Rowan Holzberger (Forde, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My first adjournment speech in my first last sitting week of the year is giving me a chance to reflect on what I've learnt over the last six months. I have tried to employ a very simple philosophy in the electorate that I am privileged to represent, and that is to listen, to fight for what I hear and to deliver for our community. To that end, we've been doorknocking most weekends of the year. Our team have been out there, knocking on doors. I've been organising house visits. We've been holding community barbecues. The sorts of issues I'm hearing are that people are still doing it really tough. It's been a crisis, in many ways, as our housing minister says, 40 years in the making—not just in housing, but in energy, training and so many areas. I think that this government is beginning to turn it around. I think that we are really beginning to deliver.

With Medicare, I've never seen, in all of the time that I've been a participant or an observer of politics, one single policy have such a massive impact as that policy to provide incentives to everybody for a GP to bulk-bill. That has meant that, in the electorate of Forde, we went, overnight, from nine bulk-billing clinics to 20—more than doubling the number of clinics. That number has gone up to 21, and that number is only going to continue to rise. I've never seen a policy so successful.

I believe that housing is my No. 1 priority in Forde. That is where people are really doing it the toughest, and this has been a failure of policies, as our housing minister says, over 40 years in the making. A complete lack of federal government investment in public housing like we used to has created the problem that we have today. Our post-war economic miracle was very much based on cheap public housing and cheap public energy, and, over the last 40 years, the federal government really has left the field and left people to struggle with what we have now. But we are delivering, and I am delivering in Forde, some very practical policies—policies like the five per cent deposit; policies like the Housing Australia Future Fund, which has already built almost as many houses in Forde in one year as the coalition built in 10 years; policies like they Help to Buy scheme; policies like getting behind the building 100,000 houses just for first home buyers; policies like getting behind National Cabinet's objective of 1.2 million homes to take that pressure off. They are the sorts of policies that this government is delivering in communities like mine.

Cost of living is, without doubt, something that housing is a part of and that health care is a part of—not just housing and health care. Cost of living—I can see the member for Hume shaking his head at me and my speech tonight. Member for Hume, I'm shaking my head at the policy that you took to the last election—a policy to bring taxes up on Australian people. When that happened, member for Hume, that's when I thought I had a chance of winning Forde, by the way. That was the very day I thought, 'Hang on, they can't seriously be going to repeal the tax cuts?' When you did, that's when I thought, 'I've got a chance here.' It's not just tax cuts; it's energy rebates and it's cutting down HECS by 20 per cent. When we cut, we're about cutting the cost of living for people. It's things like the real wages growth. I think we've had eight consecutive quarters of real wages growth. That replaced your five consecutive quarters of cutting real wages.

Ultimately, the world that I grew up in, in the nineties, was a much different world to the one we have today. The home town I came from, Broken Hill, when I went back there in the nineties, had an unemployment rate of over 20 per cent—Depression-level unemployment. Today, it's different. We've got work. We've got employers screaming out for workers. But, again, a failed system of training has meant that Labor is now playing catch up. That's why things like free TAFE are helping both people get the skills that they need to have a good life and employers employ the workers that they have. There's a lot to do. I'm listening to workers and fighting for workers and people in our community, and this government is delivering. (Time expired)