PRIVATE MEMBERS' BUSINESS

Ms KARA COOK (Bonner) (11:46): Imagine knowing that, to complete your degree or training, you need to stop earning an income, not for a day or two but for weeks and sometimes even months. You still have rent to pay. You still have groceries, petrol, looking after kids, childcare fees—but you also have hundreds of hours of mandatory unpaid placement ahead of you, and, without completing it, you don't graduate.

That has been the reality for far too many Australian students. We've heard, today, many stories about what this means for students. It has meant choosing, sometimes, between the qualification they have worked years towards and simply being able to pay their bills.

We have heard from students cutting back shifts, burning through their savings, having to give up their jobs or, worse still, giving up their degree or training entirely. Labor is changing that. In 2024, Labor announced paid prac—the type of policy that only a Labor government would make.

For the first time, the Australian government helped eligible students with the cost of living with paid prac while they completed the mandatory placements they needed to graduate. This was a fundamental change, and now we're taking the next step. From 1 July 2027, Labor is expanding paid prac to 10 more frontline health professions: clinical psychology, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech pathology, paramedicine, radiography, pharmacy, rehabilitation therapies, audiology and podiatry.

If we think about how often Australians rely on these professions throughout their lives, it paints a picture of how important these professions are to our society. The paramedic who arrives on what might be the very worst day in a person's life, the physio helping you to walk again after surgery, the speech pathologist working with a child to find their voice—these professions matter, and we need more people choosing them.

In my electorate of Bonner, around 12,000 people already work in health care and social assistance, and, in the last census, more than 4½ thousand Bonner residents worked in hospitals alone and almost 9,000 people were studying at university or another higher education institution. Behind those numbers are thousands of people building careers and providing the services that families across my community depend on.

Among those almost 9,000 students is the next generation of our health workforce. We want students to graduate. We want them to take up these jobs, but, when we ask them to complete enormous amounts of unpaid practical training to get there, we limit their opportunity.

For radiography students, practical training can add up to more than a year to their degree. Try fitting that around a normal work week. We cannot keep saying Australia needs more skilled health professionals while putting the financial barriers in the way of people trying to become them.

Paid prac is about removing one of those barriers, but it is also part of something much bigger because a stronger Medicare isn't about just what we fund; it's about who is there to deliver. You can invest in hospitals. You can open clinics.

You can expand services, but ultimately somebody has to be there to provide the care. Australia needs these students, and we need to support them. Labor understands this.

That is why we created paid prac, and it's why we're expanding it. It is all part of the government's commitment to a better future for all Australians. Paid prac is good cost-of-living policy.

It is good education policy, and it's good health policy. Most importantly, it backs Australians who are putting in the work to build a better future for themselves and who will spend their careers looking after the rest of us. Only Labor values these students, and we will continue to deliver and expand paid prac to support them.