The PRESIDENT (09:31): I remind senators that the question may be put on any proposal at the request of any senator.

Senator CICCONE (Victoria—Deputy Government Whip in the Senate) (12:14): Tuesday of last week was National Forestry Day. As most people would know, forestry is an industry that I am not just very passionate about but that is very close to my heart, as are the communities that this industry supports right across Australia, particularly around the many regional communities in my home state of Victoria.

It is a great time to be talking about forestry, in the context of the Albanese Labor governments plan to tackle climate change and of the Jobs and Skills Summit from last week. I had the pleasure of returning to Australian Sustainable Hardwoods—or ASH, as it is commonly known—in Gippsland last month, accompanied by the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, Senator Watt, and the local federal member for Gippsland, Darren Chester. ASH is Australia's leading manufacture of timber products, and I have visited their impressive facility several times now. It was great to return with my good friend Senator Watt, as part of the government, and, of course, with Nationals MP Darren Chester.

Labor took a bold vision to the election. We have set ourselves the task of building a better future by bringing the country together. We know we need to invest in skills and to create good jobs, the very kind of jobs where you can support not just yourself but also your family and your community. ASH is a model employer. It sets an example for the kinds of businesses that we want to encourage in our economy and in regional communities. The company employs apprentices. It trains people right on the site and provides clear career pathways. All the managers at ASH have started on the shopfloor. They invest back into their business to create more opportunities: more opportunities for their workers and more opportunities for the local community. We heard about the growing number of women in their workforce, thanks to investments made in advanced manufacturing processes. It was great to meet with a number of the workers, particularly Kerry, one of the delegates on site and a long-standing employee of ASH.

They also have a very strong working relationship with the union—for the record, the CFMMEU. Their manufacturing division works very constructively with management, the workers and other members of the community. They work together to professionally address any issues on site, and both make an important effort to advance the forestry industry. They know that protecting and growing the industry is in the interests of the workers and of the business. ASH also supports the local community by providing funding for projects undertaken by groups like the local sporting clubs.

These practices of education, investment, cooperation and community engagement are exactly the kinds of practices that we were discussing just last week at the Jobs and Skills Summit. These are the principles that the Albanese government believes must underpin our economy. It is great to see this spirit of cooperation at individual businesses like ASH and, at a macro level, at the Jobs and Skills Summit. This is what it will take to tackle the big challenges that we are facing as a country, including addressing: labour shortages, wage stagnation, the rising cost of living and, of course, climate change.

Speaking of climate change, no discussion about our forestry industry would be complete without talking about the significant contribution it makes to reducing our carbon footprint. Tree plantations in Victoria store around 8.4 million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year, and this timber can be used instead of less sustainable products to manufacture products and buildings. Timber really is an ultimate renewable source. That's what makes it even more infuriating when supposedly environmentally minded activists attack this industry. Antiforestry propaganda damages our ability to take meaningful action on climate change. Last year in this chamber I spoke about a paper that was published by the Centre of Policy Studies at Victoria University entitled Zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050: What it means for the Australian economy, industries and regions. The paper showed that, in taking action to pursue net zero, our forestry industry would almost double in size. This clearly demonstrates that forestry is key to our low-emissions future. So not only are antiforestry activists disrupting the lives of our timber workers and hurting an industry that supports regional communities; they are making it more difficult for us to reach our climate goals. When Minister Watt, Darren Chester and I were being shown around ASH in Heyfield, we were looking at the kind of business that Australia's future must be built on: a business providing good jobs, training and career pathways; a business that works collaboratively with the union movement; and also a business that, through its activities, is playing an important role in tackling climate change.

ASH is not only the only forestry related business that I've had the pleasure of visiting recently. I also spent some time at the Sorbent Paper Company mill in Box Hill, down the road from my electorate office. Sorbent has a really sophisticated operation, and it was great to get an understanding of how we produce a very sophisticated product, Australian toilet paper, our facial tissues and hand towels, which I'm sure all Australians were in desperate need of during the last couple of years because of the pandemic. I don't think any of us in this place ever expected toilet paper to be such an important subject of public debate, but panic buying brought on by the pandemic ensured that toilet paper was all over the front pages and social media. It just shows us how important it is to have a very secure and sustainable supply chain in this country.

I enjoyed hearing from the Sorbent team about how they managed supply through this period, to keep a steady flow of stock to supermarkets and other retailers, and how they are continuing to innovate and produce Australian-made products. I want to thank Denise Campbell Burns, the National President of the CFMEU Manufacturing Division, for setting up this visit to the Sorbent facility. It was fantastic to meet many of the members and workers who were there, and who have kept this mill going for many, many years. Some of these workers have been there for decades actually, producing goods that Australians use every single day.

I think sometimes these sorts of jobs get lost in discussions about work, whether that's in parliaments, the media or academia. We sometimes think of these long-term, secure jobs as things of the past, but these are job that we should all aim to build for the future. There's no reason that well-paid, secure jobs with long-term career pathways have to be a thing of the past. ASH and Sorbent are already showing us that these jobs can and should exist in a modern Australia, good businesses and strong unions working together to create secure jobs.

I'm proud to be part of an Albanese Labor government that is committed to making sure that more of the jobs created in Australia look like these jobs. We'll achieve this by resisting the politics of division. There are some that do want to pit businesses and unions against each other: big business against small business, workers against unions. But this is not the approach of this Labor government. Our approach was on display last week at the Jobs and Skills Summit. We have big challenges and big opportunities ahead of us to meet these challenges and seize on these opportunities so that we can all work together—governments, business, unions, civil society. And I'm encouraged by the spirit of cooperation that we have already seen around the country, whether it's at businesses like ASH or Sorbent, at the 100 local jobs and skills summits held by the government right across Australia or, indeed, at the main event last week. I want to thank again Minister Watt, for visiting Gippsland; Darren Chester, for showing us around his great electorate; as well as the CFMEU Manufacturing Division and the Sorbent Paper Company for organising that visit in Box Hill some weeks ago.

Senator McGRATH (Queensland) (12:24): It is important that today I use this time to reflect on my home state of Queensland, and in particular praise the Brisbane City Council for their significant contribution to Brisbane over the last decade. In particular, I want to recognise their great work over the last three years under the leadership of Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner. While there are over 500 local government bodies across Australia, the Brisbane City Council is Australia's largest council, serving a population of over 1.2 million people. It goes without saying that the successful administration of this grassroots local government does not come without its challenges, especially with a constituency of this size. As such, much praise is due for team Schrinner's work in putting the Brisbane City Council on the map and furthering Brisbane's reputation as Australia's most liveable city.

Taking a moment to reflect upon the financial stresses and pressures facing ratepayers and small businesses during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I will say that the Brisbane City Council's commitment to its constituents during this time was both firm and unfaltering. Rates were frozen for council residents and CBD businesses, providing much-needed support where it was due. Fast-forward to when the International Olympic Committee selected Brisbane as the host city of the 2032 Olympic Games. The Brisbane City Council got to work immediately, engaging all levels of government to ensure the timely and successful delivery of the world's largest sporting event—an event that a former Lord Mayor of Brisbane, Graham Quirk, had the foresight and the vision to argue for, for many years, saying it was Brisbane's time to hold the Olympic Games.

We have city-shaping projects like the Brisbane Metro, green bridges and the transformation of Victoria Park, which are underway thanks to the forward thinking of team Schrinner in recognising these as important infrastructure assets in readying Brisbane for the games as well as for the future. In particular, the council's commitment to city-shaping transport infrastructure is really shown in the delivery of the new Brisbane Metro. The Brisbane City Council is providing the 'turn up and go' metro that Brisbane residents need in order to get home sooner and safer. Gone are the days of inefficient and unreliable public transport, with great progress being made to link the city to the suburbs and the suburbs to the suburbs. Team Schrinner must be commended for its functional execution of fully electric, high-capacity metros that are ensuring that Brisbane remains the most liveable city in Australia.

Not only that, but the Brisbane City Council is also actively growing a greener Brisbane. More than 13,000 trees have been planted along the residential footpaths as part of the Greener Suburbs project, while bringing people together through community planting initiatives. Meanwhile, the council has also managed over 9½ thousand hectares of natural conservation areas while facilitating nature based activities and the protection of our biodiversity. A cleaner, greener Brisbane is a key priority for team Schrinner.

However, it cannot be forgotten that all this has been delivered despite the devastating flooding which affected Brisbane residents particularly hard earlier this year. The sheer volume of rain experienced had a devastating impact across the city. It affected more than 20,000 properties and almost 200 community and sports clubs across 177 suburbs, grounding CityCats and ferries and damaging roads, parks, paths and bikeways. The outstanding work of team Schrinner both during and after the floods is commendable. Under team Schrinner's direction, the council single-handedly provided more than $4½ million in rates relief for affected residents and more than $1.5 million in financial relief for community organisations. This was alongside the cleaning of 170 kilometres worth of bikeways and the filling in of more than 70,000 potholes.

We've seen Councillor James Mackay's satellite landfill imitative to streamline the waste-clearing process and Councillor Sarah Hutton's recharge station initiatives for residents without power, as well as Ryan Murphy's transport reforms. These are all fantastic examples of Brisbane City Council's getting creative to deliver for their constituents and demonstrate the initiative and the vision that team Schrinner offers Brisbane residents. It is clear that the Brisbane City Council has made an impressive commitment to build back better and protect the lifestyle of all Brisbane residents.

At all levels of government, especially local government, residents want and expect their elected representatives to deliver the basic services they need to make their life easier. But while team Schrinner keeps delivering for Brisbane, there remains one obvious handbrake on progress in Brisbane, and that, of course, is the Queensland Labor government and that shiny, shimmering red-carpet-hugging premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, from cancelling cabinet meetings—and this is true—so she can sail with her boyfriend and billionaires and celebrities on a glitzy yacht off Hamilton Island, to integrity and health crises. Remember when goons from the premier's office raided the private office of the integrity commissioner and stole the laptop and had it wiped? We all wonder what was on the laptop, don't we? What photos were on that laptop, Premier Palaszczuk? Queenslanders have clearly had enough of Palaszczuk and the rotten Labor Party in our state.

Unfortunately for Queenslanders, Annastacia Palaszczuk is more concerned with how things look than how things are, which says a lot about why she has hired the entire press gallery in Queensland to avoid media scrutiny.

Senator Scarr: How many?

Senator McGRATH: Senator Scarr, I'll answer your question. She now has a media team the size of which no premier or prime minister in Australia has ever had before. She has, across government, over 250 full-time minions, 250 taxpayer funded staff, who are all about the image of the Premier and her ministers.

Senator Hughes: Keeping unemployment low in Queensland!

Senator McGRATH: Yes, we've got low, low unemployment in Queensland, thanks to the government employing everybody in the Premier's office. In her own private media team, she has more than any particular newsroom in Queensland. She's very good at hiring ex-journos, she's very good at making sure her image is out there, but she's not very good at delivering for Queenslanders.

If you look across Queensland, there are a lot of problems in Queensland. Queenslanders have to wait over seven hours over the recommended time at emergency wards. That's seven hours over the recommended time. People are dying in ambulances outside of hospitals because the ambulances are being ramped and people are dying in the ambulances. This is what's happening in Queensland today. This is not some Third World country where they don't have operating hospitals; this is Queensland.

Senator Hughes: Queensland hospitals are for Queenslanders.

Senator McGRATH: That's right. Remember, this is the Premier who sat at the height of COVID that Queensland hospitals were for Queenslanders, not that hospitals are actually for sick people, playing this petty partisan politics. Now 40 per cent of ambulances are ramped, but the Premier has hundreds of press officers. Babies are being born on the sides of highways because regional maternity wards are being closed. The AMA recommends at least an extra 1,500 hospital beds just to meet demand.

Premier Palaszczuk and her failed dunce of a health minister galivant about the state, cutting health spending in real terms and rubbing shoulders with anyone but our hardworking frontline workers. Their priorities are cooked. Their vision for Queensland is cooked. Their service for sick people in Queensland is completely cooked, because it's Queenslanders who are paying the price of this arrogant, out-of-touch Premier who would prefer to spend her time on glitzy yachts or at the Logies. She is the Premier for first nights; she is not the Premier for overnight in hospital, because she doesn't want to see the sick state that Queensland is in because of her mismanagement.

There are 55,000 people in Queensland waiting for elective surgery. That has doubled—increased by more than 25,000—since she came to power. It gets worse: they've got a waiting list for a waiting list. There are 230,000 people are on the waiting list to get on the waiting list. Welcome to Queensland! Perfect one day, sick the next day under this malignant, poisonous Labor government who want to just play politics and not get on and ensure that Queenslanders have the health system that they deserve. I will give a teaser: I will come back tomorrow and talk about what some of those other cabinet ministers are doing in Queensland. Guess what? It's not good.

Senator McKIM (Tasmania—Australian Greens Whip) (12:34): Takayna/Tarkine, in the north-west of my home state of lutruwita truwana Tasmania, is stolen land. It was never ceded by Aboriginal people, and it still belongs to them. It is also one of the most beautiful places in the world. It's a place of peaceful rivers, of rugged mountains, of majestic forests. It's a place of the most striking rocky coastlines and sweeping beaches that are pounded by the westerly and south-westerly swells that sweep in from the Southern Ocean. It's also home to some of the cleanest air in the world, which travels three-quarters of the way around our globe before it strikes those coastlines. It's globally recognised for its link to the ancient supercontinent of Gondwanaland, and the forests in takayna/Tarkine are an incredibly important carbon sink. It contains a massive tract of Gondwanan cool temperate rainforest. Those forests, mountains, coastlines and rivers of takayna/Tarkine are worthy of protection, and they're not worthy of the exploitation they are facing at the moment. What we should be doing is listing takayna/Tarkine as part of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage area, we should be making it a national park and we should be returning it to the people under whose stewardship it existed for many tens of thousands of years, the takayna people.

In that area there is a company, MMG, a Chinese state-owned mining giant. MMG has a plan to destroy nearly 300 hectares of this precious place—of that precious, carbon-rich, threatened species rich rainforest—in order to build a toxic tailings dam at their mine site near Rosebery. They've made an application to do this under the EPBC Act, and the decision now as we sit here today rests with the relatively new Minister for the Environment and Water, Ms Plibersek. This minister is now the seventh consecutive environment minister to ignore the Australian Heritage Council's findings that takayna/Tarkine holds outstanding heritage values and has a high probability of meeting the criteria for World Heritage listing and the Australian Heritage Council's recommendation that the area be listed on our country's National Heritage List. That's what the minister should be doing: listing this beautiful place on the National Heritage List, as recommended by the Australian Heritage Council and nominating it for inclusion in the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area. But instead the minister is now considering MMG's application for a toxic tailings dam. It's important that folks understand that MMG has an alternative solution for its tailings, and that is what the company should be pursuing.

In recent times thanks to a massive citizen science project, the Bob Brown Foundation took many hundreds of recordings of masked owls, a listed endangered species, on the very site of the proposed tailings dam, and those recordings included breeding calls and chattering calls, which indicate that juvenile owls live in that forest. It's not just the masked owl, a magnificent and striking predator bird, an endemic species to Tasmania, that is going to have its home destroyed by this proposed tailings dam; we've got the spotted-tail quoll, the wedge-tailed eagle and the Tasmanian devil all resident in this area.

Successive governments and successive ministers have failed in their duty to protect takayna/Tarkine and failed in their duty to nominate that area for inclusion in the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area, despite the International Union for the Conservation of Nature having twice requested that the nomination be brought forward. So to Minister Plibersek, I say: do the right thing. Protect takayna / Tarkine on behalf of the people of Tasmania, the people of Australia and the people of the globe. Do it for people alive now and for people who are not yet born, and do it as soon as you possibly can. As part of that, please reject this application from MMG for a toxic tailings dam. That is an unacceptable imposition on one of the most beautiful, important carbon-rich places in the world.

It is not a coincidence that, as the fight to protect nature and climate gets ever more desperate, governments around this country are doing more and more to protect big corporations from ordinary people who are fighting back, and that includes not only folks involved with the Bob Brown Foundation down in my home state of Tasmania but it also includes people all around this country who are fighting to defend nature, who are fighting for real climate action by putting their bodies on the line. Good on them and more power to them for doing it. We have seen in Tasmania and in other states governments smashing freedom of speech and freedom of action, and passing Draconian antiprotest laws. It is a pattern we are seeing repeated around the country, and it is being done because they are trying to arrest their way out of that citizen rebellion, which is growing by the day in this country. They will soon find that they haven't got jails big enough for us all. That is what they will find.

On the one side, you have the big corporations run by psychopathic CEOs and senior managers who are determined to strip as much profit as they can out of this late-stage disaster capitalist system that we are living under, while burning the planet just as quickly as they can. Then they have their agents, those psychopaths in this place—politicians from the major parties—who come in here and do their bidding. That is on one side. On the other side are the real climate wars I'm talking about, not Mr Albanese's confected kind of wars. On the other side are those brave, heroic people who are standing up against those massive corporations, putting their bodies on the line to defend nature, to defend our climate and to call for real climate action and real action to protect biodiversity.

We know which side of the fight we are on. I invite other folks in this chamber to think about which side of the fight they find themselves on. Some of us are prepared to stand up and to take the fight directly to those psychopathic operations and to their agents in this place, those people who are purchased by those massive corporate donations, the institutionalised bribes that flow so rapidly and at such size around this building. At the behest of their big, polluting corporate donors, Liberal and Labor governments are trying to arrest people and put them in prison when the only thing they have done is try to stand up for a liveable planet and stand up for a sustainable future for their children and grandchildren.

