Zoe McKenzie (Flinders, Liberal Party) | Hansard source

My earliest memory of Australian politics is 5 March 1983. I was 10 years old. Laura Branigan, Marvin Gaye, Kenny Rogers and Sheena Easton were in the top 10 playing on 3XY. I should've been in my room, of course, dancing around to 'Billie Jean' at the time, but it's fair to say that my affection for watching election results came to life very early. I am the only child of a single parent, and that election night in 1983 meant a great deal for my single parent and for what she could or could not do for herself and for me. My single parent, my mum, was at that time a doctor—a cardiothoracic surgeon, to be precise, a qualification that took her the better part of 20 years to acquire, with undergraduate study in medicine and science over seven years, five years of general surgical training and two years as a specialist fellow training at the Alfred, followed by two years at the Mass General in Boston and six months at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto in Canada, before she brought her skills back home to Australia and had me.

Having me, of course, was a huge risk for a woman who had just embarked on a career surrounded by men with not too much expectation of women being around, and, in particular, not forthright, bloody smart women like my mother coming into their midst. As I have explained elsewhere, in my first speech to this place, she went to extraordinary lengths to make sure I was safe and fed while she went back to work. My mum took just two weeks off when she had me, not because she was desperate to get back to work—even though my mother is the very definition of a careerist woman. She went back to work because she had to. Being self-employed, as most specialist surgeons are, she knew that no work equals no money.

So mum picked up the plumbing tools, as she would so often describe her surgical instruments, a week or so postpartum and went back to the operating theatre and the hospital wards. She would take me with her on the weekends to visit the patients on Saturdays and Sundays, and in the school holidays I would sit in her consulting suite and, in truly terrible handwriting, take patients' histories. In hindsight, I thank them for their patience, as I would interrogate their smoking and drinking habits and their next of kin and diligently write down their six-digit phone numbers.

When I got a bit older, sometimes her team would let me into the operating theatre. Fully dressed up in all the garb you need, I would stand on a small ladder and peer over the shoulders of the doctors and nurses and see their remarkable skill at work, with the human form converted into science and art. The patients would wake up an hour or so later in recovery and, like a cheery oompa-loompa, I would greet them with glee. It was my job to tell mum that they were awake so she could go in and check on how they were faring. More than once, I think, some went back to sleep, or maybe just passed out, wondering if they'd been in a dream where the doctors had all converted into midgets.

But on the night of 5 March 1983 my mum looked ashen. I couldn't understand why. 'Mum, why don't you look happy?' As the Hawke landslide rolled in, mum quietly said: 'It'll be okay. It's just going to be harder for me to send you to school now.' School was, of course, my world, my safe space, my joy, my mates, my curiosity and a fun park for a galloping brain, but it was also my parent—the parent Mum could not always be because, at least it felt this way at the time, her patients always came first. Every night after school she would spend hour after hour talking on the phone to the patients, their families, other doctors, oncologists and physicians. And words that would never normally appear in a 10-year-old's vocabulary, like adenocarcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma, small cell carcinoma, mesothelioma—I knew them all, and I knew exactly which words to listen out for to work out whether the conversation she was about to start on the phone after dinner was going to be a difficult one or an optimistic one.

You see, my mother did medicine the hard way. She charged patients who were in tough times the Medicare rebate, and sometimes not at all. She frowned on colleagues who charged the AMA rates. She watched her earnings carefully, and I realised sometime later that she did this so that she was able to send me to a good school—a great school—that did some of the parenting she could not always be available to do so that, when she couldn't be there to pick me up from school after play practice, debating or netball, which, frankly, was more often than not, someone would make sure I wasn't forgotten and got home.

Don't get me wrong—I should be fair—Liberal to the bootstraps, my mum loved Hawkey. There was something about his large, larrikin and articulate brilliance that cheered her greatly. But that night her pale face was all about what it meant for her ability to make ends meet and, specifically, it was all about Labor's approach to taxation policy. So, when I come to this place and talk about Labor's approach to taxation policy and its impact on aspiration, you know it comes from a little kid looking at her mother's face, thinking, 'Seriously? Could you work any harder?'

Australia is founded on aspiration. Sure, many were compelled to come here, but most came here willingly for a better chance for them and their families to get ahead in ways they could not in the country where they started out. It's what makes us so successful: having a go and taking a risk. I see that spirit across my electorate of Flinders every day—the small business, independent contractor and tradie heaven that Flinders is. We live well, surrounded by the sand, the hills and the sea, but people work their guts out. I see it every day.

People in Flinders still want to own a home. It's still a common aspiration. Roughly 40 per cent of my electorate own their home, 34 per cent have mortgages and about 20 per cent rent. High rates of home ownership have excellent outcomes for social cohesion and continuity when it comes to community participation. It's one of the reasons we have thriving footy clubs like the Somerville Junior Football Club. It's one of the reasons we have well-loved and much-used men's sheds, like the one I visited in Blairgowrie just before Christmas. It's why our rotary clubs are full and fantastic, as demonstrated by the Rotary Club of Mt Martha on Australia Day, and also in their generous and constant reach and assistance across the peninsula. Don't get me started on my local Probus clubs, where retired leaders across the spectrum of Australian industry share their wisdom on contemporary issues. I thank the Probus Club of Main Ridge for their recent invitation to talk about social media. But with each day the aspiration of home ownership in my electorate gets harder to realise.

