Louise Miller-Frost (Boothby, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

[Kaurna language] Ninna Marni. Ngai nari Louise Miller-Frost. Ngai kartinya ngarri. Ninna marni ngadlu Kaurna yerta. Ngadluku Ngunnawal and Ngambri yerta, ngadlu tampinthi, parnku yerta, ngadlu Ngunnawal and Ngambri yartangka tampinthi. What I just said was: 'Hello. My name is Louise Miller-Frost. I am the first-born female in my family. I come from Kaurna land, and I acknowledge that I am on the land of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people. I respect their land and acknowledge that they are the traditional owners of the land.' This is the language of the Kaurna people, the First Nations people of the Adelaide Plains, the place where I am privileged to live and work and that I represent here in Canberra.

As I speak these words into Hansard, I reflect on the history of the Kaurna language. The lands of the Kaurna people are the Adelaide Plains, and they extend to the north of Adelaide, around Crystal Brook, and to the south, at Cape Jervis. When European settlers came to South Australia and founded Adelaide, the Kaurna people were pushed off the fertile plains. They were sent to missions on the lands of the Ngarrindjeri people near the Coorong and the Narungga people of the Yorke Peninsula, and their culture was suppressed. The language was lost and completely died out. It was only through the work of school principal Aunty Alitya Wallara Rigney and linguist Dr Rob Amery in the 1980s, who researched through written records and letters written home by German missionaries, that the language was rediscovered and rebuilt. I reflect on practices that eliminated something as important as culture and language, and the impact that colonisation had and still has on First Nations people. But I also reflect on the importance of written records, without which we would not know the Kaurna language today. I reassure Hansard that I will be providing them with the text of the words.

It's my very great honour to represent the people of Boothby in South Australia. I was first elected in 2022, the first Labor member for Boothby in 73 years, and now I am very honoured to have been returned by the people of Boothby in 2025. It's wonderful to be back here in Canberra with my colleagues. We have a larger majority in the House and two additional senators. Every single member of the Labor class of 2022 has been returned, and, with the exception of those retiring at the last election, every single one of my colleagues has been returned. The former member for Higgins, Michelle Ananda-Rajah, whose seat was eliminated in a redistribution, is back as a senator for Victoria. Moving in the other direction, former senator Anne Urquhart stepped down as a senator for Tasmania and has successfully won a seat in the House of Representatives. We welcome her as the member for Braddon.

South Australia was a very exciting place on election night. We had birthday cake at the Boothby election party for Charlotte Walker, who turned 21 on election night and, shortly thereafter, discovered, as third on the Labor ticket, that she had been elected as the youngest-ever senator. Senator Walker is a great addition to the Labor caucus, building on an important aspect that the Prime Minister often comments on. We are a caucus that reflects modern Australia: diverse in gender, cultural origin, career paths and age. Every voice is important.

I also welcome my friend Claire Clutterham as the new member for Sturt. The Sturt electorate voted for Claire, returning the electorate to Labor for the first time since 1972 and with a female representative for the first time ever. It still shocks me that we have to say 'the first female' so often and in so many spheres of life. The people of Adelaide have put their trust in Labor, and we will work every day to ensure they know that their trust and their vote was well placed.

I'd like to put on record my thanks to the many volunteers who supported me in the Boothby campaign—doorknocking, phone calling, supporting me at events, letterboxing and of course prepoll. Day and night, in good weather and bad, they came out day after day after day because they knew it mattered. They knew that only a Labor government would look after our community and our economy, that only a Labor government will do the necessary work of energy transition that is vital for mitigating climate change.

The catastrophic algal bloom that is currently ravaging the coastline in my electorate as well as much of metropolitan and regional South Australia coastlines is not an early sign of climate change; it's a late sign—maybe a too-late sign. The algal bloom is twice the size of the ACT and up to 20 metres deep in places. For years—decades—we've been warned about the impact of climate change on our oceans, rising ocean temperatures, changed ocean currents, failing ecosystems and catastrophic die-offs of marine life, and now we are seeing it in the fish, the rays, the dolphins and sharks, the grasses, the sponges and the shellfish being washed up on our shores, dead.

Climate change should no longer be a debate. Net zero by 2050 is the bare minimum, and the idea that it is still being debated and that there still might be political points to be made by casting doubt, working against it or delaying it, as we saw with environmental legislation in the last parliament, in this place and the other, is shocking. We are elected here to do what is right for our country and for Australians, not to score political points at their expense. A liveable climate is the bare minimum.

Only a Labor government will do the necessary work of energy transition that is vital to mitigating climate change. In the last term of government, 80 large-scale renewable projects were approved, and another 130 were in the process of approval. This is really important work. We need to decarbonise if we are going to have any possibility of maintaining a liveable environment. We are already decades behind where we should be. We cannot have further delays. And we invite those opposite and those in the other place to join us on this most critical fight and to do what is right for our environment, for our country and for our planet.

Only a Labor government will protect the rights of workers and ensure that everyone gets to share in the prosperity of our country—a fair day's pay for a fair day's work. We passed a number of really important pieces of legislation in the 47th Parliament: closing the loopholes that meant some got paid less for doing the same job; increasing paid parental leave; enabling multi-employer enterprise bargaining; and backing increases in the minimum wage in some of the low-paid sectors, such as child care and aged care. Only a Labor government sees gender equity as something worth fighting for. We should all be entitled to an equal playing field—equal pay for equal work, equal opportunities in work, in sport, in our life choices and in politics.

But gender gaps don't close by accident. The same conditions that generated a gap aren't going to magically produce a different result because you wish it. As with everything in life, gender gaps close only when there are deliberate accountable strategies that are designed to close them. I'm pleased to be part of a Labor caucus that: is 56 per cent female; has overseen a record closing of the gender pay gap in Australian society; introduced additional paid parental leave, including a 'use it or lose it' clause so that both parents take leave and that encourages shared responsibility for parenting; applied superannuation to paid parental leave; and reintroduced the women's budget so that every budget measure has a gender lens placed on it.

Only a Labor government will continue to heal our relationship with our overseas trading partners and our neighbours in the Pacific—so important for our security and prosperity. In the last term, we saw a normalisation of relations with China, and I know, in my home state of South Australia, winemakers are particularly pleased with the resumption of trade—and I imagine Chinese consumers are pleased to see our top-quality reds back on their shelves.

Only a Labor government will protect Medicare and the NDIS. Only a Labor government—

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