Silencing people will not work. No amount of antidemocratic, Draconian legislation is going to protect big corporations from the consequences of their actions. The people of Australia want nature protected. They want real climate action, not the facade being offered by this government, and they want a safe, inhabitable climate for them and their children.

Senator SHELDON (New South Wales) (12:44): One of the major criticisms of the Morrison government was that they never took responsibility for their mistakes. They went to great lengths to never admit when they were wrong. This new Labor government is committed to being accountable. In that spirit I want to acknowledge that our bargaining system, which both parties have contributed towards, does not work. The single-enterprise-centric bargaining system introduced by Labor in the 1990s is no longer fit for purpose. To end the right of workers to pursue multiple-employer agreements was a mistake. That system laid the groundwork for subsequent coalition governments to launch a full-scale assault on the rights of workers to collectively bargain. It opened the door for the Howard government's WorkChoices legislation and some of the most extreme antiworker legislation ever introduced into the developed world.

Labor sought to repair the damage done by WorkChoices through the Fair Work Act in the late 2000s. The Fair Work Act included a provision for multi-employer bargaining in low-paid industries, but that provision has failed. It has failed to create a real multi-employer bargaining option for low-paid industries, and, worse still, the act has loopholes that employers have been exploiting to drive wages down. The nine years of the Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison governments were the worst period for wages in Australia's history. It was a lost decade for the Australian middle class. We've had almost an entire decade where wages and the standard of living of the Australian middle class have gone backwards. This government was elected on a mandate to ensure that Australian workers do not go any further backwards. We were elected on a mandate to ensure that we get real wages growing again. But, to be blunt, real wages will not grow if we do not fix our industrial relations system. It's that simple.

We've seen the productivity growth, we've seen massive profit growth, but none of that is getting through to workers. Fundamentally, that means Australian workers do not have enough power to bargain for their fair share. If you don't have power to bargain, all you have left is the Oliver Twist approach, favoured by the last government, where workers have to come on their hands and knees to their employer and say, 'Please, Sir, can I have some more?' And even where good employers want to give their workers a fair go, they are inevitably undercut by dodgy employers who want to squeeze every last penny out of their workforce. So, how do we put real power back in the hands of Australian workers?

Firstly, we need to undo the mistakes of the last few decades and cut the red tape preventing multi-employer bargaining. We need multi-employer bargaining for industries where low pay is entrenched as part of doing business. I'm talking about industries such as child care, where today thousands of workers are taking strike action to fight for a fair go. I'm talking about industries like aged care, where nine in 10 workers are hired on insecure, part-time or casual contracts. Unless workers in these industries can bargain collectively, they do not have the power to get paid fair value for their essential work. Ray Collins, an aged-care organiser at the Health Workers Union, told the job security inquiry last year:

The business model to operate when you're using a casualised workforce is to keep everybody hungry, lean and green.

Ray told us how aged-care employers hire their entire workforces on part-time contracts, where each worker is only guaranteed a few hours a week. They might work a 30-hour week, but they're only guaranteed three hours, so, if anyone complains about not having PPE or not having enough time to properly care for residents, the employer can take almost all their hours away and throw them into poverty. If someone doesn't agree to take on a shift with one hour's notice, they lose their hours. Aged-care workers are put in a position where they are constantly on call, where they can't take leave, where they can't speak up about any problems because, at the drop of a hat, their employer can take all of their hours away.

Sherree Clarke, an aged-care nurse, told the job security inquiry:

When my mother went through cancer, I couldn't tell her that I would support her to appointments, because, if you're not available to pick up a shift, they don't offer you a shift the next time.

And Sherree can't do anything about this because they do not have a real voice or real bargaining power. It's not only happening in the care industries that have been underpaid and undervalued for years. Even in jobs that used to be well paid and strongly unionised, the lack of worker voice is driving a race to the bottom—look at aviation. Getting a job at Qantas used to mean a lifelong career. It used to be that, were you a pilot, a flight attendant or a ground handler at Qantas, you were the cream of the crop. You could raise a family. You were highly trained and highly experienced. You took pride in your work because you were the best of the best, and you were paid a rate of pay that reflected that.

That was the spirit of Australia, but not anymore. Our industrial relations system has failed Qantas workers, as it has failed many Australians. It has failed to give them a proper voice and proper power. Alan Joyce has steamrolled them all and led the way for so many more. Qantas has a set up shell companies to hire workers on lower pay and conditions than direct Qantas employees, and Mr Joyce gradually moved the entire workforce into these shell companies or, worse still, he moved them to external labour hire firms. He illegally outsourced nearly 2,000 people, and the Federal Court said that he did not have to rehire them because he would probably sack them again anyway.

On Four Corners on Monday night we saw brave current and former Qantas employees speak out about this. Matthew Allsop was a flight attendant at Qantas for 16 years, and I will quote Matthew, who said:

I was with the Qantas group of companies just shy of 16 years … I managed to work for wholly owned subsidiaries or labour hire firms … but never actually worked for Qantas Airways.

…   …   …

… each time to slowly erode the high value of pay and conditions that once existed in the legacy part of the airline.

…   …   …

… on any given day, you would have crew employed under four different contracts. So we had our wholly-owned New Zealand-based subsidiary, the UK-based subsidiary, and then you had your two Australian subsidiaries.

Alan Joyce can do this because Qantas workers do not have real bargaining power. If you have workers on one plane being hired by five different companies but they can't even bargain together, they have no power.

It's the same story in the mining industry. BHP have dusted off the Alan Joyce playbook and set up their own shell company as well. They call it BHP Operation Services. BHP told the job security inquiry that only 29 per cent of workers on their mine sites are actually employed by BHP. The rest are employed by their shell company or by external labour hire firms, and they are paid an average of 24 per cent less for doing the exact, same job. That is a 24 per cent pay cut for these workers, because they do not have real bargaining power. They can't bargain directly with BHP, because BHP is not technically their employer. If you want to face the wages disaster of the last decade, we need to fix bargaining, because Qantas, BHP and so many others are making a mockery of our industrial relations system.

Again, only today, if you look at the ABS statistics that have just come through, you will see the effect that those sorts of figures have on so many Australians and the disconnect with what is a fair return for labour. Real unit labour costs have dropped for four successive quarters as a result of the previous government, while the labour share of income has fallen to a new record low and the profit share has hit a new high, according to ABS national accounts data released today. It's companies like Qantas and BHP that have gamed the system over the last decade. There is an opportunity for us to change that system so that there is a fair share for all and all Australians in the Australian middle class can get their fair share of the Australian pie.

Senator VAN (Victoria) (12:53): The situation in Ukraine affects us all. Russia's unjust and illegal invasion has upended Europe and the globe through food shortages, fuel shortages and inflation. The knock-on effects are reverberating around the world, yet only a handful of countries are assisting. Many are not, and some are not even condemning this heinous breach of international law. As a major exporter of critical food supplies such as wheat, barley, corn and sunflower oil, we will likely see an increasingly volatile and unstable world as food shortages increase. This will affect our security more directly, as many of our closest neighbours are heavily reliant on Ukrainian wheat, and they will be impacted by not only the high prices but also the lack of supply. One only has to look at Sri Lanka to see the effect that poor economic conditions and food shortages have had on that nation's stability.

As some will be aware, I recently travelled to Ukraine, not just to Kyiv for a photo-op but into the theatre of operations in Donbas, to see where the Australian-built and donated Bushmasters are being used by the Ukrainian troops. I was able to gain an immense amount of first-hand knowledge by being there, speaking to the people and seeing the war unfold before my eyes. That is why it is an absolute travesty that this government has not reopened our embassy in Ukraine. Some of you will know that our embassy in Ukraine shares a building with the Canadian embassy. It was truly a sad sight, on my morning jog the first morning I was in Kyiv, to see the Canadian flag flying above that building but not an Australian one. Many, if not most, other countries have returned their embassies to Kyiv, and I call on this government to send our wonderful ambassador, Bruce Edwards, back from Warsaw to Kyiv, along with the defence attache and a large defence contingent. Why? Because there is a lot to learn from this war, and, in this increasingly complex strategic environment in which we find ourselves, we should be doing everything possible to learn as much as possible about how this war is being fought.

In fact, that is why many embassies in Ukraine have sent in a somewhat large defence contingent, located in country: not only so they can support Ukraine to the best of their ability but also so they can learn as much as possible and incorporate that knowledge into future fighting plans. One of the major lessons I learned from my time in the Donbas theatre of operations was the importance of combined arms fighting and how this is shaping the battlefield. Despite what many analysts are saying, combined arms is working incredibly effectively in that area. This just goes to show the importance of having people in country, learning firsthand from the events on the ground. One of the things I learnt is that the Ukrainians are using our Bushmasters more like an infantry fighting vehicle than a protected mobility vehicle, which is what they were built for. But they are proving effective in battle and saving lives, even though this is something they were not made for. Yet, in the meantime, this government is sitting on its hands and not making any decision on the LAND 400 Phase 3B project, a project that would put our troops in much safer vehicles than the current Bushmaster or Boxer.

Let us not forget that if Russia stops fighting then the war will end, but if Ukraine stops fighting, because of a lack of support, Ukraine ends as a country. However, Ukraine needs firepower to end this war. This means Australia and other countries, particularly European countries, in whose part of the world this war is being fought, must provide more weapons to Ukraine. From Australia, this should include more Bushmasters—at least 60 more than have already been committed—to arm another brigade. I met with the commanding officer of the 80th Brigade, the air assault troops that are using them to plug the lines when the Russians try to break the battle lines. But, as Ukraine's ambassador suggested this week, we should be sending Hawkeis, another protected mobility vehicle. We should be sending M777 howitzers and the 155-mm ammunition that's fired from them, as well as high-technology weapons such as the DefendTex drones that we've sent in there, and the DroneShield air defence system—all made in Australia.

Other countries should be sending air defence materiel as well, including fighter jets and guided missiles, as well as more armour, especially tanks, like the German Leopard tanks, of which there are thousands sitting idle, as well as IFVs and more artillery. Yes, helmets are helpful, but they won't help Ukraine win this war.

We must also reassess whom we look to in the future to complete defence deals with. The war in Ukraine has highlighted how many countries in Europe have been unwilling in meaningful ways to help one of their closest neighbours in this fight. If we are to shore up our own security, we cannot be relying on those who won't protect their neighbours, let alone a country on the other side of the globe.

As Ukraine comes into winter we must also start looking at providing them with more humanitarian aid. The word that everyone is using over there right now is winterisation. How do they protect their people who have been damaged by the war, their homes destroyed by Russian missiles and rockets, during the cold of a Ukraine winter? Ukrainian winters get down to minus 10 quite often, and the fear is that more people will die of cold than from Russian bullets and missiles. With temperatures like that, provisions such as materials for housing repairs—which we don't need to ship; we could pay for—or replacement shelter like flat pack housing, warm clothes that they've lost when their houses have been blown up and energy such as more coal and gas shipments are desperately needed in the coming winter.

The Ukrainian people are warm, generous, resilient people and are dedicated to defeating the army of Putin's murderous regime. Virtually everyone I met there, from cab drivers to baristas to hotel workers, were all saying to me how much they were looking forward to joining the fight when they are called up, and all of them were disappointed that they hadn't been called up by that point in time. I think Australians share many if not all of the traits and values of the Ukrainian people, so I call on this government to learn what it can from this war, feed that into the upcoming defence review so it's not just another talkfest and start arming our defence forces with everything they need to defeat an autocratic, aggressive force. I wrote for the Lowy Institute before the invasion:

Of course, if Europe does not stand up to Russia in Ukraine, a clear message will be delivered to China on the question of strategic ambiguity over Taiwan. It will signal that the West does not have the strength—or the will—to defend smaller liberal democracies and that, if you push hard enough, the West will capitulate.

I think that point is arguable more now than it was then. This is not something that we can allow to happen here in our region, and we should be doing more and more to assist the Ukrainians to defeat the Russian army, push them back over the borders and restore the rules-based order.

Senator STEELE-JOHN (Western Australia) (13:03): Housing is not a commodity or an investment; it is in fact a human right. Every Australian deserves to have the security of a safe place to sleep and to live without the worry of eviction. No-one should have to deal with the anxiety of whether their landlord will take the opportunity to raise the rent this week or whether this will be the week that their landlord decides that they want to renovate and in so doing evict them. Australians are facing an unprecedented housing crisis right now. Homes are more unaffordable than they have ever been, and inflation is driving up the cost of living and has made mortgages unsustainable. If you are a renter, it is even worse. My office and I have heard story after story of people being priced out of their rental homes due to the greed of landlords trying to exploit what they see as a quick profit.

If you are a victim of this exploitative behaviour, a new rental can be almost impossible to find. In my hometown of Perth, the vacancy rate on rental properties is just one per cent. Those numbers, if you can imagine it, get even worse in regional towns like Bunbury, Albany and Broome. This has empowered landlords and rental agencies to increase rent by literally hundreds of dollars. With 50 people or more attending open homes every week, rental bidding is all too commonplace. The devastating impact of this unsustainable and exploitative market has been dire. People have been forced to sleep in their cars, on friends' couches or on the street just to get by.

This is a catastrophic situation. The worst of it is that it is avoidable. As members of this place, it is our collective responsibility to regulate the market, and the only good market is one that works for all Australians. That is why the Australian Greens are calling for an immediate freeze on rents and rent increases. It is not even unprecedented to take this approach, to freeze rent increases. It is something in fact that the Scottish government agreed to do just recently. In their most recent budget update, they have executed a complete freeze on rent increases and evictions until 2023. The Australian government has even done it. During World War II, rents indeed were frozen. It's time for the government to side with workers, with people and with renters and immediately freeze rent increases.

As part of the broader and urgently needed affordable, accessible and inclusive housing agenda, we as a community and the federal and state governments have a fantastic opportunity before us. There is a little known process going on right now by which Australia is recreating its National Construction Code. As part of that review process, the states and territories have been given the opportunity to embrace new sustainable housing construction code guidelines and new accessible and inclusive construction guidelines, particularly for residential properties—houses, rentals et cetera.

I am really pleased and proud to say that it's the Greens here in the ACT that champion inclusive design standards at the national level. So far, the majority of states and territories have bought into that system and have agreed that from 12 months time every home constructed will be accessible for disabled people—that is, every state except two: one is my state of Western Australia; the other is New South Wales. The Greens will continue to push until WA comes onboard with inclusive design standards.

Senator DODSON (Western Australia) (13:08): This week I was moved by the first speeches of our new colleagues. A senator's first speech is a unique insight into their character. But when you listen to several, as I have this week, it is impossible not to realise that they hold a common thread across the political divide. They reflect a shared desire that our time in this chamber will leave a country in a better place. Despite the cynical public view sometimes, most of us occupy our places here because we want to do good. We want to contribute to the difficult but rewarding work of nation-building. We want to shape a fairer, more just and freer society. We want to look back, when our time comes to be done with this place, and tell our children, our grandchildren and their grandchildren that we were a part of putting things right.

Those of us in this 47th Parliament will be asked to make a choice on one such issue of nation-building—whether or not to support a referendum on a Voice to Parliament. As envisaged in the Uluru Statement from the Heart, the Voice to Parliament is a modest and generous invitation to the nation. Out of the torment of our powerlessness, it weaves a simple and hopeful suggestion for a way forward. It proposes a First Nations representative body to advise the parliament on the laws and policies that will impact upon their lives, and it proposes that this body, the Voice, be enshrined in the Constitution to ensure it has a place of recognition, responsibility and contribution into the future. Importantly, the Voice is not the work of the Labor government or any other political party. It is the culmination of decades of advocacy by First Nations people and their leaders. There is a clear line from the advocacy of early leaders such as William Cooper, the 1938 Day of Mourning, the 1963 Yirrkala bark petitions and the 1988 Barunga Statement to the regional dialogue processes that birthed the Uluru Statement from the Heart. The process brought together over 1,200 First Nations delegates in 12 regional dialogues across the country. The final convention at Uluru resulted in a historic consensus around the proposal for a Voice. It was the largest consensus of First Nations' people on a proposal for recognition in Australian history. It is about recognition in the Constitution and it is also about practical outcomes.

There is a long history, and we know it, of failed government programs, broken promises and waste. Everyone knows that. A Voice means that First Nations people, the people who know what works, will advise the parliament in a focused and consistent manner about laws that impact their lives. It is about shaping better policies and strategies that make a practical difference. It is about getting it right for the first time. It is about giving a constant voice to the people who don't have one. It is not the end of the road. It is not the only thing we need to do. But it is the next significant nation-building step in our journey towards reconciliation.

In my own first speech I made a commitment to work with my fellow senators to build a better country—a stronger, just and inclusive Australia. As I hear the new colleagues across the chamber express similar sentiments I feel hopeful that, together, we can play our part in responding positively to the generous invitation of the First Nations people contained in the Uluru Statement from the Heart, for a Voice.

Senator HUGHES (New South Wales) (13:13): Yesterday I made a two-minute speech with regard to the trip to Israel that I took under AIJAC, the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, and some of the disturbing things we learnt when visiting Ramallah and meeting with the Palestinian Prime Minister.

