MATTERS OF PUBLIC IMPORTANCE

Mr GORMAN (Perth—Assistant Minister to the Prime Minister, Assistant Minister for the Public Service and Assistant Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) (15:19): Labor believes in public services. Labor is the party that created Medicare. Labor is the party that expanded Medicare to deliver some 137 new Medicare urgent care clinics across Australia.

It was Labor that legislated to ensure that the NBN stays in public hands. It was Labor that ensured that we have superannuation for all working Australians. It's in living memory of many in this place when it was just public servants and a few fortunate people in the private sector who had superannuation.

Labor democratised it, and we made it available for everyone. We believe in serving the public, we believe in public services and we believe in Australia's public service. I will note that I've got a lot of colleagues here who dedicated themselves to delivering services to the Australian public prior to coming into this parliament.

The member for Maribyrnong fought for wages for public servants at Royal Perth Hospital in my electorate. The member for Banks served as a public servant and diplomat, serving Australia overseas. The member for Sturt recognised that there are some things that non-government organisations do better.

She served on the board of the Royal Flying Doctor Service, something that is rightly owned by the community at large but strongly supported through government funding. The member for Deakin did one of the most important jobs of all—and I know that the minister who's at the table here will agree with this—serving the public as a schoolteacher. I don't agree with the Greens that we should nationalise everything.

I don't agree with that. I believe that parents should have choice of where they send their kids to school. I believe that people should have the choice of an industry super fund.

I also remember the time not that long ago when the Greens party in Western Australia tried to set up their own bank. It wasn't a particularly good bank that the Greens party in Western Australia tried to run. They sent an email out to all of their party members saying, 'Lend us some money—and we'll pay you interest on that money—so we can fund our election campaign.' The problem was that the Greens party did not have a banking licence.

It was sketchy as to whether they were complying with electoral rules. When the member said, in her short speech on her own MPI: … don't let politicians sell you fake solutions … she missed out a single word. Don't let Greens politicians sell you fake solutions.

I've always been sceptical about a party that says it campaigns for housing and then comes into this place and votes against it time and time again. I reflected on that when I visited Perth Hub in my electorate, a Housing Australia Future Fund funded project. It was a project that was public investment in public housing, something that this side of the chamber championed.

Those in the Greens party—and there were more in the Greens party who used to oppose this—opposed these houses being built, so it is a bit rich to have a lecture about public services from the Greens party that indeed opposed housing in my own electorate. That's not all. The member opposite did speak extensively about energy policy.

I'll remind the member there's another grid in this country, the south-west integrated system. I proudly campaigned alongside my friends Mark McGowan and Roger Cook to make sure that we did not privatise Western Power, something that the Liberal Party had proposed. Again, Labor has a very proud history not just when it comes to protecting essential public assets.

We also have a proud history of expanding them. But too often in this place we are fighting a fight where we have to ensure against those cuts and those attacks on public services that those particularly on the Liberal and National parts of the broader crossbench often propose. We remember the 900 cuts that the coalition proposed to Medicare.

We remember they set up a Medicare privatisation taskforce. Again, I'll remind the member that was the coalition, not the Labor government. We remember the $170 million of taxpayer money that was pumped into the coalition's privatised cashless debit card, the stealth privatisation of the vocational education and training system, and attempts to outsource visa processing and privatise the visa system.

We know that they wanted to privatise the NBN, and we proudly, in this government, passed legislation to stop that from happening. It's not just in those big, government owned enterprises but also in what we're doing in terms of reform to the Public Service. I draw the member's attention to the Australian Public Service Strategic Commissioning Framework.

This was a complex piece of work that we did when we first came to government to look at, from a cost-benefit perspective, how we make sure that we don't have excessive outsourcing in the Public Service. That's now been in place for more than three years, and it has saved millions and millions of dollars of taxpayer money and, at the same time, given better jobs to those who work in our Public Service.

I draw the member's attention to Budget Paper No. 4. Let's start at page 6. Page 6 will tell you, when it comes to that strategic commissioning framework 2024-25, agencies have brought more than $542 million of core work back in house.

That was work that, under those opposite, was outsourced to the private sector. It's now being done by Australian public servants because we believe that the core work of the Public Service should be done by the Public Service, but we've got runs on the board to prove that we've done something about it. In terms of the projections for the coming year, we expect another $438 million of work to be brought back in house again.

Maybe it's not the most exciting, but it's realistic, it's achievable, and this government is doing it. I want to pay huge tribute to Senator Gallagher, who's led that work across the government, going agency by agency to make sure that we can bring more of that work back in house. Similarly, in the department I'm very honoured to assist the Prime Minister in, we have Australian Government Consulting, recognising that actually we don't have to be outsourcing all of this consulting work to a range of consultancy and accounting firms.

The Public Service can do a lot of this stuff themselves. We just have to choose to do it, and this government chose to do it. We chose to set up Australian Government Consulting, and they have now delivered more than 40 projects and some 16 agencies across the public service, with a client satisfaction rate of 90 per cent.

I don't think you'd find many people that, if they've outsourced to private consultants, have a satisfaction rate of 90 per cent. Maybe some would get that. They've done really important work in terms of making improvements in the trade and investment environment for Australian businesses, assisting with our household batteries program, something where this government is helping individuals have a little bit more say over their energy security by rolling out more than 500,000 community batteries.

We anticipate that, when at full-scale, Australian Government Consulting will be able to deliver across the Public Service some 160 projects a year. We're really proud of that work. Similarly, we're proud of the investments we've made in Australia's Public Service to make sure that Australians get the services they deserve.

We put out, through Services Australia, some $260 billion of payments a year. Some 27.5 million Australians rely on Services Australia through Medicare. What we knew is we didn't have quite enough public servants doing that core work of public service, so we put more people in there to make sure we could get better services to the Australian people.

Here are the results for the member where we've chosen to invest. Aged-care customer claims used to take 51 days, but, because we invested in public services and public servants, it's now down to just 14 days. That's people getting payments faster.

We saw, when it came to paid parental leave, it was taking up to a month, 31 days, for people to get their paid parental leave claims. Now it's taking just six days because our government has chosen to invest in public services. We've also ensured that we can get our disaster recovery payments out faster, which, in the last financial year, affected some 735,000 people.

I'd refer all honourable members to read all of the budget papers, but particularly that—about how the benefits of our investments have helped the Australian public get the public services they rightly deserve. It's always a risk in this place when you say something like, 'Don't let politicians sell you fake solutions,' and I'd say to the Greens party, when it comes to fake solutions, if you want to set the bar a little higher for politics in the future, maybe don't preference One Nation in Western Australia.

The Greens party at the last election had a real challenge. They couldn't bring themselves to put One Nation last in Bullwinkel. Even in Fremantle, the Greens party chose not to put One Nation last.

I think we can set higher standards than that, and I encourage the member to show some leadership in her— (Time expired)