Peter Khalil (Wills, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Defence) Share this | Hansard source

I recently had the pleasure of meeting with my local chapter of Grandmothers for Refugees, a community group in my electorate. The Grandmothers for Refugees were established in 2014. They're a group that advocates for fair treatment of refugees and for their visas. They're a wonderful group of women who are committed, who are passionate, who care, who advocate and who do the hard work. I share a lot of their passion, and I have throughout my parliamentary career and my work around refugee rights and for asylum seekers as well.

That's why it was so great to welcome the Albanese government's commitment to a $160 million package of reforms to restore integrity to Australia's refugee protection system, providing a fair go to asylum seekers and helping break the business model of people who seek to exploit the system. That included a $54 million investment in establishing real-time priority processing of protection visa applications. That's a historic investment. That means most new protection applications are now decided almost eight times faster than those under the previous government. That means individuals and families, if owed protection, can move to permanent protection visas sooner, which, obviously, comes with access to essential services like Medicare, Centrelink and the NDIS as well.

I've spoken over many years about the need for Australia to have a fair and a compassionate migration system. My electorate of Wills thrives due to the migration policies of many governments of the past, especially Labor governments. Our electorate is very diverse. It's multicultural, and 62 per cent of residents have at least one parent born overseas. I will continue to fight for a fair, humane refugee policy that reflects the values of our diverse and our generous community, like the Grandmothers for Refugees.

Also in my electorate, I have the incredible honour of representing the national Outstanding Community Pharmacist of the year for 2025. Her name is Sara Murdock. She's based at Pharmacy 777 in Pascoe Vale in the heart of my electorate. Sara is an amazing pharmacist. She's been recognised for her dedication to patient centred care, innovations in community health and a commitment to improving public health outcomes. I recently visited Sara for a health screening. She made sure I was fighting fit for my role in parliament. I'm not sure how well she did, but that's on me, I think.

Thanks to the Albanese government, from the beginning of next year, pharmacies will now dispense all PBS scripts for just $25, the same price as 2004. Sara was very happy about that, and many of her clients and customers were so happy about that. This is all part of our commitment to ease the cost-of-living pressures and strengthen Medicare. That's what we're doing—we're freezing the cost of the PBS medicines so people have greater access to the medicines they need when they need them, because no-one should be left behind when it comes to their health.

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