I began to touch upon some appalling behaviour that has apparently been endorsed by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the ABC. Fouad Abu Gosh has worked for the ABC since 2004 and in fact, even more appallingly, won a Walkley award in 2016 for his reporting from Syria—but we know what the status of the Walkley awards are in this current day and age. He has now deleted his Twitter account. It is important to note that, prior to deleting this account, just a week or so, Abu Gosh's an official title on his Twitter account read: 'Middle East producer for Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Opinions are mine and ABC's.' I think the ABC potentially has some questions to answer, because last year, Abu Gosh warned that 'there is a great Zionist project to dominate and control all Arabs in the region'. That sounds very anti-Israel to me. Is that the view of the ABC? But it gets worse. Surprisingly, it gets worse.

In April this year, there were further posts in response to a screenshot of an Israeli policeman detaining an unidentified civilian. I was lucky enough to be in Israel just last week. Those of us who have experienced Israel, who understand where the borders are and what is occurring within the different areas—particularly around Jerusalem, Bethlehem, the different parts of Temple Mount, all of the old city of Jerusalem and the very holy lands—know that what is portrayed in the media is not necessarily what is actually going on. Never let the facts get in the way of a good story, particularly in the ABC!

In response to that photo—and apparently this is the view of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation—Abu Ghosh tweeted:

This is how the Nazis treated the Jews, maybe it's time for....!!!!

To me, that is up there with one of the most appalling things you could possibly say. But this is the view of the Israeli correspondent in the Middle East, who, on his Twitter account—until it was recently deleted—determined that these were not only his views but the views of the ABC. David Anderson, Ita Buttrose and the rest of the ABC deserve to give every Australian who pays for this organisation an explanation. They deserve to let all Australians who fund them—not only Jewish Australians, not only our friends in Israel—know if these are their views. It seems to me that they are going out of their way to ensure that they alienate huge sections of the community and contribute to the misinformation that is consistently being peddled.

I will touch on another issue very briefly, and I'm sure I will come back to this. One of the things that we heard whilst in meetings in Israel is this new piece of propaganda that somehow Israel is a state of apartheid. This emanates from an antiracism conference in Durban which was deliberately put there in coordination with a group of Arab states and the Palestine Liberation Army. The PLO and Arab states put together an antiracism conference in Durban, and somehow they compare Israel—Israel is the most inclusive state, as those who have ever been there know.

One of the people we met with, who is absolutely amazing, is an Arab citizen of Israel. He's been a journalist there for over 38 years, and he said that he was incredibly grateful to live in Israel. I would have thought that, if you're an Arab Israeli and this is really a state of apartheid, that's probably not where you'd want to be. As I said, I'm going to come back to this. Amnesty International has used a definition of apartheid that has never been signed by a Western nation—it was actually only developed by the USSR—to claim that Israel is an apartheid state. Amnesty International is discredited. It is disgraceful, and the ABC owes us an explanation.

Senator TYRRELL (Tasmania—Jacqui Lambie Network Whip) (13:18): The Tamar is in a shocking state. Launceston should be living on a river of gold; instead, it's a river full of mud and poo. It's sad to say it but it's true. I hate to imagine the stuff that's floating around in that water. I cringe at the idea of going for a swim. Those signs that say 'no fishing' and 'no swimming' are on the money. You wouldn't dip a toe in there most days.

This is what we're doing to Tassie's clean, green image. The Tamar is brown. It's brown for all the wrong reasons. The grass creates big, dirty mudflats that destroy breeding grounds for our birds and wildlife. You can hardly get a kayak out there because the mudflats are impossible to bring a boat over. I have no idea where I'll take my lab, Charlie, for a dip. If he ever jumps in the river he'll look like a completely different dog.

These problems are way worse than can be fixed with another task force talkfest like federal Labor is saying, and we need to do better than a bit of extra dredging like the Tassie government is doing. Dredging might tidy things up for a little while, but the locals know that the silt and mud come back in the blink of an eye.

Together, Liberal and Labor's so-called 10-year plan is to clean up five or six hectares of wetlands, when we've lost 100. We still have no idea when they're even going to get started. This thing has been going on for yonks, and we're still tinkering around the edges. Why don't you get it, you guys? Doing little bits and pieces is never going to work. It'll never get you anywhere. You're changing the spark plugs while your engine is broken. These kinds of problems don't get solved by going around the edges. It's time for action to hit the bullseye.

That's why I reckon we should look at a barrage—gates that open when the tide goes out and close when the tide comes in. It flushes the water and pollution out to the ocean and stops it flowing back. We'd have a freshwater lake where the polluted river is now. Trust me, barrages create beautiful waterways. The Tamar's muddy low tides would be a thing of the past. Think Adelaide, Canberra and Singapore, with clean and pretty waterways that people want to be around. We'd also get flood control. We could empty the lake down to Bass Strait and close the gates to stop the tides going upriver to Launceston and inundating the place. Yes, a barrage costs money, but it makes money, too. For a start, we could sell the fresh water to irrigators and hydrogen energy operators, rather than building a ridiculous 50-kilometre pipeline to Lake Trevallyn. Even better, we'd bring in more tourist dollars. All the fresh water would kill off all the bloody rice grass and give us lakeside beaches so that Launnie tourism would get a boost. I bet all those little caravan parks and hotels would love to catch a break after the few years they've had.

It's a big idea, but that's what we need. The river's been stuffed for years. Will Hodgman set up a task force in 2017 and promised that things would get better. Peter Gutwein put money aside for more dredging before the last state election—money that still hasn't been spent. Now the federal Labor Party are chipping us over a few bucks to tidy up things here and there. It's all too slow, too little, too timid. As usual, the politicians talk and talk while the rest of us are left up the creek without a paddle.

Senator GREEN (Queensland) (13:21): I am very pleased to finally have the opportunity to rise in this place and talk about the Jobs and Skills Summit that was held in parliament last week. I'm particularly keen to talk about not only the events that were held and the discussions that took place in Canberra but also the work that was done in the lead-up to the summit, which I think goes to the power of the summit itself. As we know, many members of the government held round tables in the lead-up to the summit. By setting a date and telling the rest of the country that we would put everyone in a room and tell them that we wanted solutions on the table, we found that people started to come together—people from all walks of life, people who do not necessarily agree with each other all the time, people who might have different views about what we need to do to fix some of the challenges. But holding the summit itself led to outcomes before the summit even began, and after the summit we saw 36 concrete, meaningful outcomes that came from the agreements before and during those discussions.

For my part, in the lead-up to the summit, I was determined to make sure that the unique views of people in regional Queensland were heard and were part of the discussions. I live in Cairns. I am based in Far North Queensland. There are many different diverse communities all across regional Queensland. I wanted the opportunity to hear from just a few of those communities in the lead-up to the summit. So, over one week before the summit was held I held three regional round tables in regional Queensland, across three different electorates. And I have to say, they were very well attended, and I really appreciated the effort and enthusiasm that people brought to these opportunities. From Mareeba in the Atherton Tablelands to Townsville and to Cairns, I heard from diverse, passionate Queenslanders who are working hard for their communities. Everybody who came to the summit understood that we weren't going to be able to solve every problem there and then. But they were there with ideas and with a contribution, with an understanding that their feedback would be taken into the summit itself.

It was very good to see that a number of regional Queenslanders were present at the summit. We know that there were mayors. Mayor Ann Baker from Moranbah was there. Professor Allan Dale, who is based in Far North Queensland but chaired one of our roundtables in Cairns, had the opportunity to attend the summit in Canberra. So there were people in the room from regional Australia, but I definitely wanted to make sure that these views were held and were delivered to the Treasurer and the task force secretary. In many of the same ways that many of my Senate colleagues and MPs in the other place did, I joined in listening to communities in the lead up to this opportunity to make sure that these voices were heard.

What we heard was resoundingly clear. From Meribah all the way through to Townsville and Cairns, we heard that there have been 10 long years of wages going backwards and not keeping up with the cost of living. Queenslanders understand that our challenge does not end with just getting people into work. We also have an opportunity to make sure that workers are treated with respect and paid for a fair day's wage.

Everyone at the summit recognised that our industrial relations system is desperately in need of an update, and that is coming from businesses and workers alike. Workers and businesses told me that workplace laws were too complicated, and I was pleased to see agreement between business and union groups over the summit itself, demonstrating a commitment to work together in Australia's national interest. While we still need to work through what the details of these plans will look like, there is definitely consensus—not only through the government but with businesses, with industry, with unions, with employers and with workers on the frontline—that we need to have a look at our workplace laws to make sure they are fit and proper for the future.

In particular, in regional Queensland, our tourism and agricultural industries indicated that the skilled labour shortage has disrupted migration settings, meaning that they experience concerning labour shortages. Just as difficult as it has been to attract workers to regional Queensland, it is equally hard to retain them in the current conditions. Vital community infrastructure like housing, health and internet are central to keeping regional towns afloat. We are hearing all too often that, without community infrastructure and services, workers see no incentive in making a regional place their home. So we need to make sure that if we are encouraging workers to come to regional Queensland they will certainly have the infrastructure and services needed to make sure they want to live there and raise their families there as well.

I think Minister Gallagher summed it up perfectly when she said that 'women nailed it' at the summit. So did women across regional Queensland. I'm very proud that at my roundtables in regional Queensland we had a lot of women around the table, and they were telling me that the cost of childcare and parental leave issues are causing them to make the decision to leave the workforce or work fewer hours than they would like to. When we are in desperate need of workers to revive and grow our economy, we must look at ways to clear every obstacle that women face in entering and staying in decent work.

Finally, a more detailed summary of the North and Far North Queensland contribution to the Jobs and Skills Summit was delivered to the Treasurer and the task force secretary. I was very pleased to have the opportunity to meet with the Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, to talk with him directly about these issues. He is certainly no stranger to regional Queensland, but it was important to make sure that the original issues that we were talking about weren't lost on the national scale.

I am proud to be a member of a government that seeks to find common ground and invites cooperation so that we can reap the benefits of reform. It is very clear that the Jobs and Skills Summit was a success. I can understand those opposite wanting to talk down the success of the Jobs and Skills Summit because, unfortunately, they failed to turn up. They failed to understand that this was not a moment for politics, but a moment for our country—a moment to deal with a lot of the issues that we are facing, come together, put aside differences and build a consensus on how we can move forward. Whether it is the cost of living, whether it is skills shortages, whether it is getting women back into work after childbirth, it is important that everyone around the table shares the same concern to make sure that these issues are dealt with by a reforming government—a government that cares about people, a government that is focused on delivering jobs in places like regional Queensland, and a government that is crystal clear that it will always put the national interest ahead of political interest. That is what was on display at the Jobs and Skills Summit, and I couldn't have been prouder to be a part of a Labor government on those days.

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT ( Senator O'Neill ): We shall now proceed to two-minute statements.

Senator W ALSH (Victoria) (13:30): Today, early childhood educators are walking off the job, and their message to us is clear: give us a reason to stay in our jobs and pay us what we are worth; value early learning properly as part of our education system and put children before profit. To the early educators who are taking this action today I want to say that I stand with you. I stand with you because the work that you do is completely essential, I stand with you because you are completely undervalued for that work and I stand with you because I know you've tried absolutely everything to be respected for the work that you do and that this is the only action that you have left to take in order to be heard. Let me tell you that right here in the parliament today we hear you loud and clear.

Early educators are absolutely essential. Early educators are qualified. You are dedicated. You are professional. You provide a play-based learning experience that is tailored to the unique needs of every child. You are incredible, you do incredible work and you are completely undervalued and underpaid for the work you do—completely; $22 an hour is an absolute joke. To literally hold the nation's future in their hands, we cannot ask educators to continue educating our nation's children when they can barely earn enough to support their own, so I stand with educators who are walking off the job today. I know it's a tough decision that you have taken, I know our industrial system is completely broken for you and I know this is the only way that you can be heard, and we hear you loud and clear.

Senator ANTIC (South Australia) (13:32): History tells us that civilisations and empires are transitory. There are increasing signs now that Western culture has reached a tipping point. Left-wing activism supposedly based on equity, diversity and inclusion uses its allies in the media, the corporate sector and politics to prohibit any views it disapproves of. Too many of our modern leaders are not across this threat. They seem to think that defending our values is beneath them and that we have time on our side. We do not. Suicide and depression rates in our young people continue to skyrocket. We've failed to instil in them a sense of meaning and purpose, replacing it with empty modern ideologies like climate alarmism. On leaving school, young adults have little knowledge of history, the result of a curriculum denuded of Western history, replaced by critical race theory and a sense of victimhood.

Sadly, too many have cowered before these ideologies, afraid of being called the various isms and phobias, and they're wreaking havoc across the West. If a principled defence of liberty was ever needed in this country, it was over the past 2½ years, yet we were told that those concerned with freedom were dangerous extremists. We need more brave men and women to stand up for future generations of Australians and hand them a culture that is greater than the one left to us. The relative prosperity and peace we've enjoyed have allowed us to become complacent, thinking that such a decline couldn't happen here, but the time has come for our leaders to stand up for what is right. Without urgent, strong leadership the West is doomed.

Senator Thorpe: Why do you have to be so racist?

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT ( Senator O'Neill ): I just want to draw to the attention of senators that these are short statements of two minutes, and I do expect members to be heard without interruption.

Senator Thorpe: This is my workplace.

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT: Senator Thorpe, you are out of order. You need to contain your commentary to an appropriate standard for the Senate.

Senator Thorpe: I will not stand by—

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT: You will not be heard.

Senator McGrath: On a point of order, a senator in this place just called another senator a racist, and I would ask for that to be withdrawn.

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT: I think that's entirely reasonable. Senator Thorpe?

Senator Thorpe: I was stating a fact.

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT: Senator Thorpe, you must stand and withdraw.

Senator Thorpe: I'm not withdrawing, because it's a fact.

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT: Right, take your seat, Senator Thorpe. Turn off the microphone. I'll take some advice from the Clerk. Take your seat.

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT: Senator Thorpe, please resume your seat for a moment.

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT: Senator Thorpe, I'm going to give you an opportunity to withdraw. Will you stand and assist the orderly business of the Senate by withdrawing?

Senator Thorpe: Can you tell me what happens if I don't?

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT: No, I'm not going to tell you anything else. I'm going to ask you to stand and, for the benefit of the Senate and the orderly progress of business, for you to withdraw. Senator Thorpe.

Senator Thorpe: With all due respect, Acting Deputy President, could you please inform me what the ramifications would be for me to remove my remark about somebody being racist and me not feeling safe?

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT: I don't want to give you a platform to repeat the terms that you've used.

Senator Thorpe: I need to know what the ramifications are. Could I seek advice?

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT: Turn off the microphone. Senator Thorpe, resume your seat. Senator Thorpe, you have the opportunity to assist the Senate by acceding to our standing orders and withdrawing a remark that was unparliamentary. That is what you are being asked to do. It doesn't remove it, but I am asking you, for the benefit of the Senate, to withdraw a remark that was not parliamentary. I'll take a point of order from you, Senator Faruqi.

Senator Faruqi: I want to raise this point of order. It has happened in this chamber before that often, when there is racism thrown around in this chamber, it is the people who raise the—

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDEN T: Senator Faruqi, please resume your seat for a moment. I just want to be clear that we're not going to reprosecute every time that offence has occurred in the chamber, and I don't think this historical contribution is assisting at this point. I need you as, a fellow member of this chamber, to advise your colleague about standing orders and principles. It would be appropriate for the senator to withdraw. If she is unable to take that on—

Senator Faruqi: I think people, when they are throwing around racism, need to be aware of what they are doing and how it's impacting on other people.

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT: Broadcasting, do not open the microphone unless I called the senator's name. Senator Faruqi, what is your point of order?

Senator F aruqi: My point of order is this: when decisions are made in this chamber, I think consideration needs to be given to the impact of comments from other senators on appropriateness and on racism.

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT: I have to agree with you, Senator Faruqi, and that is why we have standing orders. So thank you for your point of order; please resume your seat. I am going to give you one final chance, Senator Thorpe, to withdraw your comment that was unparliamentary. You can either withdraw or you may not. What is your choice?

Senator Thorpe: With all due respect, I need to be pointed to where using the word 'racism' in this parliament—I need to know where it's unparliamentary because I don't understand. I'm feeling violated—

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT: Senator Thorpe, please resume your seat. I'm assuming that you are refusing to withdraw and so I will be reporting this matter to the Senate. You no longer have the call. We will return to the program because this has taken up the time of people who want to speak. Senator Faruqi, you have the call to make your contribution.

Senator FARUQI (New South Wales) (13:39): Today I want to give a shout out to unionists and the union movement. Over the last few months in New South Wales alone we've seen the strength and energy of educators; nurses and midwives; rail, tram and bus workers; and university staff and students amongst many other unionists. Yesterday we felt that energy from TAFE unionists on National TAFE Day. Today the lawns of parliament are full of early childhood educators who have shut down the sector for the day, closing centres and rallying around the country to draw attention to the impact of their terrible pay and conditions—conditions made much worse by a critical workforce shortage. The solidarity shown in the movement and from the public for each of these actions has been tremendous. As a lifelong unionist myself, I could not be more proud of and inspired by all of this work.

The Greens recognise the vital place of unions in our society and will continue to fight alongside them for fair pay and conditions. We will keep joining you on the pickets and do everything we can in this place to unwind the decade of union-busting, worker-undermining garbage of the former Liberal government. We will push the new government to give workers real power to organise, bargain, grow and participate fully in your workplaces and communities. I am with you all the way. All the Greens are right with you in fighting for your rights and conditions. There has never been a more important time to join your union. Collectively, we can change the world.

