Jo Briskey
Maribyrnong · Australian Labor Party · Australia
“This Saturday night, the mighty Melbourne Vixens are back in another grand final, their fifth in seven years, and we're going back to back. Five of these women also put on the green and gold for the Australian Diamonds, arguably the most successful national team our country has produced. But here's what gets me.”
“Yesterday, that ask was again answered in another large step forward—the biggest expansion of paid parental leave since Labor created the scheme. This week, paid parental leave in Australia is now a full six months, 26 weeks, paid at a higher rate at just over $1,000 a week, with income limits lifted so more families qualify.”
“Superannuation now lands with every payday instead of months behind, which protects workers least able to absorb being shortchanged. Every one of those changes helps on its own, but, arriving all at once, they take the real pressure off working families. That is real change delivered.”
“Before I came into this place, I spent about just over five years as the CEO of the Parenthood, Australia's peak advocacy body for parents and carers. Our work focused on how we make Australia the best place in the world to be a parent. I spent many hours in this building helping amplify the voices of parents and the needs that they had.”
“But this government is changing it. We're funding pay rises for female dominated sectors like aged care and early childhood education, and the gender pay gap is the lowest it's ever been. This week, paid parental leave grew to 26 weeks, with super paid on top, so that raising a child no longer costs a woman her career or her retirement.”
“When it began in 2011, it gave families 18 weeks, and I watched it change households. I also watched how quickly it could be put at risk. In 2015, parents who used the scheme exactly as it was designed got branded double dippers by those opposite, as if caring for a newborn were a rort.”
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“There is always more work to do to support working families, and that's exactly what we focus on every day we're in this place and out in our communities.”
“Superannuation now lands with every payday instead of months behind, which protects workers least able to absorb being shortchanged. Every one of those changes helps on its own, but, arriving all at once, they take the real pressure off working families. That is real change delivered. I want to finish with the people who made this happen. To the parents of my community, the ones I've met out at local sporting fields and on the doors: you kept asking, and our government is listening. Change like this doesn't happen on its own. It happens when ordinary people organise. To everyone expecting a baby this year: congratulations. You will be among the first families in Australia to take the opportunity to have a full six months off. I hope you enjoy every single day. We know the job is not finished.”
“She wanted it because you only get this chance with your newborn once, and it goes so quickly. Our government's sole focus is on delivering real change for working people and their families. That is why, yesterday, every Australian taxpayer received another tax cut—13 million people keeping more of what they earn. Around three million workers on minimum and award wages got a pay rise, and among them are early childhood educators—those who I stood alongside in the Big Steps Campaign and those I've met locally, like Vanshika at Goodstart in Flemington—doing some of the most important work in this country. Our government has banned supermarket price gouging—it's now law with some serious penalties behind it—so working families doing the weekly shop get a fair deal.”
“Yesterday, that ask was again answered in another large step forward—the biggest expansion of paid parental leave since Labor created the scheme. This week, paid parental leave in Australia is now a full six months, 26 weeks, paid at a higher rate at just over $1,000 a week, with income limits lifted so more families qualify. Because we started paying superannuation on parental leave last year, taking those months with your baby no longer leaves a hole in your retirement savings. We delivered this because women should not retire poorer for having raised this country's children. The economic case for this reform is rock solid. Parents keep connected to work, and careers no longer stall at the first birthday. But, in the five years of advocacy, not one mum ever told me she wanted to leave just for some time off.”
“When it began in 2011, it gave families 18 weeks, and I watched it change households. I also watched how quickly it could be put at risk. In 2015, parents who used the scheme exactly as it was designed got branded double dippers by those opposite, as if caring for a newborn were a rort. To add insult to injury, the then treasurer announced these plans to end so-called double dipping on Mother's Day of all days. My job that year was defending the mums and dads whose only offence was wanting to spend more time with their newborn by utilising the scheme as intended. But the parents of Australia were not deterred by these attacks. They kept asking calmly, stubbornly and in their tens of thousands, and the country moved with them—unions, employers and, finally, this parliament.”
“Before I came into this place, I spent about just over five years as the CEO of the Parenthood, Australia's peak advocacy body for parents and carers. Our work focused on how we make Australia the best place in the world to be a parent. I spent many hours in this building helping amplify the voices of parents and the needs that they had. When we talk about need, often this is expressed quite acutely in those first few weeks and months of being a new parent. I think, in particular, about the new mums that I met at my time at the Parenthood. Their stories were different, but, often, what they wanted most was the same, and that was time—to be able to afford just a few more months or weeks with their newborn baby. Labor built this country's first national paid parental leave scheme.”
“But this government is changing it. We're funding pay rises for female dominated sectors like aged care and early childhood education, and the gender pay gap is the lowest it's ever been. This week, paid parental leave grew to 26 weeks, with super paid on top, so that raising a child no longer costs a woman her career or her retirement. And we're making the biggest investment into women's health that this country has ever seen. This is what happens when you have a majority-women government and a gender-equal cabinet. We don't just see and value women's worth. We are delivering the real change that ensures we have a fairer future for them. And I'd like to give a shout-out my daughter Gwen, who's in the gallery today. We're doing it for you. All the best of luck and go, Vixens!”
