Address to Labor Party Caucus – Parliament House, Canberra
Well, friends, it is good to be back. And it’s good to be here the day before what will be a Labor Budget in every sense tomorrow night. A Labor Budget which tackles the immediate challenges that are before us.
When talking with other international leaders in the UK, at the sidelines of the Coronation, there are none who didn’t wish they were Australia. You have global inflation having a major impact on slowing economies right around the world.
You have, in spite of, I did have time to watch on the way back, one of our opponents yesterday morning saying that we had the highest inflation of any country in the G7. Now, we’re not in the G7. That’s a separate point.
But in fact, of course, the UK has a higher inflation rate, the United States has higher interest rates, and the world is struggling through two events. One, the ongoing impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and secondly, the pandemic and what it did to supply chains and causing disruption around the world.
What we’re doing is tackling those immediate challenges, dealing with the pressures that are on working families. And tomorrow night, we will have $14.6 billion of cost of living relief targeted for those who need it most.
And I want to congratulate, particularly, Jim Chalmers, our Treasurer, and Katy Gallagher, our Finance Minister, and all the members of the ERC who have sat for day after day, hour after hour, to the point whereby I had to leave the country to get away from those meetings to have a break.
We have worked very hard over many months since the October Budget. We’ve worked hard as well because we’ve had to find dollars for all of those programs that ended on June 30 of this year.
Essential programs on community services funding, essential programs relating to our national security, essential programs regarding infrastructure, regarding service delivery right across the board, including in areas like health and education.
We had to find money for the programs that, it’s not like they just were going to end on June 30. It’s that they didn’t begin when we have an art gallery down the road here that has one piece of art, thanks to Gough Whitlam, worth half a billion dollars, but has buckets in the corner collecting water from leaky roofs, then that is simply not good enough.
And we had to find space to protect that as well as to protect a few other natural assets, such as Kakadu, and the areas around Sydney Harbour National Park, which have suffered from absolute neglect for a long period of time for the nine years of the former government.
But we’ve done that. We’ve done that whilst making sure that, as I promised during the election campaign, we don’t leave people behind. But we also don’t hold people back. And tomorrow night is about aspiration of people for a better life.
Aspiration, the investment we’re making in expanding fee-free TAFE to 300,000 places, in providing support for additional university places, in providing the support for advanced manufacturing, in recognising as other world leaders do, like the UK Prime Minister, Conservative Rishi Sunak, that the challenge of climate change is also the economic opportunity of creating jobs and new industries as we transition as well.
There’s another area in which we create aspiration, one of them standing here. And I was really proud, today, to announce the single parenting payment would increase from eight to fourteen, so that those families could look after people.
Now, when we sat down around that table for hour after hour, we always went back to the commitments that we made. We made commitments that no matter how young you were, the first youngest Australians, that they’d get the support through early learning. Right through to working people would get support as well, and we’re seeing wages starting to rise, as we said we would.
And we also said that we’d look after our oldest Australians who need respect. And that’s why I’m very proud that we are providing the funding, an additional $11.3 billion in adjustment that’s been made, to make sure that we fulfil the promise to lift up the wages of people in the aged care sector, 250,000 of them.
So this Budget will be in the best tradition of the Australian Labor Party. Dealing with those immediate challenges, but always with the eye on the future, on the medium and long-term, to make sure that we’re delivering, laying those foundations for a better future that we promised when we moved from the office down there, to this office here.
And I do note that while we’ve been doing that, we’ve seen other resignations foreshadowed and more chaos on the other side. Well, they can be distracted by being concerned about each other and concerned about themselves. What our concern is about is always about the Australian people. Always about the Australian economy and jobs. Always about a fairer society. Always about how we create that better future.
And I must say, colleagues, that our ranks are about to increase. Now, we had a little by-election on April 1. And for 100 years, governments have had hopes that they would win a seat off the opposition, a held seat. But for 100 years, it hasn’t happened.
When I rang Mary Doyle and asked her to recontest as the Candidate for Aston, it was a big ask. When Mary Doyle started, she was running for a seat that had received a Liberal primary vote of 54.7% and a two party preferred vote above 60%. She ran hard in that campaign, and showed herself to be a quality candidate whose decency just absolutely stood out to the people of Aston. And she received a very big swing.
It was a big ask to run twice for a seat, and Mary Doyle was prepared to do just that. And all of the figures showed that we were hoping to do okay, and if we had have held that vote from 2022, that would have been outstanding.
But instead, Mary Doyle decided to defy history, and a by-election in which you receive a swing of that magnitude, towards the government from an opposition-held seat, is literally unprecedented. The only precedent we can find going back was 1920 in Kalgoorlie that were different circumstances. To be clear, a bloke was expelled from the Parliament for treason, against the Crown, and recontested. And not surprisingly, under the circumstances, whatever people might think about that, he was not successful.
But Mary Doyle was successful. She ran an amazing campaign. She worked each and every day to do us proud. And I’d like to ask colleagues to welcome the Member for Aston, Mary Doyle.