I do have a bit of time, so I want to address the matter that was before the parliament just a minute ago. In this parliament, racism is thrown around so easily, and the people who call it out are the people who are penalised. When will this chamber and this parliament actually seriously consider the Jenkins report and the behaviour standards in this chamber, and actually act on them and not keep shouting down and shutting up people who actually call out bad behaviour and racism?

Senator MARIELLE SMITH (South Australia) (13:41): Today is Early Childhood Educators' Day, where we get to celebrate every single early educator across our country for the absolutely life-changing work that they do. But these educators have been doing it tough. Through the height of the pandemic and beyond, they have not been valued in the way that they should be for the vital work that they do each and every single day. They are not appreciated enough and they're not paid enough. So it's no surprise today that thousands of these workers are walking off the job to stand up for their wages and conditions at work.

I am here in the Senate today standing in solidarity with these workers. If I were in Adelaide, I would be joining my son and my daughter's carers as they walked out of their centre. I would be standing with them because I value them. More than that, like many families across Australia, I depend on them and I adore them. They are an extension of our family, and I know they deserve so much more.

Our industrial system has been failing these workers. It's failed to deliver the pay rises that these workers deserve. Like workers right across our care economy, workers in female dominated industries have been let down by the current industrial system and are unable to access the right compensation for the incredible work they do, the essential work they do. I know the answers aren't always simple here, but I want every early educator in Australia to know that I am advocating for you every step of the way. I see the work that you do as an extension of the families who place their trust in you, and also what you do for our nation. The work you do with our littlest and most precious minds is fundamentally important to our success as a country. We value you and we see you. Thank you for the work you do. I know it's a tough decision to walk off the job today, but we understand and are in solidarity.

Senator CADELL (New South Wales—Nationals Whip in the Senate) (13:43): When I gave my first speech the other day I spoke of my happy upbringing and my time at my parents' property at Cliffy, as well as the land that we had. We had Heddon Greta Speedway across the road and a drive-in just a kilometre or two down the road. With the energy of youth, life was great, and all of those locations were visited more than once. I walked the speedway track and imagined myself racing around it. But the speedway closed long ago, and the track turned into housing, because change happens and change is inevitable.

Today it has been advised that the director is about to call cut on the other local icon, the Heddon Greta Drive-In. It has survived bushfires, floods and global pandemics, with its facilities used for COVID testing at the virus's peak, but it cannot beat change. It cannot fight time, and notice has been given that the metaphorical curtains will be closing, with a development application for more housing to be lodged. Whilst the facility has been around since before my recollection, it most recently came to life under Scott Sneddon, who reopened the turnstiles in 1996 with a double feature of Babe and Apollo 13. Since that evening in March, it reintroduced itself as a cornerstone of local entertainment amongst those with a strong car culture in the Hunter Valley. With the iconic advertising slogan of 'If you don't like the movie you can slash your seats,' young lovers, families that couldn't be bothered dressing up to go out and groups of friends all attended. It was more than a movie; it was an event. There was no more jumping into boots or burying kids under blankets to dodge a ticket, as we paid per car and had a ball. Thank you, Scottie, for bringing this back into our lives. Good luck in your development and good luck in finding a site for a proposal to construct the new facility.

Senator LAMBIE (Tasmania) (13:45): I would like to thank the people of the West Coast of Tasmania, who I regularly visit. We like to call it the 'rugged wilderness' and, my goodness, most of you people in here would not survive over its border, I can assure you—that is where we have drop bears. To the people in Tullah: it was great to see you guys. It is great to see tourism really starting to pop down there again. To the people of Rosebery and the Ochre Medical Centre: you are doing a wonderful job. It is great to hear that you finally have a wonderful new GP down there servicing that area. I know that the people of Rosebery are very grateful, because her husband is a great football player. He is playing for Toorak down there and that is giving the doctor a whole new standing in that community, which is very entertaining in itself.

I also want to thank the people in Queenstown. I can tell you, 12 months ago, 18 months ago, it was frightening. Twelve months ago, 70 per cent of the shops were closed. When I went down there this time, there were two shops closed and they look like they have new lease signs on them. That is fabulous. It is going great guns down there. I can see the new mountain bike track is starting to draw the attention of the tourists. You will have the walking track that should be built over the next couple of years. We understand you also have a housing issue. I ask that the mines get back to the table and talk about those housing issues down there and start seeing what they can do to provide houses for workers and their families. We need those workers and their families there. We do not want to see DIDOs—drive in, drive out. That is what is going to make these communities function in the long run, so it would be lovely to see that.

I do apologise to the people of Strachan. I did not get to see you this time. I also want to thank the mayor and the general manager on the West Coast for the time they give us to fill us in on what is going on on the West Coast. To West Coast people: thank you very much.

Senator GREEN (Queensland) (13:47): Today is Early Childhood Educators Day, so, like so many of my colleagues today, I want to speak on the important work that our early childhood educators do. Our early educators have a mammoth task on their hands every day they go to work. Not only do they care for our youngest Australians, allowing parents across the country to go out and participate in their own jobs and build the economy, they also do an incredibly important job of giving our youngest Australians the very best start to their education. Yet this predominantly female workforce is seriously undervalued and underpaid, and they are tired. Educators are leaving the sector in droves but today, in just a few hours, educators will stand right outside this place and speak up for their worth. They will speak out about the unjust way that they have been treated for far too long, and I and my colleagues are proud to stand with them

Our government understands that the current early childhood education system is not working for educators, which means it is not working for families, which means it is not working for our economy, and we want to see that fixed. We know that, beyond praise, educators need and deserve better wages and conditions. Their pay packets should reflect the important and very skilled work that they perform every single day. We know that a lot needs to be done to reform this sector, but childhood educators across the country can rest assured that we see you, we stand with you and we will deliver for you.

Congratulations on the very important step that you are taking today. We want to make sure that you understand that we stand here in solidarity with you and the important work that you do.

Senator O'SULLIVAN (Western Australia—Deputy Opposition Whip in the Senate) (13:49): It's well known that Western Australia is blessed with an abundance of natural resources—iron ore, oil and gas in particular—and the Western Australian mining sector has benefited Australia's economy for decades. Western Australia is being presented with new opportunities and has the potential to take part in an industry that is gaining global momentum. I speak of hydrogen.

Recently I met with the team at the Dampier to Bunbury pipeline. The Dampier to Bunbury pipeline stretches 1,539 kilometres and pipes 845 terajoules of natural gas each day, from which natural gas fuels approximately 50 per cent of WA's energy needs. With changing energy demands globally, AGIG, the operator of the pipeline, are working on a plan to start blending hydrogen with natural gas. They aim to have a 10 per cent hydrogen and natural gas blend by 2030. This is the first step towards adapting our current gas infrastructure to carry only hydrogen by 2040.

Even more exciting is that, with the production of hydrogen in northern WA and the infrastructure to move it, we open up opportunities to export hydrogen to global energy markets. This is about seizing market opportunities. It's not some woke pursuit of ideology and reckless abandonment of reliable low-cost energy. We must continue to invest in traditional energy sources while exploiting every opportunity to establish new markets with new sources of energy. So I look forward to working with Western Australian companies and industry to explore the opportunities that hydrogen can bring, whilst also supporting those traditional businesses that need to continue to export their resources so that we can bring energy not only to Australia but indeed to the world.

Senator THORPE (Victoria—Deputy Leader of the Australian Greens in the Senate) (13:51): I made some remarks earlier today towards Senator Antic, and I'd like to withdraw those comments.

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT ( Senator O'Neill ): Thank you, Senator Thorpe, for assisting the chamber. You have the call for your two-minute contribution.

Senator THORPE: Thank you, Acting Deputy President. First Nations people in this country are the oldest living continuing culture in the world. We are sovereign to our lands, waters, skies and totems. This is sovereignty. Violent colonial invaders never sought an agreement to live peacefully alongside us. The colonisers say that they are sovereign. We say that we are sovereign. Treaty is an agreement to share sovereignty.

First Nations people have always fought for the right to make our own decisions when it comes to our people, our culture and our country. In the 1930s, Yorta Yorta man William Cooper petitioned King George V for Aboriginal seats in parliament. In 1963, the Yirrkala bark petitions called for land rights. In 1988, the Barunga Statement called for self-determination. In response, Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke promised to begin working on a treaty by 1990. Now, the states have taken up this Labor visionary's work. Victoria, Queensland and the Northern Territory all have treaties in the works.

Do you know who suggested we change the Constitution? John Howard! In the lead-up to the 2007 election, John Howard promised that the coalition would hold a referendum to recognise Indigenous Australians in the preamble of the Constitution. Why is Prime Minister Albanese following John Howard's lead? Why is the Prime Minister out of step with the Labor governed states?

Treaty is not an overnight process, which is all the more reason to start laying the groundwork now at the federal level. Treaty is an opportunity to celebrate this nation together. It's an opportunity to unite and mature.

Senator ROBERTS (Queensland) (13:54): As the Reserve Bank raises interest rates another jumbo sized half per cent, we gasp at the audacity, the cheek, of all major parties talking about cost of living. Decades of Greens, Liberal, Labor and Nationals policies slowly destroying our country caused the cost-of-living crisis.

In just three months under the coalition, groceries got five per cent more expensive, an increase of 20 per cent per year. Fuel prices will jump again when Labor cancels the 22c-a-litre tax discount. Wholesale power prices are at record highs and will flow through to power bills. That's why Labor quietly crab-walked away from their election promise to reduce your power bills by $275. Both sides take turns to gradually destroy our country. Both forced intermittent wind and solar pipedreams, driving up power prices. High power prices make everything else more expensive.

The coalition now, laughably, claim to be fiscal conservatives yet ran the largest money-printing operation our country has ever seen: $508 billion conjured out of thin air in electronic journal entries. That supercharged demand, the culprit in runaway inflation—neither side will talk about it.

Labor now plans an immigration flood. Two hundred thousand new arrivals each year will drive up demand for housing and services, making costs of living worse. This is the difference between keeping lights on and sitting in the dark; between eating healthy groceries and walking down the supermarket canned-goods aisle; between new school uniforms and sending children off to school with holes in their socks; between a roof over our heads and being out on the street.

Instead, One Nation policies will build an environment making our economy stronger. Stable breadwinner jobs will flourish. Our policies will unlock Australia's abundant natural resources so we can be the world's energy superpower, as we should be. One Nation policies will return Australia to having the world's cheapest power bills. We are one community. We have one flag. We are one nation.

Senator RENNICK (Queensland) (13:56): I rise today to speak about vaccine injuries and the lack of help from the Albanese Labor government to those injured by the COVID vaccine. I receive many stories of people being injured every day, and they are seeking help. I've been contacted by one constituent whose wife suffered an extreme systemic reaction to her first AZ dose. She had multiple trips to her GP as her condition worsened, and two trips to emergency prior to paralysis episodes from GBS. She was then taken by ambulance and admitted to hospital in June 2021. She suffered a brain bleed and brain inflammation. She was subsequently diagnosed with multiple conditions, all attributed to her reaction to AZ. These conditions have lingered for 15 months and have been linked to acute onset lymphoedema and severe hypokalaemia, which have left her with severe permanent disabilities, including an acquired brain injury, and ongoing chronic conditions that need constant care and treatment.

The couple has provided evidence to the indemnity scheme, including five letters from her GP, hospital admissions, one letter from a medical registrar, another letter from a consultant physician and clinical immunologist, a letter from another immunologist, another letter from a neurologist, another letter from a haematologist and another letter from a neurologist. Despite all of that evidence and these experts saying that her injury was caused by the vaccine, the indemnity scheme has refused her claim. It's not a lot; it's only $20,000 topped out. Yet this couple is suffering severely. I'm calling on the Albanese Labor government and the health minister, as well as the Minister for Social Services, to do the right thing and look after these people.

Senator PRATT (Western Australia—Deputy Government Whip in the Senate) (13:58): Today, I took a point-of-care glycated haemoglobin test, thanks to the Pathology Technology Australia visit to parliament. I have to say how pleased I was with this technology. As someone who has had gestational diabetes, I found that the test where you have to fast and then pump yourself up on sugar to then come crashing down was a horrible experience. But this technology is a terrific replacement for that. I really want to see this point-of-care testing become more accessible to the Australian people so that women, and anyone who needs to do one of those other horrible tests, are able to do a much more rapid and accessible test where appropriate.

I think this should be affordable because it is simply replacing a different kind of test in our Medicare subsidies, so I very much look forward to this technology being more widely available. Currently, for example, it can take a long time for test results to get to and from remote communities. Where we've got a high burden of disease, for example in some remote Indigenous communities, it would be terrific to be able to see this technology diagnose high blood sugar levels there and then on the spot, so people can get their diabetes diagnosed and therefore protect their lives and their kidneys. It was an entirely pain-free, easy experience, and I very much want to thank Pathology Technology Australia for being here in parliament today.

The PRESIDENT: Thank you, Senator Pratt. We will move to question time, and I call Senator Birmingham.

Senator WATT (Queensland—Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry and Minister for Emergency Management) (15:02): Senator Thorpe, I have some partial answers to your questions. I may have to come back with some further answers tomorrow. In relation to your first question, the Montgomery case that you were referring to follows some similar litigation, the Love and Thoms cases, which I'm sure you're familiar with. Since the High Court's judgement in Love and Thoms, and as at 29 August this year, 13 noncitizens have been released from immigration detention on the basis that they meet, or the detaining officer suspects they meet, the tripartite test. Five noncitizens have been released from immigration detention directly or indirectly as a result of court judgements concerning whether it was reasonable for officers to suspect noncitizens were aliens in particular circumstances but did not involve conclusions that they meet the tripartite test. These individuals may still be required to be detained in the future, in the event further inquiries demonstrate more conclusively they do not meet the tripartite test and they do not hold visas.

In relation to your second question, the Department of Home Affairs continues to manage individual cases that raise claims of meeting the tripartite test and continues to consider the implications of the High Court's decision for Commonwealth programs in consultation with other Australian government departments, including the Attorney-General's Department, the National Indigenous Australians Agency, the Department of Finance and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. In relation to your third question, there are currently no plans to alter the visa scheme to introduce special conditions. As I say, if those responses don't fully answer your questions, I'll come back with some further detail. And, as I've mentioned to you, I'd encourage you to have some discussions with Minister Giles about those issues.

Senator WATT (Queensland—Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry and Minister for Emergency Management) (15:04): Yesterday in question time, in my capacity as the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, I took on notice questions asked by Senator Canavan relating to biosecurity. I have written to Senator Canavan to provide additional information, and I table my letter to Senator Canavan for the information of all senators.

Senator WONG (South Australia—Minister for Foreign Affairs and Leader of the Government in the Senate) (15:04): Yesterday in question time, I undertook to seek further advice on questions asked by Senator Tyrrell to me, in my capacity as the Minister representing the Prime Minister, relating to the Australian Future Leaders Foundation. I have written to Senator Tyrrell to provide additional information, and I table my letter for the information of all senators.

Senator O'SULLIVAN (Western Australia—Deputy Opposition Whip in the Senate) (15:05): I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Finance (Senator Gallagher) to a question without notice asked by Senator Ruston on distribution priority areas and health.

The Albanese government's recent decision to expand the classification of a distribution priority area to include suburbs of state capital cities is more bad news for regional Australia. Regional communities from my home state of Western Australia, who were already struggling to get doctors, will now have to compete with large metropolitan areas.

The whole idea of the DPA was to identify areas experiencing lower numbers of GP services and provide unique channels and incentives for them to be able to attract GPs and be able to retain them in these areas. Three areas in Western Australia where the Labor government have now granted full or partial DPA status include Kwinana, Kalamunda and Brigadoon. For those not familiar with Perth, these suburbs are hardly even considered outer metropolitan suburbs. In fact, I live just north of one of these places, and it is hardly a regional area, and certainly not a remote area.

What is the government doing? It's just going to draw in people to work in these areas. I'm not at all disputing the fact that there would be a need for GPs and GP services in these localities across Perth and, indeed, across Australia, where the other locations are. We know that Fyshwick is listed, which is just down the road from here. Tuggeranong is another one which is just down the road—not too far at all. There might be need for GPs in these areas, but you need to come for a drive around Western Australia to some of the regional communities that are in desperate need of adequate services provided by GPs. You don't even have to go that far.

If you go out to somewhere up in the Kimberley, across to Halls Creek and Fitzroy Crossing and Kununurra. How do these places attract staff, GPs and GP services if you're providing in the capital cities the same incentives and initiatives that are designed to support those communities and regional areas? I've got no doubt that these locations may be struggling to attract and retain GPs, but it should not be at the expense of GPs leaving regional and remote areas of Western Australia, which are already battling to ensure that they're able to access sufficient health services. It's not too difficult to work out that, in general, the health status of people declines the more remote they are, the further they are from capital cities. Therefore, it's hard to imagine that the changes the government has made will strengthen the ability of Western Australians in regional and remote areas to access GP services, and how they will be improved.

What we know is—and I'm wondering if we're going to start to see a pattern here—that when the Labor Party was last in government, they started to really tinker with health services. One of the things they tinkered with a lot was the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, where we saw the delisting of medicines on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. Yet while we were in government—the whole time that I was in this place sitting on the other side—we listed an equivalent of one new medicine for every day of the last term. I don't know about you, Senator Rennick, but it is one of the great things that, as a new senator in this place, I am proud that we were able to achieve—to see that happen, to see that track record.

