Helen Polley (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

President, thank you for the opportunity to make a contribution to this debate. Can I remind those listening and those on the opposition benches that those opposite were in government for almost a decade. One has to ask why they were booted out of government. The Australian people lost confidence in them. Why? Because of the rorting, the dysfunction of the government and the mismanagement. Senator Liddle asked a question today in relation to health and access to GPs, One has to remember that the former Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, had such little faith in his health minister that he actually took control of the health portfolio as well as being Prime Minister and four other ministries. That is how dysfunctional that government was.

The Australian people understand that those opposite cannot accept that a new government has come in. I think we are a very good government, but even we can't fix the mess that was left behind by those opposite after the last decade. We all know, and my home state of Tasmania knows, only too well of the crisis in health. There's a lack of access to GPs and hospitals under enormous stress. The good senator from Tasmania here understands the issues that the Royal Hobart Hospital, the Launceston General Hospital, the North West Regional Hospital in Burnie and other hospitals face with ambulance ramping. The issues facing our health system are chronic.

It's been a Labor government that has built the nation when it comes to skills. We've built the nation around Medicare and ensuring people have access to their GPs. We invest in mental health. We invest in housing. We are very aware of the homeless crisis in this country. Then we have the opposition that now wants us to rewrite history and forget about the trillion dollars of debt that they left the Australian community. We're the government that now has to manage that debt. We have to begin to start paying that down.

We've introduced a very, very modest change to superannuation. All this week we've had people come into every question time, taking note, bleating about the impact that it's going to have on people who have $3 million plus in their superannuation fund—that they're still going to get a concession but not as great a concession as the rest of the people. Let's face it, most Australians have a balance of $120,000 in their superannuation fund. So we have a trillion dollars of debt on the one hand, and the Australian taxpayer is going to have to pay for that, and there's 0.5 per cent of people who have $3 million plus in their superannuation, and that is very modest. It seems to be another attempt by those opposite, the 'no-alition', where it doesn't matter what this government puts forward, they're not going to support it. They talk about homelessness and health, but when it comes to addressing those issues, like providing a housing Future Fund so that we can assist people in getting into affordable housing, particularly when it comes to women and children, what do we get from the Liberal coalition? No! They won't support it.

So don't come into the chamber rewriting history and bleating about your concerns. When you were in government, if we look at skills and training and manufacturing, you let all those companies go offshore. The only way that you're going to provide manufacturing in this country is to support the TAFE system, which is why we've introduced 180,000 fee-free TAFE places. (Time expired)