Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Yesterday this parliament was welcomed to country with a powerful speech about the ongoing fight for First Nations justice. All around Australia we live on stolen and unceded land. The grave injustices inflicted upon First Nations people since colonisation continue, with deaths in custody, poverty, ongoing dispossession and persistent gaps in health, education and employment outcomes. We must tell the truth about our past in order to start to heal, and I am proud to be part of a party that's deeply committed to the work for First Nations justice, to truth-telling, to treaties and to voice.

Yesterday we saw the opening of a parliament with more women, with more people from diverse backgrounds and with more members and senators from outside the two big parties. It's also now a parliament with the largest number of Greens ever. Our now 16-strong Greens party room is majority women, and women of colour have taken up positions of authority. Muslim, migrant and fantastic feminist Senator Mehreen Faruqi is our Greens deputy leader, and grassroots activist and DjabWurrung Gunnai Gunditjmara woman Senator Lidia Thorpe is our Senate deputy leader. I'm also particularly proud that my home state of Queensland became 'Greensland', and I'm now joined by four wonderful friends, Senator Penny Allman-Payne; the member for Ryan, Libby Watson-Brown; the member for Griffith, Max Chandler-Mather; and the member for Brisbane, Stephen Bates, who gives his first speech in the other place tonight.

Many Australians shared on election night the elation that, after nine long years, we had seen the back of an embarrassing, incompetent, rampantly self-interested and desperately archaic Morrison government. But what was clear was that the vote for both the coalition and the Labor Party went down. The vote for the Greens and Independents surged. People want change. They want choice, and they don't just want two parties who frequently agree with each other and often lack courage. People want a democracy that works for them, not just delivers for big political donors and vested interests. They want universal services, like fully funded hospitals and schools. They want affordable housing. They want dental and mental health included in Medicare. They want student debt abolished, and uni and TAFE made free again. They want free child care and fair wages at work. They want integrity in government and they want real climate action that looks after our current coal workers as we transition to 100 per cent clean, cheap, renewable energy. And they understand that if we make the billionaires and the big corporations pay their fair share we can actually afford to fund those universal services that make people's everyday lives better and reduce the cost of living. The Greens will push for all of these things in this parliament, and this is a parliament with a real opportunity to change the future. There is hope again. But the new government just being better than the past nine years will not be enough. We need brave, strong action to address the climate crisis, the housing crisis and the inequality crisis.

I want to acknowledge the brave young people who gathered in parliament and on the lawns yesterday as part of the Tomorrow Movement. Those young people, like so many people I spoke to during and since the election, are worried about their future. They understand the science; they know that we can't keep digging up coal and gas. Every year of their lives is hotter than the last. They have seen their communities burnt, flooded, suffering through drought; they have read the State of the environment report; they have struggled to find any work, let alone secure work; their rents keep going up and they are burdened with student debt. These brave young people are fed up. They are sick of politicians who listen to their big donors and not them, who care more about their own interests than the future of their communities. Those young people voted for change and they are demanding that everyone in this place thinks about them when they are making decisions. They are the ones who will carry the burden of our choices and our inaction.

Last night on 7.30 on the ABC, the Prime Minister said that not opening up new coal and gas would have 'a devastating impact on our economy'. But do you know what has a devastating impact? Floods, fires, droughts; keeping emergency services ready to respond to the latest crisis; loss of agricultural land; and coal communities left high and dry by changing global markets that the government has refused to plan for. The CSIRO says that extreme weather caused by climate change, including new coal and gas, will cost Australia $39 billion each year by 2050. Despite this marriage to the fossil fuel sector by both of the big parties, young people in the Tomorrow Movement still have hope. They find strength in their solidarity, their shared purpose and their determination to turn things around. They know that a rapid transition to a renewable future is possible. They know that transition offers sustainable job opportunities, stronger communities, better services and a healthier environment. They just need us to act. Along with my Greens colleagues, I will be working tirelessly in this parliament to channel their hope into action. It is what the people of Australia voted for, and we intend to push this government to deliver.

We are pleased that in relation to the climate target legislation the government is at the table in negotiations with us and the crossbench to improve its tepid bill. We are having productive discussions about improving that bill but we will continue to push to make sure that we don't open new coal and gas mines in this country. Any target that is legislated will be totally undermined if the 114 coal and gas projects in the pipeline proceed. The Greens will push for rapid decarbonisation and a transition to 100 per cent renewables that the science says is needed to not just keep our habitat liveable but to protect the Great Barrier Reef and minimise species loss. And we will look after coal workers and affected communities while a transition happens, with jobs guarantees and future planning.

We can tax billionaires and make corporations pay their share so that everyone can access the services that they need to live a good life. This government could and should drop the $200 billion stage 3 tax cuts and redirect that money into things that improve people's everyday lives—free child care, wiping student debt, more affordable housing. This government wouldn't need an austerity budget and the cuts that it is flagging if it axed Morrison's stage 3 tax cuts.

Throughout the election campaign I heard a lot from voters about what would improve their lives. It is clear that we are in a housing crisis. The waiting list for social housing in all states is out of control and growing, with some people waiting years to get a home. Every night, thousands of people are sleeping rough, couch surfing. They are in crisis accommodation or tenuous housing situations and are at real risk of becoming homeless. Older women are among the fastest-growing cohort of people facing homelessness, and tonight 400,000 women over the age of 45 will be without home. We are a rich country. There is no excuse for a single human being not having a home. We need to build one million social homes, we need to give renters more protection and we need to fix the perverse and inequitable tax settings that make it cheaper to buy your fifth investment property than your first home. And we need to raise the rate of income support above the poverty line so that people are not choosing between paying the rent or putting food on the table.