We know that this mob on the other side don't have the ability to manage the books. They don't have the ability to manage the affairs of this government appropriately. Australians need a government that is sensible about their needs and about the services required and are prepared to stand up and do what is necessary and not just rob Peter to pay Paul to provide the services that are required—and that's exactly what we're seeing here. We need services in the bush, and all this is doing is taking it away from them. (Time expired)

Senator GREEN (Queensland) (15:10): Sometimes it's difficult to understand whether the opposition understands what a 'Dixer' is, because this question is an opportunity for those on this side to talk about the appalling history under the Morrison government and its treatment of Medicare and GPs, particularly in rural and regional areas, and what our government is doing to fix the mess you left.

Let me break this down for you. You so utterly broke the Medicare system and the reliance on GPs that it was so incredibly difficult for people to see a GP in rural and regional areas. But now we have a situation where we have had to step in and make sure people can see a GP. But it's very interesting to see that those opposite are opposed to the use of distribution priority areas. I am wondering whether senators on that side have consulted with members of their own party, because I know that, in Queensland, Cairns is a distribution priority area. The member for Leichhardt hasn't opposed that listing. Townsville has DPA status. The member for Herbert hasn't opposed that listing. Mackay has DPA status, and the Whitsundays. And we certainly haven't seen that happen from the member for Dawson. And Hervey Bay has DPA status, under the Labor government. We know that means that the member for Hinkler must be very supportive of our policy.

But it is clear that under the Liberal-Nationals government—the former Morrison government—at every opportunity they had, they ripped out funding from Medicare and made it harder to see a GP. We know they froze the Medicare rebate for six years. If you speak to a GP, whether in the city or the bush, they will tell you that the former government ripped the heart out of Medicare when they froze the rebate. They went as far as to cut access to telehealth appointments for regional Australians. They also made sure that people living in places like Emerald were waiting 12 weeks to see a GP.

We had a Senate inquiry and we put that motion to this place, and those opposite—who are going to get up today and talk about access to GPs—voted against that inquiry. You said there was no problem, that there was no issue, nothing to see here, no problem to be fixed. But when we held that inquiry, initiated by Labor, we heard horrible stories from people around the country about the treatment that you lot put them through so that they couldn't see a GP. That is why a Labor government is strengthening Medicare, and we were very clear at the election and were supported at the election to form a government with a core value of strengthening Medicare and protecting it. We will be delivering urgent care clinics in regional areas and across the country. We have developed the Strengthening Medicare Taskforce, an important opportunity to bring so many people around the table to fix this workforce issue caused by your former government. And we have delivered DPA access to areas that are desperately in need of GPs.

We will not stand here and be lectured by a political party that sacked nurses in Queensland. Queenslanders will never forget that. We know that Queenslanders are so pleased to finally have a government that values Medicare. I won't stand here, as someone who lives in a regional area, and be lectured to by those opposite about who cares about access to GPs and Medicare.

I note that the previous speaker raised the issue of medicines. Well, I have fantastic news for you. Today, we have announced that we will be making medicines cheaper for millions of Australians. This is a fantastic step forward—the first time in 75 years—

Senator Rennick: Are you going to line the pockets of big pharma?

Senator GREEN: Are you opposed? There is a choice here. You can support that policy or you can be opposed to it, but we on this side of the chamber know that our government is making medicines cheaper. We'll be introducing legislation. You'll have the opportunity to support that legislation to make sure that people have access to the medicines that they need. Labor built Medicare, and we will always protect it. You tried to rip the heart out of Medicare. You made it harder to see a GP. That is why our Labor government is fixing it. We will always stand here on our record, and it is complete rubbish from your side of politics to lecture us about access to GPs in rural and regional areas.

Senator RENNICK (Queensland) (15:15): I suggest that Senator Green go back and do some study on the history of health care in this country. I stand here as the son of a midwife who also had a general ticket. She worked in many hospitals—in four states, as a matter of fact. She did her training at Saint Vincent's in 1953 in Sydney—

The DEPUTY PRESIDENT: Senator Green, please restrain yourself. Senator Rennick, you did give some commentary during Senator Green's contribution

Senator RENNICK: I've actually got something important to say because I actually know the history of health care in this country. Let me tell you, the state governments have taken advantage of the good nature that Medicare was set up for and have cost shifted from the states onto the federal government. I know that because when I grew up and had to see a doctor I would sit in a thing called 'Outpatients' in a public hospital. That has been renamed Emergency. The reason they renamed it Emergency is so that people don't go to Emergency. The state governments want it that way because then they don't have to pick up the cost. By sending it to a doctor in the primary healthcare system they get the federal government to pick up the cost. The problem with that is that it has overloaded the system on the doctors. What we need in this country is more doctors on fixed salaries, and we need the public health system in the states—to be honest, we need to go further than this. We need to get one level of government trying to run health care in this country, because we're getting this cost shifting all the time in this blame game between the federal and state governments, and these ambiguous responsibilities result in nothing but name-calling, rather than problem-solving.

I will touch on something that Senator Green was talking about, this so-called discount for the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. That may sound very well at first intentions, but the point is that you need to ask the question. I notice there was a cholesteryl drug called Lipitor, which was a prescription drug patented by Pfizer. This goes back a decade or so. The Australian government was paying about 50 bucks for this particular drug, and Pfizer was collecting about $40 of the $50. The fact was that there was a similar generic drug that came off patent that you could have bought for $2. So it's all very well saying that you're spending billions of dollars on the PBS, but the question needs to be asked whether or not there are suitable drugs out there that you can use and that aren't going to line the pockets of rich pharmaceutical companies. I would like to see greater detail of the PBS.

Getting back onto doctors and having priority schemes for doctors, the fact of the matter is that we've got an undersupply of doctors in this country. We need to also point the finger at the professional bodies of the medical industry who, quite frankly, aren't training enough doctors here in this country. I touched on this in my maiden speech. It is an absolute insult that Australia, a first-world country, is importing doctors from underdeveloped countries because our AMA and our doctors are running a cartel in this country and are restricting the supply of specialist services in order to make sure that they can maximise their fees. We've got to have a serious look at this.

I don't want to get bipartisan on this, because I am sick to death of the health issues that we've got in this country. If we're meant to solve this problem, we really need to get one level of government taking responsibility for health. I'm happy to work with Labor on this, and I mean that, because regional health is very, very important to me. In the last 30 years, I've seen under the Queensland state Labor government the closure of over 30 maternity wards in regional Queensland. I know that it happens in other states, as well.

That's because of a combination of factors, but one of those factors is that we just will not get doctors to go to the regions. They don't want to take on the insurance because they work in the private sector. We've got a problem with training nurses. Many nurses now do either general practice or midwifery but they don't do both. If you want nurses out in the regions you need them to get their general ticket—mum would always call it a 'general ticket'—and be a midwife as well. Out there, there aren't enough babies being born every day to have a full-time midwife; they need to also be general nurses as well.

At the end of the day, what we really need are better front-end services. I would actually like to get rid of the states altogether, but it is absurd that we have nine health bureaucracies in this country while our front-end services are suffering. We've really got to get serious about having a big overview. If you want a job summit, you should have a health summit—and I will turn up to that one, I guarantee you that.

Senator O'NEILL (New South Wales) (15:20): I think you can see in that flow-of-consciousness contribution from Senator Rennick, as generous as it was in its intention, a bit of a map of the former government's way of planning the health sector—chaotic and destructive, not doing anything valuable that is going to stand up to Australia's real needs. Let me remind you of a bit of history. Before Medicare was—

The DEPUTY PRESIDENT: Senator Rennick, you were heard in silence. I remonstrated with Senator Green.

The DEPUTY PRESIDENT: Senator Rennick, that's not a point of order. I appreciate it. I appreciate that you're very passionate about it, but Senator O'Neill is entitled to be heard in silence.

Senator O'NEILL: Let's get to the reality of what Medicare does and why we're talking about GPs today. The government of the last nine years, and their various iterations over the last few decades, have attacked Medicare at every turn. The main cause of a bankruptcy before Medicare was medical debt—Australians died or they sold their house. Finally, the Labor Party moved to make sure that was no longer the case, and Medicare was established. In establishing that, we change the course of the health of this nation in a very positive way. It was attacked relentlessly by every iteration of the federal Liberal-National government that came after. That's what we've seen over the last nine years, so let's get a little bit of fact on the record.

The reality that we confronted when the Rudd-Gillard government was established was that there was a declining number of GPs being trained. We completely changed that and ramped up training of our own. Mr Abbott's solution as health minister was to stop training Australians and bring in overseas-trained doctors. It was a short-term decision and a bad long-term decision. The reality is that those wonderful GPs that we trained happened to come out into a medical profession that was being ripped asunder by the Abbott government. When they froze Medicare, they basically kicked out from underneath the business model of our GPs their sustainability as a practice. What happened with those smart cookies who were training to be GPs? They had a look at these businesses in collapse, destroyed by the Australian government, and they said, 'Hold on, I don't really want to be a GP anymore.' We don't have a training problem in terms of the numbers. We have a problem of a broken business model that has destroyed GP practices across this country. Right across this country, it's the Liberal and National parties, who always pump themselves up as being great understanders of businesses, who broke the back of the GP business model for Australia.

The reality that we confront right now is because of that failure. Because they broke access to GPs, they decided to tinker with this thing that they called the DPA or Distribution Priority Area. On the record, in the other chamber today, the Minister for Health and Aged Care very clearly indicated that the changes we were being asked about here today—changes to the DPA that Labor has instituted—were to reverse a cut made by the former government in 2019. It was a reverse to what that government had done in terms of denying Australians in this country access to a GP. They did that as a response to the failure of their own policies of ruining Australian's access to GPs. And then they thought they could just shrink the places in which it was distributed.

On the Central Coast, there was evidence given to our committee—it was a Labor instituted GP shortage inquiry. It was our committee that determined to tell the reality of what's going on in Australia. Whether we were taking evidence in Victoria, Queensland, New South Wales or out in Whyalla, it was the same story everywhere: a completely ruined system and communities in desperate need of doctors. And it's the responsibility of the former government that we do not have that workforce today.

Now Labor have come in. We've been here, what, 108 days. We can't undo everything that they did wrong, but this really egregious move of cutting the DPA in 2019 was a con job by the former government. It didn't fix the problem. It bought them time, but what it didn't do was give Australians access to the health care that they paid for and the health care that they deserve. Labor is on the job of fixing the mess in the health sector that we have been left by the former government, and Australians can trust that the Labor Party who built Medicare will restore the integrity that the system deserves.

Senator SCARR (Queensland—Deputy Opposition Whip in the Senate) (15:26): Perhaps I can strike a somewhat more conciliatory note as we discuss what I consider to be a very important issue, and that is the access of Australians to general practitioners across this country.

For those in the gallery—through you, Mr Deputy President—I might just explain what we're talking about here. It is what's referred to as distribution priority areas. For those areas which are classified as distribution priority areas, there are various incentives in place to attract medical professionals into those areas to be general practitioners. Benefits to attract medical professionals into those areas include, for international medical graduates and foreign graduates of accredited medical schools, having access to Medicare in those distribution priority areas only. If overseas medical practitioners come to this country, they can access Medicare as long as they're practising in those areas.

The whole intention of this policy is to try to provide an incentive for that pool of professionals to provide general practice services to Australians living in those rural and regional areas. That's the issue we're talking about. In my view, the system is broken and we shouldn't be focusing so much on history; we should be focusing on the way forward. How do we fix the system? We know the system is broken. There is such a lack of general practitioners that we now have the absurd situation of the incentives which are meant to be given to a medical practitioner to go to a place like Emerald, in my home state of Queensland, which is three hours from Rockhampton, being the same as the incentives which are provided to medical practitioners to practice at Fyshwick, 13 or 15 minutes down the road from Parliament House. It doesn't make sense.

Senator O'Neill: People get sick in Fyshwick too.

Senator SCARR: Of course they get sick, Senator O'Neill. Of course they do. As I said, I'm trying to strike a more conciliatory tone and look forward. The issue is that, if you're providing the same incentives to someone to work 15 minutes down the road from Parliament House as you're providing to someone in Mildura, over five hours from Melbourne, or Emerald, three hours from Rockhampton, the incentive obviously isn't going to work. The problem is so widespread around this country that there's a fundamental issue with the incentive system, and that's what we're talking about here.

There's also a fundamental system issue, in my view, with what's referred to as the Modified Monash Model, which is the way in which different areas are categorised, and I've spoken to different communities across Queensland with respect to the application of that system. To give you one example, the town of Rosewood in my home state is put in the same classification as Ipswich. Again, me being a senator, this is one of my patron seats, and the demographics, the geographical challenges and the ability to attract medical staff are completely different in those two areas, but they are considered to be in the same category. This system, this modified Monash system, does not reflect what happens on the ground, the realities of local communities, and it is a system which we really should look at—it really is.

I'd like to finally, with indulgence, thank someone who brought this to my attention, and that is Mr Lyall McEwin. Lyall has served for many years as chair of an aged-care facility in a little town called Rosewood. He talked to me about his frustration as the chair of a community organisation providing aged-care services. He talked about the issue in terms of attracting health professionals to that aged-care facility, when he's in the same category as Ipswich, which is more of a major metropolitan centre. There are major, major issues with this system—major, major issues in relation to this system and in relation to every Australian's legitimate expectation to be able to access health services, GP services in particular, whether or not they live in Mildura, whether or not they live in Fyshwick, down the road from Parliament House, or whether or not they live in Emerald, in country Queensland, And that is something which all of us should be united in attempting to fix.

Question agreed to.

Senator FARUQI (New South Wales) (15:31): I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister representing the Minister for Social Services (Senator Watt) to questions without notice asked today.

I take note of Minister Watt's response to my questions on the pay and conditions of early learning workers. The minister was talking very big, the rhetoric was very big, but where is the action to address the low pay and the really difficult conditions that early childhood educators are subjected to? There is none. Today, on Early Childhood Educators' Day, thousands of early childhood educators have walked out of centres. Right now, they are gathering on the parliament's front lawns, to give a message to the government and to all parliamentarians to say that enough is enough. And the Greens are right with early childhood educators, as they shut down the sector today. We give them our full solidarity, but we give them more than that.

They can be assured that we will be fighting for better pay for them, for better conditions and for free and universal early childhood learning and care. Parliament needs to hear these calls for an immediate pay rise. Early childhood educators, who are now predominantly women, have been taken for granted for far too long, and they've also said, enough. They are burning out and they are leaving the sector in droves. Literally every week I meet some of these educators who are telling me that they are working more and more from 6 am to very late at night. These are not conditions that educators or any workers should be subjected to, and educators do deserve professional pay that reflects the skill and the responsibility of the work that they do every single day.

We know that early childhood education and care is an essential service, and it should be treated as such. It is critical for children in the early years of their development, and it should be well funded, it should be universal, and it should be fee-free. We know it benefits children, it benefits women, it benefits families, it benefits society, it benefits community, and yet the can has been kicked down the road. The Greens are calling on the government to bring legislation to lift wages and to improve conditions of educators and deal with the critical workforce shortage in early learning and care. These steps, hand in-hand with the Greens plan for free early learning and care for all, are absolutely vital to building a better future. So when will this government come to its senses and dump the $244 billion in stage 3 tax cuts, commit to essential public services like free and universal early learning and care, like giving early childhood educators and workers an immediate pay rise that they so deserve? We need to make sure that educators have the best pay and conditions, and we need action on this right now.

Senator THORPE (Victoria—Deputy Leader of the Australian Greens in the Senate) (15:34): I'm also responding to Minister Watt, and I thank the minister for his response and follow up. But I do want to also add that the previous government, who actually invented this new Aboriginality for sovereign people, created some heartache and pain for many families. We had an Aboriginal man who was deported, who died after waiting six years as an Aboriginal man in another country for this government to allow him back into the country. He died waiting, and he came back in a body bag as a result. That family are still picking up the pieces. The number of children that this gentleman had are still reeling in the grief of not only not seeing their dad for six years but then having their dad coming home in a body bag.

So this is an urgent plea to the government to fix this problem, this decision that the ex-government made which was clearly discriminatory. We had a situation where we had the government or the parliament making decisions on who's Aboriginal and who's not in this country, which is going into very, very dangerous territory. It's not up to any government to decide who is Aboriginal and who is not in this country.

Question agreed to.

Senator GALLAGHER (Australian Capital Territory—Minister for the Public Service, Minister for Finance, Minister for Women, Manager of Government Business in the Senate and Vice-President of the Executive Council) (15:36): I give notice in general terms that on the next day of sitting I shall move a motion to provide for the consideration of the Climate Change Bill 2022 and a related bill.

Senator SHOEBRIDGE (New South Wales) (15:37): Pursuant to standing order 78(1), Senator Tyrrell and I give notice of our intention at the giving of notices on the next sitting day to withdraw business of the Senate notice of motion No. 1 standing in our names for that day, proposing the disallowance of the Financial Framework Supplementary Powers Amendment (Prime Minister and Cabinet's Portfolio Measures No. 2) Regulations 2022 made under the Financial Framework (Supplementary Powers) Act 1997.

The PRESIDENT (15:38): I remind senators that the question may be put on any proposal at the request of any senator.

Senator CHISHOLM (Queensland—Assistant Minister for Education and Assistant Minister for Regional Development) (15:39): I move:

That, in accordance with section 5 of the Parliament Act 1974, the Senate approves the proposal by the National Capital Authority for capital works within the Parliamentary Zone, relating to new construction and refurbishment works at West Block.

