MATTERS OF URGENCY

Senator MARIELLE SMITH (South Australia) (17:01): I also welcome the opportunity to contribute to this motion. Although we disagree with it, I welcome the opportunity to contribute to it. I note that it's been brought to our chamber by the party that, to the last election, took policies of higher taxes and more debt.

It's been brought to us today by the party that has been consistently opposed to higher wages. It's been brought to us by a party that has never met a cost-of-living measure in this chamber that they like. We know Australians are doing it tough, and that's why our No. 1 priority, not just in this term but in the previous term, has been the cost of living.

It's why we've been backing in higher wages. It's why we've supported a pay increase for some of our lowest-paid workers in highly feminised workforces like aged care and early childhood education. It's why we're investing in things like cheaper medicines, ensuring Australians now pay no more than $25 for their scripts, which is making a huge difference in my community, especially for people who have a recurring need to access such scripts.

We're investing in making bulk-billed urgent care clinics a permanent part of Medicare. Anyone who has been unfortunate enough to need to use one of these services themselves, has had a child they've needed to take to one of these services or, like me, has had multiple children they've had to take multiple times, knows that these play an absolutely incredible and important role in our healthcare system.

We're bedding them into the budget, to make sure that they can continue. We're also investing in cheaper access to early learning, because we know that makes a big difference for families, as well as in six months of paid parental leave to ensure families have the choice to stay at home in those critical early months with their children. This is not only for an opportunity to take time off work for recovery but, of course, for when those critical bonds and connections are formed.

We're investing in protecting penalty and overtime rates for workers and making it easier to buy your own home. These are all cost-of-living priorities, which have been our focus as a government. When it comes to our tax reform agenda, it is focused on building a better, fairer, simpler tax system by reducing the tax burden for over 13 million Australian workers, by supporting 75,000 more Australians into the housing market, by delivering over $3.8 billion in new measures that lower taxes for businesses and startups and by reducing compliance costs by $540 million a year.

On 1 July this year, over 14 million Australians received another tax cut—of up to $268. This was a tax cut that the coalition opposed and promised to repeal at the last election. Our combined tax cuts mean that workers on an average wage will pay around $2,800 less tax because of our reforms to the taxation system.

While those opposite talk about the cost of doing business, we are the ones delivering new measures that lower taxes for businesses and start-ups and reduce compliance costs, real measures making a real difference. Of course, tax relief for workers is only part of the story. Our reforms are also about helping first home buyers get their foot on the property ladder.

This is an issue I hear time and time again in my community, particularly from younger people, who say they feel locked out and let down when it comes to the housing market and who tell me that they want to have the same opportunities that their parents and grandparents had. They want to be able to raise their children in the same neighbourhood that they grew up in.

They want their child to have some grass in the backyard like they did or to have some amenity nearby to be able to go down to a park or visit their local GP who's been their GP for years. They want to live in that community. They want to be able to buy a home.

Their parents were able to buy a home and were afforded that opportunity. Their grandparents were afforded that opportunity, and now it simply feels so unfair for the next generation that that opportunity isn't available to them. That's why we're trying to level the playing field here.

That's why we're trying to make sure that those generations don't feel locked out of the housing market. It's not just being locked out of owning an asset; it's being locked out of everything that means—their connection to community, their connection to family and the schools their children can attend, whether they can attend the same local public school that they were able to attend.

These are big things which make a big difference to the fabric of our communities. It's not just about an asset. It's about where that asset might be located and therefore where your life is located, where your connection is located and what community means for you.

That's why we're doing it. It's for those workers and those Australians. (Time expired)