On dental: each year, over two million Australians avoid going to the dentist, not because they don't like the dentist but because they can't afford it. In the papers today, the dentists are saying that they're worried that two-thirds of Australians who've put off making an appointment risk minor issues becoming major problems. People who avoid going to the dentist face higher costs and higher risk of things like heart disease, and they can face social isolation. The Greens recognise that getting dental care into Medicare for everyone would relieve a significant cost-of-living pressure, it would address inequality and it would lead to better health outcomes.

We also need to get mental health care into Medicare. The ABS National Study of Mental Health and Wellbeing, which was released last week, found that 40 per cent of Australians aged between 16 and 85 have had a mental health disorder during their lifetime, and that one in six has had suicidal thoughts or behaviours. Almost half of all young women and 30 per cent of young men suffered an anxiety, depression or substance abuse disorder last financial year. These are horrifying statistics, and we need to work to end the financial insecurity, the housing stress, the gender inequality and discrimination, and the persistent existential threat of a changing climate and an uncertain future that is driving that epidemic of anxiety in our young people. But we also need to make sure that people experiencing mental health issues have accessible, affordable support for as long as they need it. No-one should have to suffer because they can't afford mental health care. We need to invest in increasing the mental health workforce, making mental health care available to everyone under Medicare and removing the stigma that, sadly, still persists around addressing mental health.

I've got the portfolio for women for the Greens, and the women of Australia just voted out, in my view, the most sexist government in decades, and they expect real progress from this parliament. We welcome the government's plan for more affordable child care—although we think it should be free. We welcome the measures to address the gender pay gap—again, we think it should go further. We're interested in the plans for a national gender equality strategy. We have long supported paid family and domestic violence leave. We desperately need that positive duty on employers to provide a safe workplace, as the Sex Discrimination Commissioner recommended, and we need a strong plan to address violence against women and their children. They're positive reforms that the Greens have pushed for, for many years.

Sadly, this year 25 women already have been killed by violence, and countless more have been abused, assaulted and live in fear. Family, sexual and domestic violence is a national crisis. It's still a national crisis; it has been for a decade or more, and it's incumbent upon this parliament to do the work to fix it. Now we welcome the government's decision to delay the introduction of the next national plan to get it right, but getting it right means having ambitious targets in the plan and it means actual funding to achieve those targets. The Greens are backing the calls from the women's safety sector for $1 billion each year for frontline support services so that no-one is turned away when they reach out for help. Short-changing the national plan will see more women killed.

We need to listen to the voices of victim-survivors and experts, and we desperately need full investment in prevention, in education and in trauma recovery. We need a standalone plan developed by and for First Nations women. We need specialist services for older women, for young women, for LGBTQIA+ people, for migrant women and for women with disabilities. And we have to address the financial insecurity that can make it difficult to leave abusive relationships and start new lives.

I want to briefly mention the US decision to overturn Roe v Wade. It has shown that hard-won rights for women can be eroded unless we are vigilant, but it has also highlighted the inequity in access to reproductive health care in our country. Some people are having to travel for many, many hours and spend hundreds of dollars to get an abortion. Many people can't afford the travel costs or the costs of securing an abortion, and I was very disappointed to hear our new Prime Minister walk away from the Labor Party's 2019 commitment to say that people could and should be able to access abortion through public hospitals. We will push the new government to revert back to that original, good position, because abortion is health care and it must be available to everyone, no matter where you live or how much money you have. Let us not become America.

On integrity, which is my other portfolio of democracy for the Greens: Australians voted resoundingly for more integrity in politics. People are thoroughly sick of the culture of entitlement and rorting and jobs for mates. They're sick of the donations from the dirty industries that buy policy outcomes to boost corporate profits—from the fossil fuel sectors, big pharma, defence, gambling. They buy the outcomes that work for those sectors, and they work against the long-term interests of the community. People are sick of political donors and government friends getting government grants, subsidies and handouts while so many other people are doing it tough.

Now, we're really pleased that the government has publicly committed to establishing an independent integrity commission, and we will hold them to account on that commitment. Obviously, a bill passed this place from the Greens several years ago, and we look forward to finally having a federal corruption watchdog. That watchdog has to have broad powers. It needs to have genuine transparency and it needs adequate resourcing to do its job properly, and we need to punish the rorters and the grifters and protect the brave whistleblowers that call them out. We need to end that jobs-for-mates culture—the lobbying, the revolving door between government and industry—and we need to get big money out of politics once and for all so that politicians act in the public interest, not their own.

Lastly, on electoral reforms: this election delivered the most culturally and gender diverse parliament in Australia's history, but there is still such a long way to go before our parliament truly looks like the community it represents. We need to remove those barriers for people running for parliament, including that archaic section 44 restriction on dual citizens and public servants. We should be proud of our multicultural community, and they should be in this place.

We desperately need to end the influence of big money on our parliament by putting in electoral spending caps and having donation reforms and truth-in-advertising laws, and we desperately need that Set the Standard report legislated. The election sent a clear message: Australians are sick of a political system that doesn't listen to them, that does not look like them and that doesn't fight for them. We've got so much work to do to restore Australia's confidence in politics in this place, and the Greens are here for it.