Question agreed to.

Senator CHISHOLM (Queensland—Assistant Minister for Education and Assistant Minister for Regional Development) (15:50): I move:

That if the second reading debate for the Climate Change Bill 2022 and a related bill has not concluded by 7.20 pm on Wednesday, 7 September 2022:

(a) the hours of meeting be 9.30 am till adjournment;

(b) the routine of business from 7.20 pm be consideration of the Climate Change Bill 2022 and a related bill—second reading speeches only;

(c) the Senate adjourn without debate at the conclusion of the second reading debate or on the motion of a minister, whichever is the earlier; and

(d) if a division is called for after 7.20 pm, the matter before the Senate be adjourned until the next day of sitting at a time fixed by the Senate.

Senator DUNIAM (Tasmania—Deputy Manager of Opposition Business) (15:50): I seek leave to make a short statement.

The PRESIDENT: Leave is granted for one minute.

Senator DUNIAM: While the opposition is not against additional sitting hours, we don't accept that this proposal is appropriate. Firstly, we note these extra hours are being brought on just one day after the bill was introduced into the Senate and there has been no attempt to even use the normal hours of the Senate. Secondly, the bill changes nothing, as the targets it legislates have already been adopted by the government and committed to under the international agreement, so there is no urgency in this bill that actually changes nothing. Thirdly, the government has been making a big deal about a more family friendly parliament and sitting hours yet here we are in a greatly hypocritical move with the government proposing an open-ended debate that could see people sitting here well beyond midnight for a bill that changes nothing. We oppose the motion.

Senator HANSON-YOUNG (South Australia) (15:51): I seek leave to make a short statement.

The PRESIDENT: Leave is granted for one minute.

Senator HANSON-YOUNG: The Greens will be supporting this motion. We believe and understand that taking climate action is an urgent priority. It should be an urgent priority for all of us. While this bill is largely symbolic, it now binds the government to a promise that they will get on with it, so we want the bill dealt with. We have worked to strengthen it, so get it done and then get on with the real work.

The PRESIDENT: The question is that general business notice of motion No. 1, standing in the name of Senator Gallagher, as moved by Senator Chisholm, be agreed to.

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT ( Senator O'Sullivan ) (16:03): I inform the Senate that, at 8.30 am today, 33 proposals were received in accordance with standing order 75. The question of which proposal would be submitted to the Senate was determined by lot. As a result, I inform the Senate that the following letter was received from Senator Thorpe:

Pursuant to standing order 75, I give notice that today I propose to move "That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency:

The Stage 3 tax cuts will cost $244 billion over the next ten years, and give billionaires, CEOs and politicians a $9,000 tax cut, while people on the minimum wage get nothing. Repealing these unfair and unjust tax cuts could fund immediate cost of living relief and make people's lives better by putting dental and mental healthcare into Medicare, building affordable housing, and making childcare free."

Is the proposal supported?

More than the number of senators required by the standing orders having risen in their places—

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT: I understand that informal arrangements have been made to allocate specific times to each of the speakers in today's debate. With the concurrence of the Senate, I shall ask the clerks to set the clock accordingly.

Senator THORPE (Victoria—Deputy Leader of the Australian Greens in the Senate) (16:04): I move:

That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency:

The Stage 3 tax cuts will cost $244 billion over the next ten years, and give billionaires, CEOs and politicians a $9,000 tax cut, while people on the minimum wage get nothing. Repealing these unfair and unjust tax cuts could fund immediate cost of living relief and make people's lives better by putting dental and mental healthcare into Medicare, building affordable housing, and making childcare free.

Last week, the Prime Minister announced that the Labor government will not be repealing the obscene stage 3 tax cuts. Over the next 10 years, these will strip $244 billion out of the budget. You will all be aware by now how these cuts are benefiting the most-wealthy people in this country—usually the ones who are responsible for the stolen wealth, but that's another story. This means that men will get $1 more than women receive. However, there has been little consideration of how these tax cuts will impact on First Nations people. As always, my people will benefit the least.

Across the country, everyday people are struggling to make ends meet in the most simple ways. People are struggling to pay rent, pay for food and pay for health care. Too often, those impacted the most by cost-of-living pressures are First Nations people. In the 'lucky country', the average personal income for First Nations people is around $35,000, compared with just under $50,000 for the rest of the population. That's 29 per cent lower. That will have lifelong impacts on my people's lives. With the proposed tax cuts, First Nations people will be paying, on average, $95 less tax in 2024-25, compared with $430 less tax paid by non First Nations people. This means that First Nations people will receive about $1 for every $4 others get from stage 3 tax cuts. First Nations people will see the least benefit and be the hardest hit by this tax reform.

These tax cuts will only worsen income inequality between First Nations people and the rest of the population. If the government allows these tax cuts to go ahead, it is choosing to give handouts to the stolen-wealth billionaires instead of funding crucial services that our people are calling out for. The $244 billion could be redirected towards funding community controlled health, housing and legal services. That could pull thousands of people in this country, particularly First Nations people, out of poverty. If this Labor government is truly committed to closing the gap, they will scrap these tax cuts and put the money back into providing proper housing, proper health care and good education for First Nations people in this country.

We know that stolen wealth is also an issue in this country, and many, many people—many white people, many of the colonisers—actually benefited from stealing these lands. In fact, they still benefit today because of generations and generations of wealth creation for their families. I'm sure you know that story. But it's time to pay the rent and it's time to acknowledge that you're on stolen land.

Senator WALSH (Victoria) (16:08): I rise to speak on the urgency motion before the Senate today regarding the stage 3 tax cuts. During the election campaign we made a commitment that we would provide certainty and clarity around tax to Australian working families, and our position on the legislated stage 3 income tax cuts has not changed since the election, because, after an incredibly difficult few years for our country and the world, certainty is what Australians deserve. The legislated stage 3 tax cuts are not due to commence for another two years, so they won't do anything to address the near-term economic challenges that we face, including with the growing inflation challenge that we have right now. Instead, our government's priority, when it comes to tax reform, is ensuring that multinationals pay their fair share of tax here in Australia. Our priority is cracking down on the waste and the rorts that have contributed to the $1 trillion of debt left to us by those opposite with absolutely nothing to show for it. There is a $1 trillion debt and nothing to show for it. We, the Albanese government, need to repair the budget mess left by those on the other side, so we can get on with delivering the meaningful investments that maximise economic impact and meet community needs.

Australians are paying the price right now for a decade of missed opportunities and absolutely messed-up priorities under the coalition government. The $1 trillion debt, high and rising inflation, rising interest rates and a cost-of-living crisis—these are the consequences of a decade of complete economic mismanagement by those opposite. Australians understand that we didn't create these challenges, but they elected us to take responsibility for fixing them—for addressing them. And we are.

Our economic plan is a direct and deliberate response to the challenges facing the economy, including the rising cost of living that is hurting so many Australians today. We are getting on with the job, and we are delivering on our commitments. We are delivering on a better future for all Australians. We committed to rebuilding our economy with stronger wages and more secure work, and we are doing that. One of the very first acts of our government was to successfully argue for a minimum wage increase for our lowest-paid workers. That was an outcome which helped around 2.8 million Australians. And we followed that with a submission to the Fair Work Commission that unequivocally supports a wage increase for aged-care workers, for the tens of thousands of aged-care workers who do essential work every day but are completely undervalued with absolutely no action from those on the opposition benches.

We brought employers, unions and the community sector together at the Jobs and Skills Summit to discuss how we can get wages moving, how we can lift living standards and how we can improve productivity, which was nothing short of sluggish under the previous government. And, in so doing, we've ended up with a positive plan, bringing unions and employers together with the government. In so doing, we've ended the decade of division and delay from those opposite. We are delivering concrete outcomes from our Jobs and Skills Summit. We're delivering consensus on the need to improve the bargaining system and get wages moving again, as well as allowing age pensioners to work and earn more before it affects their pensions.

We committed to investing in Australian skills, in Australian jobs, in Australian manufacturing, and, as the new government, we are doing it. We've secured a $1 billion national skills agreement with the states and the territories. We're delivering 180,000 fee-free TAFE places in 2023, with 15,000 set aside for aged care to meet the workforce challenges that we've been left with by a decade of inaction from the previous government. We're working hard to deliver on our commitment to invest in advanced manufacturing.

We committed to backing clean energy and ending the climate wars, and we are doing it. We have reset Australia's commitment to climate on the world stage, sending a huge signal, an important signal, to the rest of the world that Australia is at the table and that Australia will do our part in the race towards net zero. We're working, just this week, right here, right now, to legislate our target of a 43 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030. Part of that is ensuring our government is accountable to these targets and providing the certainty—which the Australian people want—that we will actually deliver against those targets.

As part of our response to the climate crisis, we're making electric vehicles cheaper with our Treasury Laws Amendment (Electric Car Discount) Bill 2022, which we hope the opposition will support, and our National Electric Vehicle Strategy. We are securing Australia's future by delivering our Powering Australia plan. We are making the largest ever upgrade to our energy grid and driving down power prices for households and small businesses after a decade of complete inaction by those on the other side.

We also committed to easing cost-of-living pressures for Australian families. We are doing that too. We are getting on with the commitments that we made, and we are delivering them. Our budget in October will include our plans for cheaper child care, which will make a huge difference to the household budgets of millions of Australians. Next year, 96 per cent of Australian families will benefit from cheaper early learning. They will benefit from quality, affordable early childhood education under the plans that our government took to the election, which we are ready to implement right now.

We are also removing the penalty for parents taking on extra hours or extra days of work. That was a huge priority that came out of the Jobs and Skills Summit. We know that one of the biggest things we can do as a nation to improve workforce participation is encourage more carers of small children into the workforce—that's usually women—so providing quality, affordable and accessible early education is critical to our nation's economic future.

Today we've introduced legislation to reduce the cost of essential medicines. This is the first time any government has reduced the PBS co-payment. That is going to mean that essential medicines people are accessing on the PBS will cost around $30 less per month, a saving of around $300 a year for the average person who is relying on those PBS medicines. We're helping to ensure that fewer people have to miss filling a script because they can't afford it. The stories of people having to do that are extraordinary. We don't want people to have to choose between taking painkilling medication or taking another medication they need to address their underlying condition. That should not be happening in Australia, and we are getting on with fixing that problem.

There is no denying that the last few years have been difficult. We know that Australians are doing it incredibly tough. We don't need economic forecasts to tell us that, because we are listening to Australians every day. What Australians want is certainty from their government on the way forward. They want a government that does what it said it would do. That is the Albanese government. They want a government that will stick to its word and deliver on its commitments. It's exactly what we're doing.

The legacy of those opposite is a decade of mistakes and missed opportunities, a decade of waste and rorts, a decade of division and delay. They had no plans past the last election. They had no vision for anyone's future but their own. In May, Australians sent a strong and clear message. They wanted change. They wanted a government they could trust, a government who would bring the country together, not divide it, and a government with a plan to address the challenges that families and businesses are facing right now. That's exactly what we are delivering.

The Albanese Labor government were elected with a clear and ambitious plan to build a stronger, more equal Australia. That's what we're doing. We're keeping our promises and working hard to deliver the better future Australians deserve.

Senator CANAVAN (Queensland—Deputy Leader of the Nationals in the Senate) (16:18): What we need as a country right now is to grow our economy—to increase the size of the pie, so to speak—because that is the best way to manage the enormous public debt that we now have, thanks first to the excessive spending of the Rudd-Gillard years and then because of our necessary response to a global pandemic over the last couple of years.

We now have a public debt approaching, and soon to be above, $1 trillion. The best way to help manage that, to deal with that, is to grow our economy. By doing so, we'll have more tax revenue and more wealth to manage that debt. We now have a debt to national income, or GDP, ratio at a level we haven't seen since the years after World War II. The way we came back from that crushing level of debt IN the years after World War II, after defeating the evil of fascism, was to grow our economy. The fifties and sixties was a period of massive economic change and growth in this country that we had not ever seen. It came on the back of the world opening up after the war and the Menzies government of the time keeping an open and vibrant economy. We need to learn those lessons here, after a global pandemic which has not been as devastating as that war, but which has left the similar consequences of large public debt. We have to keep an open economy. We have to get our tax rates down and be competitive so that people will invest, work and thrive in this country and make more wealth for all of us.

The reality right now is that our tax systems are not competitive with those of the rest of the world, especially our personal income tax system. We have a high corporate tax rate, but what's often forgotten or not commented upon is that we have a franking credits system that does not double-tax corporate profits, so the actual impact of the corporate tax rate of 30 per cent is not as high as it might seem on a direct comparison with overseas countries, because, when you get dividends, you can also usually get franked credits. If the company has paid taxes on those, you won't pay the top marginal rate; you'll pay the difference between the marginal rate and the corporate rate.

But there's no such equalising factor for those earning income from labour. The workers of this country get slugged at a rate that is much higher than that of the rest of the world. Our top rate of 45 per cent—it's really 47 per cent when you add the Medicare levy—cutting in at $180,000 a year is one of the highest rates in the developed world, and it cuts in at a level of income that is much lower than that at which it cuts in in many other countries in the rest of the world. I will give a few examples. At 45 per cent, the top rate in the United Kingdom is about the same as ours, but it doesn't cut in until someone earns 150,000 pounds. That's over A$260,000. In the United States, the top rate is just 37 per cent, a full 10 percentage points lower than Australia's. Even in New Zealand, their top rate is just 39 per cent.

So we're way out of whack with many comparable countries that we would be competing with for talent, especially in a world where borders have opened up and people can move. We also have high tax rates below that level for middle-income people. What the stage 3 tax cuts are all about is making sure that middle-income people can have the aspiration to become higher-income people, become wealthier and provide a better future for their children, because these tax cuts, the so-called stage 3 tax cuts that come in in 2024-25, will actually provide a tax saving for any Australian who earns over $45,000 a year. That is a lot of people. That's a lot of Australians. In fact, 95 per cent of Australian taxpayers will benefit from these tax cuts in a few years time.

We hear a lot of rhetoric about these tax cuts being for the rich and benefiting those who are well-to-do. Well, we've got to look at the whole series of tax cuts here. These tax cuts will get rid of one whole tax bracket and make our system much simpler and easier for people. The 37c tax bracket will go. The tax rate will be at least 30c in the dollar for anyone earning over $45,000. The top rate will then only kick in at $200,000, which will remain the same. That is a big tax cut for middle Australia.

The stage 3 tax cuts are a tax cut for middle Australia. Those Australians smack dab in the middle class earn income of somewhere between that $45,000 a year and $200,000 a year. That is middle Australia. Some of those people at the higher end are very lucky and do very well, but all of them probably have worked hard in their life to get to that level, and they deserve reward for effort. We want to encourage future Australians to continue that effort, so these tax cuts come at the right time and in the right place for our country.

If we continue to have higher tax rates than the rest of the world, that will punish effort. It will mean that people will think twice about starting a business. Why would you go and work a bit harder to try to get ahead so you can maybe put your kids through school or do something when the tax office is going to take so much of what you earn?

The other point to make here is that already the average tax rate in this country sits at just over 30c or so in the dollar. That's not the marginal rates but the average rates that people pay. When you think about it, that means that, when most people start work on a Monday, all of Monday is for the tax office. Every bit of work they do on the Monday is for this place. That's for money to come down here to Canberra. About half of Tuesday, too, for the average taxpayer is also on the Canberra clock, just working for the government down here. It's not until after smoko on Tuesday afternoon that you actually get to work for yourself. What we're saying is that maybe we should move that point from lunchtime to morning tea, from big lunch to little lunch, so you can earn a little bit more for yourself and take it home for your family to help them and give them a better future.

I've been here a few years now, and I don't think we spend their money all that well. If we support this motion—

Senator CANAVAN: I don't think you're going to do any better, Senator Chisholm. I think it's a disease in this place. A lot of the money that comes here gets wasted. A lot of your money, that work you do on the Monday and on the Tuesday morning, doesn't always generate the public services that some people like to claim down here. Maybe, if we do have an issue with affording the stage 3 tax cuts, of having to deal at least temporarily with a bit of lower tax revenue, we could look at what is spent here in Canberra and the bureaucracy to make sure that your money, your hard work, is actually providing value for the Australian people. Every Australian family does that. If, after these tax cuts—I'm hoping to god they get through—middle Australia gets a little more money to take home, I know they'll spend it very carefully. They'll think about where that money should go and how it should help their children and their families. I'm not so sure we always do that here. That's why we can afford these tax cuts. These tax cuts will make for a stronger Australia if they go through.

Senator DAVID POCOCK (Australian Capital Territory) (16:26): People want a fair tax system. They recognise that paying tax in Australia allows us to have the quality of life that we have. Paying tax allows us to have the services that we have. Don't be conned by Senator Canavan that taxes simply come to Canberra. Taxes are paying for Medicare. Taxes are providing funds for aged care so that our elderly can actually live in dignity. Taxes are providing a world-class medical system here in Australia.

We've heard so much from the Labor government over the last 108 days about the failures of the Liberal-National government. Everything is their fault. They've inherited a total mess worse than they possibly thought. They didn't create any of these challenges, but they're going to fix them—which is great. You can't say that and, at the same time, stand by bad policy when it comes to stage 3 tax cuts. We're in a cost-of-living crisis. Yes, some people on lower wages will get some tax back. If you're a registered nurse on $72,000 a year, you'll have an extra 681 bucks in your pocket. But if you're a politician here, like Senator Canavan, on $211,000, you're getting $9,000 back. I don't see the fairness in that. I think at this time Australians would recognise that this is not the way that we want to go. This is not how we should be spending our money given the challenges that we face.

