Alice Jordan-Baird (Gorton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in support of the Regulatory Reform Omnibus Bill 2025, brought forward by the Treasurer, and I commend him for doing so. It's great to follow the words of my friend the member for Chifley as well. The Albanese government was re-elected earlier this year on a promise, a promise that we would keep fighting to make government work for Australians, not the other way around. This bill is another important step towards delivering on that promise. In August, the Treasurer chaired the Albanese government's Economic Reform Roundtable, with three days around the cabinet table with representatives and experts from the union movement, businesses and the community sector. This followed more than 40 mini roundtables led by ministers across a range of portfolios. After all these conversations, there was a clear point of agreement. What we heard, time and time again, was that our economy needs better regulation, our government services need streamlining and compliance costs need to go down. This bill is a result of a massive body of work, but the positive change it will create across the country will be so much greater.

In our first term the Albanese government fought inflation and reformed the budget, and in our second term we are focused on making our economy more dynamic, resilient and productive. We've worked together with the Australian people to deliver two surpluses after nine years of deficits. We've got real wages growing again after a decade of deliberate wage suppression and wage stagnation. Living standards are recovering after falling sharply under those opposite. On this side of the House, we take responsibility to work through the challenges that have arisen in our economy, whether those challenges are inflation, business investment or strengthening budget sustainability, and that is exactly what we're doing here today.

The bill before us now would make government work better for Australians in a few different ways. Firstly, the bill supports Services Australia moving towards a 'tell us once' approach for how it delivers services. This will reduce the number of times Australians have to provide the same information to government agencies such as Centrelink to access basic services. Centrelink does incredibly important work for Australians. That's evident every day in my electorate of Gorton, from the young families getting that little bit extra they need from the family tax benefit to workers affected by redundancy who are supported by JobSeeker to find work again, to older Australians accessing all-important health care with their seniors healthcare card.

My electorate is home to some of the most dedicated, responsive and genuinely caring Services Australia staff I've ever come across. The team at our local service centre—the Watergardens Service Centre—are there every day supporting our constituents, and we couldn't be more appreciative of the work they do. I had the pleasure of visiting the Watergardens Service Centre and meeting the staff in person recently. While I was there I heard about all they do to make the system work for the people they support, from having an ATO officer in-house to bridge the gap between Services Australia and the ATO, to arranging in-person language support for members of our CALD community in the Western Suburbs.

But there are serious limitations as well. Constituents who contact my electorate office are often fatigued by interacting with multiple agencies and communicating the same information again and again. Oftentimes it's stressful situations and unexpected life events that create a need people for to communicate new information to government services—financial hardship, housing challenges, family breakdowns. Not long ago, a constituent living in Truganina brought in a document detailing the more than 20 interactions with Centrelink and other government services she'd had while trying to get the support she needed after her redundancy. This shouldn't be happening. In times like these, having to communicate new information multiple times to multiple different agencies compounds the stress that constituents are already feeling, creating frustration and disillusionment. This frustration puts more pressure back onto our government agencies like the team at the Watergardens Service Centre, and makes their work of trying to support constituents and get them the assistance they need all the more challenging. That's why this legislation is so important; it lightens the load on everyone, from staff in our service centres and government departments to everyday Australians navigating these agencies and systems.

This bill amends several acts to expand the situations where information can be shared between government agencies. Ultimately, these reforms will mean that someone applying to receive their Medicare rebates and Centrelink payments won't have to hand over the same personal details repeatedly. They will need to advise Services Australia once—just once—and it will be sorted, improving the experience of government services and agencies for all Australians and lightening the load on everyone. Further to this point, the bill before us will make our medical system work better for Australians.

On this side of the House we've put access to medical care at the top of our agenda. We've given Medicare the biggest boost since it was created, and opened more than 90 urgent care clinics, including two accessible to my constituents in Gorton. Getting in and seeing a doctor is one part of the picture, but sometimes medical care needs to go beyond that. We're making primary medical care more accessible for constituents, but the steps after that first doctor's appointment need to work for Australians as well. We've heard Australians when they told us that under the existing legislation there sometimes just isn't the time to get scans and imaging done—work gets busy, family needs you, life gets in the way. We get that making time for that appointment isn't always that easy. That's why we're doubling the amount of time that patients have access to imaging services when they get a referral. This means families will have additional time to make appointments for scans or medical imaging before they expire, and, when there just isn't time to get that scan or imaging done, they won't have to start the whole process all over again. This makes the system work for Australians and helps to reduce the demand on GPs so everyone can get into a doctor when they need to.

Third, this bill will further reduce the regulatory burden on Australians and on industry by working to make processes simple, intuitive and up to date, as they should be. One type of regulation that will become much easier to navigate under this bill is legislated document requirements. Right now, Australians still need to submit hard-copy documents to prove details about themselves or their identity in a number of different situations—for example, when they get married, as I did last year. That means getting out your passport and texting Mum frantically to ask what happened to the hard copy of your birth certificate. We know that this system is out of date, and we need to keep up with a world that's gone digital. That's why this bill would modernise some of the processes to allow secure digital options to be used where they're suitable.

