Rob Mitchell (McEwen, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

No, it's a matter for this government. You should read your own bills. What this is about is that this government is happy for people to buy five or six houses and claim the first home owner grant. The people sitting over here, the multimillionaires, don't care about the people trying to buy their first home. This is the difference between us and them: we care about people; they care about themselves. The reality is that the scheme is failing many young Australians and locking them out of the housing market, and those opposite can smirk, but it doesn't help people get into their first homes.

Let's have a look at childcare, another huge issue facing McEwen families. The Liberal government have been dragged kicking and screaming into childcare reform due to immense pressure and hard work from the member for Kingston. After this government ignored the calls of Australian women and families, business leaders and economists in the early learning sector for years, the government tried to address child care. What did they do? They failed. They failed the majority of Australian families. We can see that in their own plan, with this cynical attempt to avoid the PR crisis that is all the government is about—protecting themselves, spinning away from the issues that they have faced. Regardless of all the hype and the media spin, the government's plan for child care fails to benefit the majority of Australian families.

Whereas our plan, Labor's plan, would benefit around one million Australian families, the government's plan will benefit about 250,000, supporting only a small amount of families with more than one child requiring child care. And we have seen the issue raised, where, if you've got twins, you only get one lot of child care. That's just absolutely stupid. What we see is benefits getting ripped quickly away from people. In contrast, our childcare plan benefits 86 per cent of all of Australian families.

Just yesterday, I received an email from a woman in my electorate, named Doreen, who has two children under the age of four. She pays $3,000 a month in child care. After eight long, dark years of this government, this is something that is getting not better; in fact, it's getting worse. It's like having a second mortgage. Like many families, Doreen's family hoped that, when the government made an announcement, it would help them. But, as we find with everything this government does, it's a show bag. It's all pretty on the outside, but, as soon as you open it up, you find out you have paid a high price for absolute rubbish. Thousands of families across Australia in our electorates are in the same position; they need relief now, but they get nothing from this government.

An issue that is very close to my heart is veteran suicide. We welcomed the Morrison government's backflip on 19 April about the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide. It was about time. Labor had been calling for this since 2019, and the government failed. Only a week before, the minister said, 'It's not going to happen.' Veterans and their families have been failed by this government. Since the beginning of the war in Afghanistan, we have lost more veterans to suicide than soldiers killed in combat. That is a blight on our society. The royal commission is a once-in-a-hundred-years opportunity to fix this, to identify the problems and the solutions, to listen to the ideas of veterans, defence personnel and other Australians, and to implement changes that will save lives. We need to get this right.

Contrary to what the government is proposing, Labor believes it is critical the royal commission has the power to make findings of civil or criminal wrongdoing and be able to refer those to the proper authorities. We believe the royal commission should be able to hold public and private hearings, as many veterans and their families want to talk in a public platform to tell their story. This should not be a political fix. It needs to be a royal commission for veterans by veterans. We can only hope the government will put politics aside this time and engage with everyone to ensure the royal commission delivers enforceable recommendations that will prevent tragic deaths from happening in the future.

Australians deserve a government that is on their side, that cares about them more than it cares about a photo-op. Australia needs a government that understands the experience of working families, supports local jobs, stands up for fair pay and conditions, supports cheaper child care and focuses on pensioners. The Morrison government is more focused on its political image than on what's best for Australia. It designs policies based on what it thinks sounds best, not what ensures we get the best outcome. This is a Liberal-National government that really doesn't know what to do, except leave people behind. Instead of coming up with a plan to get Australians back to work, to support real wage growth, to fight wage theft and to address underemployment, the Morrison government proposes a budget that will leave many generations of Australians paying off a debt.

The Morrison government, instead of confronting the failures of its vaccine rollout, has left behind rural communities, aged-care facilities and disabled people, as well as leaving many Australians behind the rest of the world in the vaccination rollout. You can't have the economy grow and fix our business issues until you fix the health crisis. But the government has washed its hands of the health crisis. Every promise it has made, it has broken. Every marker it has put through—remember last year when we were told that 40,000 Australians stranded overseas would be back by Christmas? How many are still overseas? You won't get an answer out of the minister. You certainly won't get an answer out of the Prime Minister! The answer is this: every one of those Australians left overseas was stranded by a government whose first duty should be to its citizens, not a photo opportunity.

Even when this government does take notice of the issues facing real Australians, it's only there for the photo op and not the follow-up. The Morrison government is leaving Australians behind, and Australians deserve a government that is on their side right now, but they're not getting it. The question we will have in years to come is, what was the point of the Morrison government? What did it leave us, apart from debt and deficit? Nothing. A lot of empty promises, lots and lots of media releases for photo ops, but still nothing—except for failure after failure after failure for eight long years. Australia deserves better. Australians deserve a government that is on their side. An Albanese Labor government will be that government.

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