We hear from the Labor government that they can't afford to increase shared paid parental leave. That has consensus coming out of their Jobs and Skills Summit. There simply isn't the money. Well, here's $243 billion that we're going to give back, mostly to wealthy Australians, mostly to men, rather than actually spending it on things that Australians want, actually spending it on addressing the crisis that we face, the cost-of-living crisis. We've got people here in Canberra who we're now calling the working homeless. It is shameful for a country like Australia to still be considering these tax cuts when so many people are doing it tough. The Labor government should be ashamed of this decision.

When you're the new government, it is unconscionable to stand by bad policy that may have been justifiable years ago when it was legislated. Sure, there may have been an argument for it, but a lot has happened since then. We have had bushfires, a two-year global pandemic, geopolitical conflict—Russia invading Ukraine—energy prices going through the roof, rising inflation, cost-of-living pressures putting so many everyday Australians under strain, and the Labor government wants to give $243 billion to the wealthiest Australians, mostly men. It is, frankly, ridiculous, and the pressure is only going to mount. I urge you to use your political capital. We hear a lot about how popular the new Labor government is. Use that. Be decisive. This is not going away. This will come into effect just before the next election. I will be interested to see how that plays out, given how tough so many Australians are doing it.

Senator BRAGG (New South Wales) (16:30): It is nice to see you, Mr Acting Deputy President O'Sullivan. It is always good to know when the clock starts ticking because that is the opportunity to make some remarks about this very important matter. When it comes to the philosophy here, it is very clear that there are different views about the role of the state and the role of money within our society and economy. Personally, my view has always been that the state has no money of its own. It must go and levy that from its citizens. That is what we do to provide services and the like, and we have done it over the last few years on a scale that has not been seen for some decades, as a result of this economic shock and health crisis.

Philosophically, we are committed to the idea that people's money is their own and we should only seek to levy their incomes, salaries and wages to pay for services that are required and nothing more. The stage 3 tax cuts, as they are called—in hindsight I think it was a mistake to have broken them down into three stages; it should have been done in one go—are effectively saying, 'Look, we are going to simplify the five brackets down to four and ensure that middle-income earners in particular are able to work an extra shift or do some extra work and not be penalised.'

By being placed into a higher income bracket, people might be paying 32.5 cents in the dollar rather than 30 cents in the dollar if these tax cuts were repealed. That's what we're talking about here. We're talking about a proposition to repeal tax cuts, which would result in a tax increase. It would result in a tax increase to, yes, higher income earners and it would also result in a significant tax increase to middle-income earners. People who are earning $60,000 to $70,000 would pay additional taxation because they would be pushed into a higher tax bracket. We would be going back five tax brackets, which would not be in their interest. We want to have an economy where people want to work additional shifts and take on more hours if they want to.

I know it's not fashionable to look at the issues facing the higher end of the tax spectrum, but the reality is that the people who were here last week at the Jobs and Skills Summit were talking about the issues facing Australian business. Legitimately they have raised the issue of access to skills. We are at a point in our history where we are competing for capital and we are competing for skilled labour. If you look at our closest competitors, their top tax rate cuts in, in the case of Singapore, at $335,000 and in the case of Japan at $417,000—so, almost double our threshold, which is quite low compared with those of our competitors. If we are serious about his nation's competitive position and serious about attracting skilled people to take on roles in this country, when Australian businesses are saying they can't get access to these skilled people, then why would we want to put lead and our own saddlebags and have an even more uncompetitive situation in relation to taxation?

Sure, I know that that part of the argument may not be particularly fashionable, but it is the truth—that $200,000 is a relatively low threshold relative to the thresholds of our competitors. We can imagine ourselves as some locked-away, protected, subsidised economy, as we were in the 1970s and 1980s—and you can look at the history books and see how that went—or we can be realistic and honest about the challenges the nation faces in relation to skilled workers. That is the truth. The middle-income earners would face a tax increase by being dragged into a higher bracket and it would be harder to attract higher-income earners, which are needed to fill the skills gaps that we heard about last week at the talkfest. We heard the Treasurer today talk about his 36 concrete recommendations. Well, if you go and listen to the business people, they will say that access to skills is one of the most important things.

It is true that the government cannot be held responsible for every single problem in the economy. Given that they have been in office for a relatively short period of time, it would be ridiculous to claim that all the ills should be put at their feet. But over the medium to long term you have to try to get the fundamental position right, and that is that we need to be a dynamic economy whereby we have a competitive tax system and a flexible labour market which allows our businesses to be competitive.

The RBA has just decided that it will raise interest rates. That will make it difficult for people who have large mortgages, and, representing New South Wales, I am very aware that there are people with large Sydney mortgages who will be finding this recent uptick in interest rates very difficult. I'm pleased the government is reviewing the RBA. I would say, whilst not making any personal criticism of him, that the RBA governor has made statements in the past that didn't need to be made, that set market expectations in a way that I think has made things more difficult than they should have been. Sometimes it's better to say fewer things. Sometimes fewer words are better. And I do think there are a lot of people now who will struggle to make their mortgage repayments. Commonwealth Bank data shows that 30 to 35 per cent of people in the capital cities have a very threadbare position when it comes to paying back their mortgages. So, ultimately, we don't want to make things any harder than they will be.

One thing that would make it harder for people would be to increase taxation, because by increasing taxation we'll be saying to the rest of the world, 'We're not interested in new investment; we're not interested in having a dynamic and competitive economy,' and therefore there will be fewer jobs; there will be fewer high-paying jobs. And of course one of the things that's within the government's preserve is tax policy, and there is no case to remove the tax cuts that are designed to improve the investment profile of the country. Any removal of those tax cuts will be a tax increase.

Senator WATERS (Queensland—Leader of the Australian Greens in the Senate) (16:39): I think we're in a parallel universe, because the people of Australia just voted to change the government, yet the new government is keeping the policies of the last government. People understand that a budget and governing are about choices, and they hear it loud and clear when the Prime Minister talks about how choices are being made. What this government is doing is choosing to keep the stage 3 tax cuts. They are actively choosing to give $244 billion over 10 years to people that are CEOs, billionaires and politicians. All of those folk are going to get about a $9,000 tax cut every year.

We're in a cost-of-living crisis. I don't think anyone disagrees with that. Why of all things would you be giving tax cuts to the rich when people are struggling to meet their daily cost-of-living challenges? Budgets are about choices. The Australian people did vote for a new government. Why are you keeping the policies of the last one? They weren't right then and they're even less right now. It is the most ill-timed policy decision that you could possibly make, and I think it is a betrayal of everyone who voted Labor that you are going to keep the stage 3 tax cuts. They are now your stage 3 tax cuts, I'm afraid. These are now Labor's stage 3 tax cuts for the wealthy. At the same time, the new government is saying the country is too poor to make child care free, the country is too poor to fix homelessness and the country is too poor to make Medicare include dental and mental health. I'm sorry, but that is just heartbreaking nonsense.

If you axe those stage 3 tax cuts, PBO costings show that you could in fact end homelessness, make child care free and put dental and mental health care into Medicare. Those are the sorts of things that will provide real cost-of-living relief to people and provide services which they deserve to be able to rely on and access free of charge.

On child care, we've got a thousand childcare centres striking today because they are begging for better pay and conditions. So we could also make child care free for parents. But we should be paying those workers more. You could do that with the $244 billion over 10 years—pay women more. Give a legislated increase above CPI to feminised industries.

We heard a lot of talk at the jobs summit last week about women's workforce participation. There's a great idea—pay woman more. Then they won't have to strike out the front of Parliament House, desperately pleading for pay and conditions that reflect the calibre of their work and the importance of their work in raising the next generation. Free child care would cost $9 billion a year. That's a lot of money, but that would ensure women can get back into the workforce; importantly, it would ensure that kids get the best early childhood education that they deserve, that would set them up for a bright future; and, of course, it would reduce not only the gender pay gap but the unfair distribution of unpaid domestic labour in the home.

This government has got a real choice to make. Are they going to be 'Morrison lite', or are they actually going to dump a bad policy and help people? It shouldn't be that much of a conundrum to decide whether to give $244 billion to the rich or to make child care free, fix homelessness and put dental and mental health care into Medicare.

Senator ROBERTS (Queensland) (16:43): If the Senate is talking about tax and the cost of living, we cannot ignore the most regressive tax on the poor and the vulnerable. Parliament is considering it now—$244 billion over 10 years barely registers compared to the trillions of dollars in economic mayhem that climate change and related energy policies are already inflicting, will continue inflicting and are making worse. Make no mistake; climate change and related energy policies are a brutal, highly regressive tax on the poor and the vulnerable.

Trying to tax carbon dioxide means trying to tax every single thing we do as humans, including breathing. That's why the United Nations and the World Economic Forum are pushing these burdens. They want to control every single thing we do. For these policies, the poor will always proportionally pay the highest price—by far, the highest price. Rich, inner-city elites can afford to buy a brand-new electric vehicle. The poor cannot. The rich can afford the outlay to install solar, which they get back with subsidies that the poor pay for through higher electricity charges. The poor cannot. The rich will be able to afford it when power bills go up, and, despite promises about the wind and solar pipedream, power bills are skyrocketing and will skyrocket. The poor cannot afford it, and, while life gets harder and more expensive for the poor, billions of dollars are being poured into the doomed wind and solar pipedreams.

Companies receiving government subsidies to build wind and solar complexes are giant multinational companies, quite often associated with the Chinese Communist Party and run for the benefit of the billionaire CEOs, billionaire owners. Climate change policies are like a reverse Robin Hood, taking taxes from the poor and giving to the rich, thanks to the Greens, the Liberal Party, the Labor Party and the Nationals. People on the minimum wage will suffer as life gets more expensive—much, much more expensive. As more intermittent and unreliable wind and solar is forced into the grid and reliable baseload power is prematurely forced out, power bills will go ever higher. As productive farming land is locked up for carbon dioxide credits that the Nationals, Liberals, Labor and the Greens want, groceries will get more expensive.

So, let's talk briefly about the carbon dioxide credit rort. If a producer of carbon dioxide pays for enough trees to supposedly offset carbon dioxide, it will get the green tick of approval and continue producing carbon dioxide. It's a tax, a hypocritical and destructive tax, about everything in life, because the end user, the customer, the people, will pay. The credits don't stop anything. They just say companies can do it as long as we, the people, pay a tree fee. Of course, that includes a fee to the companies and the government and the United Nations for their apparent services in managing this system—a tax. There are many more examples, and no-one should be in any doubt: climate change policies and related energy policies try to change the entire country, the entire economy. These changes will restrict almost everything—everything—making life more expensive. The rich will be able to afford it. The poor will not. Climate policies are a highly regressive tax on the poor.

Senator McGRATH (Queensland) (16:47): Put simply, Greens are bad, tax cuts are good. Cutting taxes is good for your family, it's good for Australia. Indeed, it is our patriotic duty as Australians to fly our flag, cut our taxes and have a barbecue, because I don't know about you, Mr Acting Deputy President O'Sullivan, I want Australians to have more money into their back pocket. I want Australians to decide how they spend their money, so I want to cut taxes. I came into this place to cut taxes because we believe in freedom. We believe in the right and the might of the individual to decide how they spend their money, and what we're seeing is the Greens coming into this place because they think they know better than Australians.

The Greens want to tax Australians more. They want to tax Australian business and Australian families because the Greens love taxes. Well, I love cutting taxes, so the more taxes we can cut the better Australia will be, and the freer Australians will be. The Greens have come in here and, because they are a pack of lairs, they are saying that this is a tax cut for billionaires. Well, they are a bunch of liars, the Greens party, because guess what?

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT ( Senator O'Sullivan ): Senator McGrath, I ask you to withdraw.

Senator McGRATH: I wasn't reflecting on any individual. I just said the Greens were a pack of liars.

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT: Senator McGrath, I ask you to withdraw. I have been advised that it would be against—

Senator McGRATH: I will withdraw, Mr Acting Deputy President, but let me put it to you: the Greens and people who sit with the colour green—the teal towards the dark green—they wouldn't know truth if it fell on them from a high place. If these stage 3 tax cuts are repealed, it means a teacher who earns a $70,000 a year would lose $620, a nurse earning $90,000 a year would lose $870 and a diesel fitter—diesel, it's a scary word for the Greens because they don't like diesel—earning $100,000 a year would lose more than $1,370 a year. The tax cuts are all about middle Australia. The Greens come here—these whinging, whining, pathetic people—with their extensive property portfolios. Did you know the member from Ryan has four homes? How many of those homes do you think are out for social housing? I say to the Greens who love taking the money but don't like sharing it that they are a bunch of hypocrites.

Here is the other fallacy being spread by the fairies at the bottom of the garden. They're saying that those who earn more don't pay their fair share. How wrong is that? When the stage 3 is fully implemented, an individual with a taxable income of $200,000, who earns 4.4 times more than an individual with a taxable income of $45,000, will pay 10 times more tax. This is why we come into politics, ladies and gentlemen. We come into politics because we believe in freedom. We come into politics because we want individuals, businesses and families to grow. The best way for Australians to grow is for them to have more money in their back pockets. This is why these tax cuts, when they are implemented, are so good for Australia.

Mr Acting Deputy President, I am going to let you in on a secret, and the secret is that I suspect that the jelly backs on the other side of the chamber will do a deal. They will do a deal with the Greens—

Senator Scarr: Power sharing.

Senator McGRATH: and it will be a power-sharing deal, as a Senator Scarr pointed out. They will do a deal and these tax cuts will be no more. They will do a deal. Listen to the language of people like the Minister for Finance, who is sitting over there. They are not strident in their defence of these tax cuts. They are using the wishy-washy language of the Labor Party. So do not be surprised by this breaking news that these tax cuts will not proceed, because of the weakness of that side. How wrong is that for those of us who believe in freedom and believe in cutting taxes because we want you to have more money in your back pocket?

Senator SHOEBRIDGE (New South Wales) (16:51): This government's priorities are cooked. Labor is giving a $244 billion tax cut largely to the wealthy and to billionaires, but less than $2 a day to people on JobSeeker. Does that sound fair? These tax cuts are grotesque and they are self-serving. Members in this parliament are proposing to give themselves a $9,000-plus tax cut and billionaires a $9,000-a-year tax cut. No wonder the coalition senators are here supporting it: '$9,000 sounds nice, thanks very much!'

Meanwhile, I met nurses just last week who are being forced to work 41 shifts in 28 days because there is not enough money in our public hospital system. I have met students who are sick from the black mould toxicity in the substandard housing that they are struggling to pay rent for, and it's still costing 50 per cent of their income. And we have Labor and the coalition saying they want to give billionaires and politicians a $9,000 tax cut. It's disgraceful.

This parliament should be fighting for the many, not the few, but right now this government is dishing out favours to billionaires and big corporations. They talk about a living crisis. They say they're standing with workers, but on the really big decisions—the ones that are the $244 billion-dollar decisions, which are make or break on fairness—they say they can't do anything about it, that they agreed to it a few years ago and they're just stuck. Well, here is a message to the Labor government: you are now in government. You are not stuck with the coalition's rotten tax agenda. Have the courage to stand up and reverse these tax cuts.

Cancelling these tax cuts means that we can get dental and mental care into Medicare. Think about the changes that would make to have dental in Medicare. It is outrageous that in this country one of the key indicators of your class and your wealth is the state of your teeth. The only reason that is, and the only reason that will be next year and the year after, is that Labor doesn't have the courage to reverse these outrageous billionaire focused tax cuts.

We can make child care free, and we can pay early childhood educators and all teachers a fair wage, but we can't do that while we had out $244 billion in tax cuts to billionaires and politicians and those who already have enough. This parliament should be standing alongside those early childhood educators who are out there today, taking action for better pay and conditions so they can look after our kids and our grandkids. That's what they want to do. And I give a shoutout to the United Workers Union and every single childcare worker. Stand strong! The Greens are with you and we'll keep fighting for you until we reverse these tax cuts and give you the pay and conditions you deserve. Childcare educators are striking today, and they are calling for this parliament to put children before profit.

That's what Labor needs to do: put people before profit. Put nurses, midwives and healthcare workers before profit. Put teachers and students before profit. Put First Nations people across this country before profit. That's who this parliament should be for—not the billionaires, who don't need another tax break. It should be for the millions of Australians who are desperate for help while their wages are stuck and expenses are skyrocketing. This parliament should be standing up for young people, for people on Centrelink, for people with disabilities, for First Nations people, for people without a home, for people renting and unable to even think about owning a home in this country.

But these people will be worse off under Labor's tax cut. This parliament should be for every single one of you who needs our help. To all of you I say this: the Greens believe this parliament should be for you and will keep fighting to make good on that promise. (Time expired)

Senator BARBARA POCOCK (South Australia) (16:56): Australia has a proud history of a progressive tax system. The stage 3 tax cuts are a watershed in relation to that history. They represent a turning away, and we know that we will never get back what we are going to give away with this reform, if it proceeds. We need to hang onto a proud Australian tradition, which is a tax system that looks after the bottom and fairly distributes the resources to the services that every Australian needs. These tax increases will give, as we all know—as I hope every Australian knows—$9,000 to billionaires and $9,000 to everyone in this place, but nothing for those on minimum wage, nothing for the working poor, who the other Senator Pocock spoke about, and nothing for the workers at the front of this parliament today who every day turn up for a job that pays them just over $20 an hour.