With this bill, we'll also continue to increase productivity and government efficiency from several different angles. This bill will make sure NBN mapping is publicly available online so that Australians will have better information about their NBN rollout and can have greater visibility of when the NBN will be coming to their community. It will grant fuel companies greater flexibility to respond to fuel supply disruptions, which will allow greater knowledge for communities when they're filling up at the petrol station. It will increase information sharing between healthcare providers, to make sure that Australians receive the highest-quality care. This means that, if you see one doctor in Deer Park and then change to see a different doctor in Caroline Springs, your health data will be shared between clinics, meaning your GP will have better historic healthcare data when you're in the assessment room, providing a more accurate diagnosis and overall better health care. It will improve the regulation of Medicare to clamp down on fraudulent claims so fewer people will be taking advantage of our system through deceptive conduct.

It's a multitude of measures which will benefit a multitude of government processes. It's an all-encompassing bill including 60 measures. It amends 28 acts and repeals two redundant acts. Through all of this, it will deliver real improvement to the operations of 13 federal government agencies. These are all commonsense changes that will make a genuine difference in people's lives, including the lives of people in my community in Melbourne's western suburbs. The changes streamline government processes so people spend less time filling out superfluous paperwork and spend more quality time with their families instead.

While the opposition has been divided and distracted since the opening of the 48th Parliament, we have been getting on with the job, and we know how important our job is. For almost a decade, the now opposition ran a government that was incapable of delivering the services that Australians expected and deserved. Across Centrelink, Medicare and the NDIS, the previous government's time in office was defined by delays and inefficiencies. Across Centrelink, Medicare and the NDIS, for nine long years, backlogs grew and Australians suffered. People in Melbourne's western suburbs suffered.

Government agencies weren't just failing Australians; they were actively harming them too. The appalling robodebt scandal should not be forgotten. It will never be forgotten, and it should never be repeated. Robodebt was designed to raise revenue by clawing back debt from people who never owed that money, preying on some of our most vulnerable Australians. The impacts of this tragic coalition government failure are still being felt in communities across Australia, including my community in the western suburbs.

When the Albanese government came into office in 2022, we took on the job of rebuilding the capability and capacity of our government agencies following nine long years of cuts and neglect. We added 3,000 staff to Services Australia. This reduced backlogs and improved service access for people across Australia, including in my community. We also directed Services Australia to release quarterly performance data to increase transparency. Where the coalition neglected, we built. We established the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme to rebuild public trust and make sure that what happened is never allowed to happen again; we rebuilt the Australian Public Service, which had been hollowed out by an overreliance on consultants and contractors; and we're reforming the NDIS, a scheme that the coalition didn't want to see succeed and made cuts to every step of the way. We made integrity and delivery the central priorities of government agencies, and the Australians who rely on these services are now better off under Labor's reforms. But we didn't just reform the way these agencies deliver support; we also increased the level of support they provide.

Last week, I attended a citizenship ceremony in the city of Melton, where we welcomed 400 constituents from my home in Melbourne's west into our broader Australian community as new Australian citizens. At the ceremony, I read out a statement on behalf of the Minister for Home Affairs, Tony Burke. In this statement, the minister reminded our community that, when you make a citizenship pledge, you take on the privilege that it is to be an Australian citizen. I want to echo that sentiment right now because it is truly a privilege to live a life in Australia. The privilege is in the safety nets we have access to when life doesn't go according to plan: access to health services like Medicare and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme; access to cheaper child care and the parenting payment for families juggling it all; access to the indexation of pensions to inflation to make things fair; access to the carers payment, because caring for loved ones takes a toll; and access to the JobSeeker payment to keep Australians afloat during life's most unpredictable periods.

While I repeated the minister's words to our new Australians—that, as citizens, we take on these immense privileges—I knew it was us, the government representing our communities, who take on a responsibility in return, because it is our government agencies who are responsible for delivering the social safety net that we as Australians hold so dear. Let me be clear. These safety nets are the product of the Australian Labor Party. It's no secret that the coalition has opposed the creation of social safety nets at every turn. Robodebt happened under their watch. Meanwhile, Australia's healthcare system exists because of the Labor Party. Our social safety nets exist because of the Labor Party. We built Medicare from the ground up, and, today, we're delivering the biggest ever investment in Medicare in its history to bring back bulk-billing.

The Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, cheaper child care, the carers payment, the parenting payment, the indexation of pensions to inflation, the JobSeeker payment—these are all services that were introduced by Labor, and they exist in their current forms today because we are here to protect them. That's the difference between our side of the chamber and theirs. Labor builds social safety nets. Liberals oppose them and cut them. This bill is just one part of that. As long as there's a Labor government, Australians can trust that those valuable safety nets will be not only protected but strengthened. We as Labor know what it means to advocate for Australians, to maintain the privileges we experience as Australians for the next generation and to build a stronger, fairer Australia for all. I commend this bill to the House.

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