this nonsense from Senator Macdonald. We had miner Larry Knight dead at 44 years old, and we get that nonsense from Senator Macdonald. We had Brant Webb and Todd Russell trapped, and the public knew that Bill Shorten was down there supporting those workers and those families—more than this mob would ever do for a worker in their lives. You're a rabble of a government and an absolute disgrace.