On 3 February the Herald Sun published a table, based on PropTrack data, setting out what you need to earn to be able to buy a house or unit in Flinders, assuming a 20 per cent deposit, which is what you need to avoid mortgage lenders insurance, and a 6.2 per cent interest rate, even though at present some interest rates are as high as nine per cent. To buy a house in Somerville you need to earn $159,000 a year. To buy a house in Crib Point or Tyabb you need to earn $152,000 a year. To buy a house in Capel Sound you need to earn $144,000 a year. To buy a house in Hastings you need to earn $137,000 a year. These are entry-point homes in my electorate of Flinders. If you want to buy in McCrae, Mornington, Mt Martha, Safety Beach or Rye, you have to earn more than $200,000 a year. Families striving to buy or pay down a mortgage in Crib Point or Capel Sound are not 'the rich' or 'the top end', as Labor's demonisation of this demographic would have you believe. They are working their butts off making ends meet, and yet they are exactly the people Labor will tell you aren't deserving of keeping their own money in their own pocket to use as they see fit.

I am so tired of hearing about Labor's tax cuts. They're all we've heard about for two weeks. But these aren't Labor's tax cuts; they're the coalition's tax cuts with some crafty, self-serving, ideological class warfare bait and switch at the last minute, designed to win a by-election in my neighbouring electorate of Dunkley: 'Here's the sugar pill on 1 July. Ignore my broken promises, all 100 of them, to deliver the stage 3 tax cuts in full. Ignore all my broken promises on energy bills, where I told you you'd get a $275 discount. Ignore my promise back in 2018 to electrify the rail line to Baxter.' Let me read you the now Prime Minister's press release dated 31 July 2018—bless him, because it's still on his website—in which Anthony Albanese, as shadow minister for infrastructure, said:

A … Labor Government will move quickly to deliver the much-needed Frankston to Baxter Rail Upgrade, building on the significant investment the Andrews Labor Government has made in Frankston infrastructure.

Federal Labor is an advocate of the electrification and duplication of the Stony Point Line to Baxter to improve train services for commuters across Dunkley and on the Mornington Peninsula.

In 2016, Federal Labor committed funding for a business case to ensure the project could proceed as soon as possible upon the election of a Federal Labor Government.

Hmm.

Currently thousands of Dunkley and Peninsula residents drive and park at Frankston, Kananook or Seaford stations because the Metro line service ends at Frankston.

A Federal Labor Government will electrify and duplicate the track to Baxter, giving commuters better access to high quality public transport and park-and-ride options.

It sounds great, but the Prime Minister cancelled funding for this project—all $225 million that the coalition had provided for it back in budgets past—after his 90-day review, which then became a 200-day review, and he snatched $300 million out of infrastructure from the Mornington Peninsula to pad highways somewhere around the current infrastructure minister's electorate of Ballarat.

A couple of weeks ago, I joined the Leader of the Opposition, Peter Dutton, together with our sensational candidate for the by-election in Dunkley, Nathan Conroy, to announce a future coalition government would provide up to $900 million to electrify the rail line and reduce parking congestion around Frankston. It will also provide study and work opportunities for my residents in Baxter and, in time, further down the Stony Point line. Here we are fixing yet another broken Albanese government promise, like the hundred promises he made before to keep the stage 3 tax cuts in full.

Today on the front page of the Australian we read that Labor's deception will hit the middle ground, not the super-rich or the top end as the Prime Minister would like you to think the tradies, subbies, landscapers and small-business families in my electorate are. Patrick Commins and Geoff Chambers write on the front page of the Australian today:

Sparkies, paramedics, police officers and accountants will be long-term losers under Labor's stage three tax changes, as a major credit rating agency says Anthony Albanese's revamped tax cuts will likely be more inflationary than Scott Morrison's original plan.

Under Labor's tax changes, electricians, school principals, cops, train drivers and others will pay more tax under the proposed legislation in a decade, analysis by The Australian has revealed.

Bigger tax cuts for middle-income earners promoted by the Prime Minister and Jim Chalmers are projected to erode over time as bracket creep captures more Australians under a higher 37c tax rate. In 10 years, Australians earning the equivalent of more than $104,000 today will be worse off under Labor's redistribution of the tax relief.

Oh, dear. The truth comes out again.

Labor deceived the Australian people when it went to the election in May 2022 with a suite of what can only be called Liberal-lite propositions. As we have seen over the last year, can you trust Labor on energy policy? You cannot. As we have seen over the last few months, can you trust Labor on defence, national security or community safety? No, you cannot. As we will see with this bill today, can you trust them on taxation policy? No, you cannot.

Add to that the avalanche of industrial relations and employment changes designed to stifle innovation, risk-taking, growth and productivity in the small- and medium-business sector. In this place, the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, Tony 'Bring Back the Beeper' Burke, is single-handedly, although encouraged and abetted by his union masters, strangling the lifeblood of Australia's small-business sector, crushing ambition and the great Australian courage in having a go and creating an opportunity for others.

The opposition will not oppose this bill. After all, without the opposition and its nine-year term of careful management of the Australian economy, there would be no tax cuts today. I can't remember the last time Labor delivered tax cuts. I do vaguely remember Prime Minister Paul Keating reassuring the Australian people before the 1993 election that the tax cuts he promised weren't just a promise; they were the law—l-a-w law. But then, in what appears to be a crafty but now customary switcheroo for the Australian Labor Party, Keating went off to the National Press Club after the election and told everyone that he'd had another think and that it couldn't be done anymore. Does that sound familiar? The Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, equally said he had a mandate for this change to the legislated tax cuts programmed by the coalition. And how did he get the renewed mandate? He went down to the National Press Club. Well, blow me down. If you can just fundamentally break a contract with the Australian people by going to the Press Club, why didn't anyone tell us? Last time we decided to change taxation policy, we gave the electorate the chance to throw us out both at the 1998 election, at which the proposed GST introduction and the choice the Australian public had were made clear to them, and then immediately afterwards at the 2001 election. That is transparency, that is accountability, and in that the Australian Labor Party has a lot to learn.

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