I think a lot about the care economy. I think about the economy that delivers care for our children, care for people with disability, care for our older citizens. All of us in this place, over our lifetime, depend on that care, and we all know that in depending on that care we need to look after it fairly. We need to make sure that those workers who are helping to look after our kids, grandchildren, parents or other friends with disability are properly rewarded and supported. We have a care economy in this country which is starved. It is thinned out. It is underpaid. It is overworked. It is disrespected. The stage 3 tax cuts are a doorway to making a historic intervention to fix that economy, which will be good for the future of our country and the citizens of this country.

As an economist, I know that when things change, when economic circumstances change, we have to change strategy. Only a fool doesn't do that. This policy was wrong at the time it was shaped. Labor knew it, and Labor opposed it. It is totally wrong now in such different economic circumstances. We are in an inequality crisis. The top of Australia has run away from the bottom. We can measure it in housing. We can measure in the quality of care. We can measure it in our health care. We can measure it, as my colleague says, in the quality of our teeth. And we can certainly measure it in a cost-of-living crisis which is leaving so many Australians under such pressure.

Today I met with Sam, a worker at Port Lincoln in South Australia, who came to the parliament to talk about his life as a carer for a household of people with disability. Sam works for $23 an hour. He's been doing the same job for 4½ years as a casual. He feels disrespected, he feels underpaid, he feels exhausted and he loves the people he cares for. He says, 'I love the guys I care for.' He is working for love, and he is not paid enough money. It is vitally important that we stop the stage 3 tax cuts and turn to the parts of our economy that are so desperate for our attention, for our resources and for our care. We must not pass the stage 3 tax cuts.

The PRESIDENT: Thank you, Senator Pocock. We will come back to this debate.

The PRESIDENT (16:59): Pursuant to order, I now call Senator Liddle to make her first speech and ask honourable senators that the usual courtesies be extended to her. I call Senator Liddle.

Senator LIDDLE (South Australia) (17:00): Thank you, President and fellow senators, of this 47th Parliament. In making my way as an elected member to this place I contested two Liberal Senate preselections and two federal election campaigns, one in 2016 and again in 2022. I have spoken with many hundreds of party members, listened to thousands of voters at shows, street corners and shopping centres across South Australia on the issues that matter to them most. At the 2022 election, with a marked level of concern, people spoke of the increasing cost of living; individual and national security and safety; health and mental health; housing for owning and renting; and the environment, and it was not all about climate change. The observation in a nutshell is there's a desire for relative certainty and looking forward to a better future, not looking back. What I learned from these interactions was the importance of listening, not to the loudest, not to the most resourced and not to the most organised but to all the voices.

With experience in executive management and leadership across some of our largest and most economically significant industries, much of my work has been in the true engine room that fuels our economy—the private sector. I've owned and operated several successful small businesses, worked and volunteered in not-for-profits, in health, the arts, tertiary education and more, focusing on governance and on social and economic participation. As a working parenting adult I earned undergraduate and postgraduate university and coveted industry qualifications, securing the tools that I've since known have served me well.

In life, education and work, success has not just been mine. I am here because of those who gave unwavering support in regular, reliable and sufficient measure and also, somewhat ironically, by those who did not. When the detractors, the hecklers and the naysayers told me my dreams were impossible, unachievable or simply unlikely my response was, quite quickly: 'Sit back; watch carefully. They are not.'

Standing six feet tall, 183 centimetres, I am used to references in relation to height, so it is with that that I acknowledge those who stood beside me, behind me and in front of me and whose shoulders I leaned on, almost cried on but most definitely stood on to get here.

To my grandparents, who have long since passed, who laboured to build vast pastoral empires on country to which they will forever belong: Corporal Harold Liddle enlisted to fight under the Australian flag and on behalf of that flag for what then was King and country. His sacrifice is rightly forever remembered. To my mum and dad, Geoff and Jean, watching from their home in Alice Springs—Arrernte country: I watched you show up, stand up, speak up time and again with courage and conviction. Together you've defied the narrative, the stereotypes, the statistics, holding sacred belief in individual responsibility, reward for hard work, a fair go and being the masters of your own destiny. From the stars up above and from the Senate gallery and across this country and the globe are the children and grandchildren who have benefited from observing those values. My older sister worked in education and administration before her potential for greater contribution was cut short by a despicable act of violence that killed her. My younger sister joined the South Australian police as a police officer, completed a science degree and an honours law degree and is now contributing to the area of justice to tackle injustice. Another younger sister completed a degree in agricultural science, then a PhD in environmental science, to further enhance her love, understanding and respect for traditional Aboriginal land management practice. The youngest of our clan, my brother—who's actually made it here—has possibly the highest level of responsibility. He's flown in the skies in a now 30-year career as a captain—in fact, as a training captain—for a major international airline.

My parents knew that structural, emotional and economic barriers and challenges were real for everyone but could be overcome by commitment to a very good plan and support from decent, good people. Indulge me as I thank my own family: my partner of 30 years and our children, who I have been asked not to name for fear of embarrassing them. I love you more than you could possibly imagine. I thank aunts, uncles, nannas, extended family, and dearest friends old and new, too numerous to name, many of whom have been on this long journey and have been forgiving and patient.

To the Liberal broad church: thank you for backing me to back enduring belief in freedom; to choose our way of life and living, subject, of course, to the rights of others; for backing individual initiative and enterprise, freedom of speech, religion and association. To the many volunteers who supported the campaign: this was simply not possible without you. I acknowledge especially the work of Liberal members and senators representing South Australia, who helped voters make the decision to deliver a sixth senator for the state. I acknowledge all senators who welcome me here and the work of parliamentary staff who settled me in. Fellow South Australians: now elected, I turn to the responsibility of representing you faithfully with clarity and confidence.

My South Australia is a state of more than 1.8 million people who live beside the mighty River Murray and the imposing Flinders Ranges, and on the shores of the Southern Ocean. We have the rolling hills of Adelaide and the Fleurieu Peninsula, the stunning Kangaroo Island, and the city of Adelaide, once awarded one of the world's most livable cities. We're already known for our world-class food and wine regions, our rich and vibrant arts and cultural scene, our tourist attractions and our experiences. We're a place of imagination and invention. Think of the Hills Hoist clothesline, container deposit schemes, the stump-jump plough and David Unaipon's shearing handpiece.

It's people with confidence and capability, and the right legislation and policy levers, that will unleash the full capability of systems, processes, environments and infrastructure. Based on my personal story, my values and my political party, you will see me on my feet for a robust economy, not just for today but for tomorrow; stability and certainty for business; lower taxes and less red tape; good service delivery and accountability; data monitoring and outcomes; strong borders to protect our people, industry and native flora and fauna; safer streets, communities, homes and workplaces, no matter your postcode, culture or income; and a sensible, measured approach to addressing the issues around climate that considers diversity, and who and how people are affected differently and disproportionately.

More locally, my home South Australia is at the forefront of building Australia's sovereign defence capabilities, building what we need to help keep us safe. Critical to our security and prosperity is the coalition's belief that South Australia should lead the creation and delivery of our vital defence and associated industries. I will be a strong advocate for growing South Australia.

Our food, wine, wool, grain, meat and seafood industries and advanced manufacturing have unprecedented workforce vacancies that must be filled to reflect the diversity of South Australians.

Moving now from productivity to people: Australians have contacted me lamenting the devastation and chaos they know will revisit their lives with the intended removal of the cashless debit card. The card is an important part of a broader suite of solutions. It gives power and respite to the most vulnerable men, women and children and the elderly—yes, those who need it most—and it is those people, not the drinkers and drug users, not the abusers, who will suffer the most from its withdrawal. Indeed, in response to what is a philosophical objection to the card, residents living in areas from Queensland, Central Australia, the Kimberley, Ceduna and surrounds, despite raising their concerns, are not being heard on this matter. Instead, the people who are being heard are those screaming human rights. But I say: whose rights are they defending? Maybe you need to live in a town devastated by alcohol, drugs and violence and see it eroded from within. Not convinced yet? Keep walking in my shoes, having helped care for foster children—yes, wards of the state. That may help you come to a different conclusion.

I've looked after a child—hello, Joe—now a man who has who has fetal alcohol syndrome, never able to live with his parents. Yes, he's had some big hurdles, but he's recently graduated with a certificate IV and is still in work. I'm here to tell you, his family and the families who raised him couldn't be more proud of him. And yet, another child, again from a remote community who lost his mother to alcohol-fuelled dysfunction now lives forever with the consequences of that. So, rather than unleashing the rivers of alcohol and drugs, and with it more associated abuse and neglect, how about ridding the communities of the miscreants, pretenders, controllers and rescuers? Leave them nowhere to hide or thrive. You know who they are, the ones that are there for the ride, for the cultural immersion, or where their apathy and paralysis prevail.

Our regulators, our government officials need to do their jobs better and reward those people working hard to work against the tide of culture of mediocrity and keep only those people delivering outcomes who we know are there for the right reasons. So it was with frustration that I watched on, quarantined by COVID, as the Aged Care and Other Legislation Amendment (Royal Commission Response) Bill passed this house. In relation to Aboriginal community controlled service delivery, I paraphrase subsection 2, clause (a), which does not require the governing board to have a majority of independent executive directors; (b) have at least one member of the governing body of the provider having experience in the provision of clinical care. Clinical care is assistance with mobility, communication, catheter care, wound management and more. It is one of eight aged-care quality standards for safe and quality care and service identified in the aged-care quality standards commission.

The passing of this legislation means Aboriginal community controlled organisations do not have to meet those requirements in the same way as everyone else. Despite caring for the most vulnerable of the most vulnerable, clients with multiple and complex chronic illness and lower life expectancy and in the most isolated regions, there is no expectation of even partial transition to a model that satisfies that standard. Go your hardest if you think that this pushback is racist, ill-conceived, ill-informed or unreasonable because I'll continue to call the double-standards, disturbing assumptions and what I call reverse racism. More broadly, I want our country to think different, act different, demand different, push away from the pressure of sameness, the rejection of discourse, the perils of groupthink, reject overpolicing of language, cancel culture and aggressive social media commentary. All that does is conjure ridicule, create fear and stifle our potential to do better.

I want this country to stop doing what doesn't or won't work, to have higher expectations, to be tolerant of mistakes and missteps, and to admit when we get it wrong and celebrate when we get it right. I get angry when others seek to define me firstly or only by race, and I know from experience it is getting worse. I was not an Indigenous news reporter, or an Indigenous businesswoman, or an Indigenous company board director. I had the same qualifications and experiences as everybody else. First and foremost, I am just me. I look forward to objecting loudly to navel-gazing, paternalism, box-ticking, quasi-consultation, silly reporting that returns little value, and ideas that fail to provide evidence of change.

I'm inspired by the words said in 1942 by Liberal Sir Robert Menzies, pushing back on government that seeks to control and limit freedom, one which seeks to nurse us, rear us, control us, maintain us, pension us and bury us. In short, give me the tools and information I need to make decisions and to prepare for my own future and help me only when I truly need it.

Senator Neville Bonner made history with his first speech 51 years ago this week on 8 September. A Liberal senator, he was the first Aboriginal person to enter federal parliament in a casual vacancy and later by popular vote. He believed the interests of Indigenous Australians would best be advanced by working within the existing political institutions, and he lamented the much too unwarranted focus on race: 'I am Bonner, proudly an Aborigine and a member of the Australian community. A token of no person.' I acknowledge his contribution and that of all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander politicians of all political persuasions, both past and present. My identity is with Arrernte of Central Australia—the cultural group of both of my parents. With that, I acknowledge the Ngunnawal people and their land, on which this House now lies, and pay respects to the ancestors and elders past and present.

I want to talk more about equity, because it is good for individuals. It's good for our nation, and it's good for our future. I think perhaps some of the most rewarding work I've done to date is in helping others into work. But from here I can encourage that on a much bigger scale. It is in everyday workplaces that sameness, the sharing of water coolers, meeting rooms or boardrooms and having the same qualifications and, yes, the same expectations destroy stereotypes based on disability, race, age, culture or religion. And all workforces and workplaces must be safe.

When I was Chief People and Performance Officer at Voyage's Ayers Rock Resort, with around a thousand employees, the target was also to employ 400 Indigenous Australians, around 40 per cent of the workforce at Santos—yes, Santos—a companywide functional oversight on matters related to Aboriginal affairs in employment and training, community investment and cultural heritage. The target was over 700 outcomes in the energy sector, and that was long ago. With opposition leader Peter Dutton, I recently visited Intract, an Aboriginal owned and operated company. It was Santos that gave Intract its first major project, which now employs 75 Aboriginal employees, making the workforce 90 per cent Indigenous. With a target of five per cent by 2030, it won't be the Public Service that will deliver these jobseekers work. Instead, look to the private sector, where they have already delivered well beyond single-digit outcomes.

In conclusion, we need to teach what it takes for bystanders to speak up and push back regardless of how inconvenient or uncomfortable. That's in our workplaces, in our individual lives, in everything we do—and we'll be better for it. Although our television, radio, newspapers and social media echo loudly the tales of panic, dread and doom, I am confident ordinary Australians—the battlers, the fighters—are ready for a sensible, measured conversation on tough matters of mutual and country interest. Having worked on projects to provide protection for vulnerable and threatened species, I too have great interest in the environment, but not in a way that supports hands glued to sidewalks to stop others going about their business or stands in the way of agreements struck with traditional owners under their right to negotiate legally, transparently, freely and with informed consent.

Common sense beats the emotional and the hysterical on every issue every time. Listen—you can already hear the click of the keyboards, the ping of the posting and the landslide of protest. I make a commitment to myself that when I start each new day, every day, my message to self is rightly quite simple. In opposition, I will relish working with colleagues to hold this government to account for its promises, legislation and policy in this chamber, in committees and in the public domain. I can't change yesterday, but today I might just help change tomorrow, and that's what I will stand for in this place.

Senator McKIM (Tasmania—Australian Greens Whip) (17:24): Budgets are all about priorities, they are all about choices, they are all about values, and government policies are about choices and values. The Australian Labor Party has made a choice and that choice is to adopt holus-bolus Scott Morrison's $240 billion worth of tax cuts for the top end—for the billionaires, for the politicians, for the CEOs. I say 'Scott Morrison's tax cuts', and of course they were designed by him, as Treasurer, and introduced by him as Prime Minister. But, as of today, they are the Australian Labor Party 's tax cuts. They belong now to the Australian Labor Party. And the choice in adopting those tax cuts—those obscene $240 billion tax cuts for the top end that Labor has made—is stuck, because this is the Labor Party that has made it clear that folks who are on JobSeeker will be condemned to abject poverty. They will be condemned to starvation rations. They will be condemned to having to make a choice every week about whether to put food on the table or to pay their rents or pay their power bills.

Yet, at the very same time that the government is crying poor, saying, 'We can't afford to raise the amount of money we give to people on JobSeeker,' they are, in the same breath, proposing to give $240 billion worth of tax cuts to the top end—to the billionaires, to the politicians and to the CEOs. And what's their excuse? 'Oh, they're legislated, and we're not going to re-litigate that,' said the Prime Minister at the Press Club last week. Well, a little bit of educative work here for the Australian Labor Party: Section 1 of the Australian Constitution vests the legislative power of the Commonwealth in—wait for it—the federal parliament. Section 51(ii) of the Australian Constitution gives—who? Wait for it—the federal parliament the power to make taxation laws. And the federal parliament has the power to—do you know what?—repeal taxation laws, and that is exactly what we've got the numbers to do, and the only thing stopping the repeal of these obscene stage 3 tax cuts is the Australian Labor Party.

Senator ALLMAN-PAYNE (Queensland) (17:27): We've heard a lot of rhetoric from some people in the chamber around the stage 3 tax cuts. But we need to remind ourselves that what we are talking about is people's lives.

Just before I came into this place as a senator I was a secondary high school teacher in a public school. I taught students whose families are doing it tough in this cost-of-living crisis. I taught students who are working four or five nights a week—not for pocket money, but to help put food on the table for their families. Those students come to school tired. They don't have time to do their assignments, and they do poorly on their exams, because they are working to help support their families. That should not be happening in a rich country like this. I taught students who came to school hungry because their parents or their carers were on JobSeeker and their families did not have enough money to put food on the table. Again, that should not be happening in a rich country like this. Students who are hungry find it very difficult to learn. They too suffer when they are sitting assessments and doing homework and exams. I taught students whose families were living in a shed. I taught students who were living in the open air under houses. I taught students whose families were living in cars.

This government is going to give $244 billion to the top end of town while students and their families and carers suffer. That is shameful. It is reprehensible. It is obscene. How about we take that $244 billion and we raise JobSeeker so that families and their kids can afford to eat, how about we take that money and we put it into housing so that students and their families have a roof over their heads and how about we take that money and we properly fund public education so that every kid in this country has the same opportunities for a good life?

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT ( Senator Marielle Smith ): The question is that the urgency motion be agreed to.

Senator STEELE-JOHN (Western Australia) (17:39): by leave—I table a nonconforming petition in relation to a fair go for Vietnam War era national service personnel, a campaign led by Geoff Parkes, president of Nasho Fair Go, and I seek leave to make a one-minute statement.

Leave not granted.