Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to address the address-in-reply motion in response to the Governor-General's speech about our plans as a Labor government and our plans to deliver on the responsibility entrusted to us by Australia's people. It's been a very long nine years of dangerous coalition leadership, but thankfully we're past that now because the Australian people shouted for change and they shouted loudest in Western Australia. They demanded that their parliament be a more progressive, more representative and kinder place, and our government does not take this responsibility lightly.

As the Governor-General outlined so well last night, we have a lot on our agenda. Importantly, as he said, we have a renewed ambition as a nation to reconcile with our past, to tell the truth about our history and to place First Nations voices at the heart of our democratic processes, and you can feel the nation changing for the better, day by day, as we really come to grips with who we want to be as a nation. Yesterday I was chatting with my son, who is seven and who had the privilege of coming to the opening of parliament. We were enjoying the welcome to country, and he said with great pride, 'We do this every day at my school.' So you can see that we've come a long way from the omnipresent institutional racism of the past and a long way towards a national identity where the symbolic things we do culturally create a new sense of nationalism and pride that puts First Nations culture at its heart in a way that makes us feel like we all belong. But we still have so many truths to hear and to tell about the history of genocide and dispossession of Australia's First Nations people. We need a voice to this parliament and a treaty for us to progress as a nation towards justice and to reconcile our history as a people. I'm excited by this work, and I'm keen to get to work using my knowledge of our parliamentary systems to work with others to make a voice as effective as possible.

Speaking of a voice, one of the first pieces of business of this new government will be to abolish the coalition's cruel cashless welfare card. I've travelled the Kimberley and Western Australia where the cashless debit card was unfairly forced on people. I heard their opposition loud and clear—opposition that the last government refused to listen to. It was unjust and racially discriminatory, whether intentionally or otherwise. There's something so deeply wrong when private, for-profit companies control people's welfare and income support payments. That is something that, indeed, we will have to look at in the context of the role of the companies in Workforce Australia that have those contracts too.

We've seen millions of dollars go to companies while those on payments lived in poverty. If the very same money had gone into services or into the pockets of card recipients, those people would have been tens of thousands of dollars better off over the time of this program. It was nearly impossible to get off the card; it wouldn't matter how well you were doing. And I can certainly say that the promised services to support people struggling with addiction never eventuated. It's also evidenced in the fact that the card has not been shown in any meaningful study to have prevented alcohol or other drug abuse. People weren't put on the card because it had been assessed that it would have an important role to support them. They were put on the card simply because of where they lived, and the communities that were put on the card are where a majority of First Nations populations live.

So make no mistake: this can only be seen as racially motivated. I've spoken with people who've had to carefully plan out how and when they were going to the store, which could be hundreds of kilometres away, and budget for the insane price of fuel that it would cost them to get to a store that would even accept the CDC to get basic food essentials. It breached every principle of good policy, including evidence and, most importantly, that important principle of 'nothing about us without us'. First Nations people were not included in these policy decisions. They told us that this card would not help, and indeed it did not.

I've got great confidence that, with a voice to parliament, we can stop this parliament from being racially blinkered in the future—or, at the very least, it will be called out loudly and clearly by a First Nations' voice before it happens. I can already see the difference that elected First Nations people have made on this issue over the last few years and how important it is to have a critical mass of First Nations representatives who have seats in both chambers. We can already see what an incredible difference it makes to how these policy issues are debated and changed. And, indeed, they have been critically important in the leadership of the Labor Party in bringing it to this decision to abolish the card.

I'm extremely excited that we're doubling the number of Indigenous rangers. I've seen the incredible success of this program in addressing what have been the often devastating impacts of colonisation on Australia's landmass—feral cats, rabbits, invasive species, land clearing and so much more. As a nation, we have to continue to value, both economically and culturally, the incredible work of Indigenous communities in caring for country. This is such a significant asset to Australian culture and identity, and their relationship to country is an asset to us all.

That brings me to talk now about climate change. The Australian public has called for action on climate change, after a decade of denial and delay—not to mention all the disruption that those now in opposition caused in Labor's time in government preceding that. Labor will give workers, their unions, industry, energy investors and the wider community certainty that we're headed in the right direction, and we're looking to do it quickly and swiftly. An emissions reduction target of 43 per cent before 2030 puts Australia back on track for net zero before 2050. We must do this. This certainty is critical to ensuring that Australia is positioned to revive Australian manufacturing and turn our country into the renewable energy superpower that we know it can be.

Importantly, though, we know this means doing the hard work of organising in the local communities that are already at the coalface, literally, of this change. You can see this in my home state of WA, where we are working towards not only building our nation's capacity as a renewable energy technology manufacturer but also moving along the path of a just transition for workers and their communities—a future that moves towards secure jobs in our economy.

The South West Western Australian town of Collie is a very long, long way away from Canberra. But if you wanted to see what climate change action looks like—action that puts workers and their communities first—you would look to Collie. Since 2019, this small coalmining town has been undergoing a major economic shift. It has two coalmines and three coal-powered fire stations. For 100 years, Collie's miners, plant operators, sparkies and fitters have provided energy to Western Australians and powered our economy. Think of all those beautiful Western Australian stories made and told under the lights powered by Collie coal workers.

But Collie knows—and we know—that the world is changing, that our climate is changing in dangerous ways because of fossil fuels and that coal cannot power our future. A few weeks ago the state government announced that all publicly owned coal-fired power stations in the state would be shut before 2030, and this is because of the work done by unions, the Collie community and the WA Labor Party. Since 2019, the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union, other unions, community groups and the state government have met every six weeks as the Collie Just Transition Working Group. They've developed and implemented a worker- and community-led strategy that is transitioning Collie from an economy built around and for coal to something more diverse and economically sustainable. We are, for example, under state Labor, moving bushfire operations to Collie. A zero-carbon magnesium plant is planned. Other processing operations are being considered for manufacturing of renewable technologies. A key part of the state's future is going to be made in Collie. It has been made from Collie in the past and it will continue to be in the future. So, if you want to know what a just transition looks like, how real action on climate change is achieved and what a Labor government can do, go and see the work that's being done there. It's not without its difficulty or without debate and conflict, but we are making incredible progress and we are doing that hand in hand with the local community.

We as a government also know that reducing transport emissions will be pivotal to making our cities and towns cleaner and healthier places to live. Electric cars need to be more affordable and more available to families and businesses that want them. They're cheaper to run, they're better for the environment, and because they've got fewer moving parts they have less wear and tear and need to be serviced less often. But the issue remains that they are far outside the price range of regular Australians. It's why our government has already moved this week to remove the fringe benefits tax from electric cars and to make them affordable to working people across the country. Making electric cars work for Australians also means covering our big distances. Unlike the opposition, which has historically negated the feasibility of charging stations and electric cars, our Labor government is committed to building a network of charging stations across the Kimberley in WA. There are already stations spanning Broome to Kununurra, which is over 1,000 kilometres, so we can support Australians with a new, cheaper and cleaner transport system.

I'll end by mentioning how proud and honoured I am to welcome my new Western Australian colleagues to this exciting place, including, in the lower house, Tania Lawrence in Hasluck, Tracey Roberts in Pearce, Sam Lim in Tangney and Zaneta Mascarenhas in Swan—the latter of whom I congratulate on her incredible and rousing first speech last night. I also sincerely and deeply welcome and congratulate Senator Fatima Payman on her election to the Senate. It's such an honour to have you here and to have you move the address in reply, and I'm so excited for all the work we'll now get to do together to make Australia a better place.