ADJOURNMENT

Mr HOLZBERGER (Forde) (19:34): My first adjournment speech in my first last sitting week of the year is giving me a chance to reflect on what I've learnt over the last six months. I have tried to employ a very simple philosophy in the electorate that I am privileged to represent, and that is to listen, to fight for what I hear and to deliver for our community.

To that end, we've been doorknocking most weekends of the year. Our team have been out there, knocking on doors. I've been organising house visits.

We've been holding community barbecues. The sorts of issues I'm hearing are that people are still doing it really tough. It's been a crisis, in many ways, as our housing minister says, 40 years in the making—not just in housing but in energy, training and so many areas.

I think that this government is beginning to turn it around. I think that we are really beginning to deliver. With Medicare, I've never seen, in all of the time that I've been a participant in or an observer of politics, one single policy have such a massive impact as that policy to provide incentives for GPs to bulk-bill.

That has meant that, in the electorate of Forde, we went, overnight, from nine bulk-billing clinics to 20—more than doubling the number of clinics. That number has gone up to 21, and that number is only going to continue to rise. I've never seen a policy be so successful.

Housing, I believe, is my No. 1 priority in Forde. That is where people are really doing it the toughest, and this has been a policy failure, as our housing minister says, over 40 years in the making. The complete lack of federal government investment in public housing that we're used to created the problem that we have today.

Our postwar economic miracle was very much based on cheap public housing and cheap public energy. But, over the last 40 years, the federal government really left the field and left people to struggle—until now. But we are delivering, and I am delivering in Forde, some very practical policies—policies like the five per cent deposit; policies like the Housing Australia Future Fund, which is already building almost as many houses in Forde in one year as the coalition built in 10 years; policies like the Help to Buy scheme; policies like building 100,000 houses just for first home buyers; and policies like getting behind National Cabinet's objective of 1.2 million homes to take that pressure off.

They are the sorts of policies that this government is delivering in communities like mine. The cost of living is, without doubt, something that housing is a part of and that health care is a part of, but not just housing and health care. I can see the member for Hume shaking his head at me and my speech tonight.

Member for Hume, I'm shaking my head at the policy that you took to the last election—a policy to bring taxes up on Australian people. When that happened, Member for Hume, that's when I thought I had a chance of winning Forde, by the way. That was the very day I thought, 'Hang on, they can't seriously be going to repeal the tax cuts.' When you did, that's when I thought, 'I've got a chance here.' But it's not just tax cuts; it's energy rebates and it's cutting HECS by 20 per cent.

When we cut, we're about cutting the cost of living for people. It's things like real wages growth. I think we've had eight consecutive quarters of real wages growth.

That replaced your five consecutive quarters of cutting real wages. Ultimately, the world that I grew up in was a very different world to the one we have today. In the nineties, when I went back to my home town, Broken Hill, it had an unemployment rate of over 20 per cent—Depression-level unemployment.

Today it's different. We've got work. We've got employers screaming out for workers.

But, again, a failed training system has meant that Labor is now playing catch-up. That's why things like free TAFE are helping both people to get the skills that they need to have a good life and employers to employ the workers that they need. There's a lot to do.

I'm listening to workers and fighting for workers and for people in our community, and this government is delivering. (Time expired)