Susan McDonald (Queensland, National Party, Shadow Minister for Resources) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Everyone who works in this place has sacrificed something to come here for the extraordinary privilege of representing our communities and, in the case of the Senate, our state. But this has been a particularly tough week to do that. On Monday, we received word that the life of a Queenslander had been lost due to inflexible government regulation of aviation, forcing remote Torres Strait Islander communities into boats on the open sea rather than into commuter aircraft. We have been reflecting on issues that I believe should never have come into the Senate chamber, and, for the people involved, they would have been much better served by the police and appropriate authorities than from being politicised in here.

So, to the millions of Australians who are really hurting at the moment, who are struggling with rent costs, interest increases and insurance costs; to the small business operators who are wondering how much longer they can keep their doors open and their employees in jobs because of spiralling electricity costs, transport and freight costs and wages increases on top of another superannuation increase; to the small-business employee who is watching the stress on the boss's face and who wants more hours but is dreading the introduction of another Labor public holiday that will mean that they won't get work on that day—to all those people—I say: we hear you. We are trying to get the government to focus on you, and I want to recommit to you and your family our daily effort to make your lives easier, to get inflation under control, to reduce the bills you pay and to keep your children safer. To every Queenslander who says to me, 'I don't know how you do the politics': we do it for you—to fight to improve your life—because we know you can't afford another energy price increase, more adversarial IR, higher rents and more expensive child care. So we are here working for you.