Peta Murphy (Dunkley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

[by video link] Last Friday I was part of Frankston City Council's launch of Frankston Zero, an important initiative to combat homelessness and assist rough sleepers. In his address at the launch, the state Minister for Housing, Richard Wynne, reminded all of us that every homeless person has a name. He didn't need to explain why he gave that gentle, as is his way, but powerful reminder. It was clear that he did so because when we refer to a person by their name it is impossible to forget that they have inherent worth. It was clear that he did so because when we refer to a person by their name it's impossible to forget that they have basic human dignity and that every person in our community, no matter their circumstances, has the same rights, like the right to shelter, even if we don't have a national charter of rights and responsibilities to promote and protect them.

Richard Wynne's words have stayed with me. His message resonated perhaps more profoundly than it otherwise may have, being delivered as it was the day after I was one of a mere 20 or so people who had attended the funeral of Frankston North resident Moira Tucker. Moira wasn't someone who would usually have her name spoken in this parliament, who would usually be given the respect of having her name record in Hansard for posterity. I think I met her only once, when she came to ask me for help against an attempt to evict her from her very modest rental property, but over the last two years I received countless emails from Moira, mostly about politics and how government could do better to care for people in need but more than a few about her beloved cats. Moira didn't win any awards. As far as I know she wasn't president of any community groups or even a member of one, apart from the Seaford Library. She didn't invent anything, she didn't win an Olympic medal and she didn't do anything to get herself on TV. But Moira was kind to her neighbours. Her friend Kate describes her as having had a sharp, inquisitive mind and as loving nothing more than a good debate, and just about everyone who worked at the Seaford Library either knew her or knew of her, her prolific borrowing and her regular suggestions for new books to add to the collection.

Moira had idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. She knew she was dying, and she wanted to maintain her independence until the end. She wanted to die in her own home on her own terms, but she couldn't, because she was poor. Although my office assisted her to get approval for a stage 4 aged-care package, the broken aged-care system couldn't deliver it to her in time, so she died alone in poverty in a hospital room. How, in the prosperous, generous country that we have, do we accept that?

In the end, those of us privileged enough to serve in this parliament won't be judged by how many eloquent speeches we give or how many books we write or even how many elections we win—or at least we shouldn't be. It's by how many Moira Tuckers live a life of fulfilment and die with their dignity that we should be judged. So while it might seem at times a million miles away, it's the Moira Tuckers of my community, of our country, that I think of when I talk about designing a national budget where economic prosperity is embedded in a larger story of wellbeing. When we take the care to name the people that we are here to represent and to tell their stories, the truth of economist Simon Kusnetz's declaration, that the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income, cannot be denied. COVID-19 has illustrated starkly and painfully that it's impossible to separate the health of our people from the performance of our economy and the strength of our society. Why then don't we require the federal government through this parliament to report annually on how we as a country are fairing on these fundamental pillars of wellbeing?

I'm attracted to the quadruple-bottom-line approach of measuring national wellbeing, where specific line items could reflect a modern Australian depiction of what's required for, or what constitutes, a good society and where we can build on the pioneering work of the Bureau of Statistics, Australian Treasury's 2004 wellbeing framework and the National Sustainability Council's 2013 measures of sustainable wellbeing. But I'm open to debate and I want a conversation about what an Australian national wellbeing budget would look like. It's a debate that I'm confident Moira, were she able to, would have loved to have been part of.