“This Saturday night, the mighty Melbourne Vixens are back in another grand final, their fifth in seven years, and we're going back to back. Five of these women also put on the green and gold for the Australian Diamonds, arguably the most successful national team our country has produced. But here's what gets me. More women and girls play netball than any other team sport, and on the world stage we're very good at it, yet it doesn't have the same platform that men's footy and cricket have. Generations of netballers who have represented our country have done so for next to nothing. Why? Because for too long we haven't valued women's work the way we value men's. And it's not just netball players; it's early childhood educators and it's the carers and the nurses in my community who have carried this same story for decades.”
“A handful of volunteers at a small sub-branch in Kensington shouldn't have to do the system's job for it. With this bill, the system finally starts doing its own. I commend the bill to the House.”
“The test of all of this is not the passage of this legislation; it is whether, in five years, a partner in Flemington got the call before the worst happened, or a veteran in Keilor East only had to tell their story once, or a family in Essendon found the agency door open. That is the only measure that counts. But this bill makes that outcome possible in a way it wasn't before. The men and women of our Defence Force put their hand up to serve our nation, to do hard and dangerous things on our behalf. We ask them to give up the ordinary safety the rest of us take for granted. The very least we owe them in return is a system that supports them, that talks to itself, that sees them coming and that never makes them carry both halves of their own story alone.”
“I think about Jenny Brown at the Keilor East RSL, who leads her sub-branch with such dedication and deep pride, who I was honoured to stand beside at the dawn service on Anzac Day this year. Jenny and her team don't just run a club; they run a sanctuary. The thing about a sanctuary is that it works because someone is paying attention to the people who walk through the door. Our job in this place is to make the national system pay attention the way Jenny and her team do—to make it notice, to make it reach out first. Our government isn't pretending that this bill fixes everything, because no bill does, and the families who fought for the royal commission have earned our honesty more than they have earned any slogans.”
“There's half a billion dollars to clear the backlog of compensation claims, with hundreds of extra staff brought on to actually process them, so that claims are answered in months, not years. The Defence and Veterans' Service Commission was legislated last year and is now operating as an independent watchdog with the teeth to hold the whole system to account. There's a shift across DVA towards early intervention and prevention rather than waiting for the damage to be done and then treating it. And there's $5.7 billion in this year's budget to support the health and wellbeing of veterans and their dependents. This is a system being rebuilt piece by piece around the people it is meant to serve.”
“From day one it will be a single place a veteran or a family member can go to find help by postcode or by phone and a person will help them navigate instead of handing them just another form. A family member can ring it even if they are not a DVA client themselves. The information-sharing powers in this bill help this agency to do effective work. It's only useful if it knows who you are when you walk through the door. The legislation we debate in here and the service that opens up today are two halves of the same promise—that no-one has to navigate this alone anymore. This is the through-line of this government's whole record on veterans, and it is worth putting plainly.”
“So when a system pretends that a veteran is a single individual to be processed and ignores the partner, the parents and the children who are holding that person up it isn't just unkind; it's clinically wrong. You will not keep a veteran well if you let the people keeping them well fall over. This bill recognises that. It builds the family into the way information is shared and support is offered so that the silent ranks are finally counted. The timing of this is important because of what is happening today. On 1 July this year—today—the new Veteran and Family Wellbeing Agency opens its doors. That agency exists because of the same royal commission. It was recommendation 87. This government has put $78 million behind it.”
“I meet the parents watching their grown sons and daughters with that particular mixture of pride and fear. I meet the kids. The families of the men and women who serve are what I have come to think of as the silent ranks. They are the first responders inside their own homes. They are the ones who notice the withdrawal first, who hear the flashback in the middle of the night, who carry the weight quietly and ask for nothing. For too long, our national systems have not treated them as though they exist. I trained as a psychologist. I studied developmental and child psychology. One of the first and most basic things you learn is that you cannot understand a person in isolation from the people around them. Mental health is not something that happens inside one person. It is relational. It is held, or it is dropped, by the people in the room.”
“Firstly, the safeguards in this bill are written through it, with the conditions on use, the ministerial guidelines and the Information Commissioner overseeing everything. Secondly, the status quo is not neutral. The wall between defence and DVA was never a privacy protection and, sadly, people have died inside the gap it created. There is no version of this where we get to do nothing and call that the safe option. Doing nothing has a body count. This bill weighs a person's privacy against a person's life, and it gets the balance right. Now I want to turn to the families. When I visit the RSLs in my electorate in Essendon, Keilor East, Flemington and Kensington, I don't just meet veterans. I meet their partners holding toddlers on their hips.”
“It makes sure that, when a relationship ends in violence, a partner doesn't lose their support overnight, so leaving can be done safely. And, yes, it means a member sentenced to prison for serious violence or a sexual offence is discharged full stop—because the people who serve deserve to know who's standing next to them. I know there are members in this place who will worry about the information-sharing powers, and I don't dismiss that worry, because it comes from good instinct. A person's health is their own. Their service record is their own. The state holding that information and moving it around is not a thing any of us should wave through without a thought. But I'd say two things.”
“Right now, a veteran leaving the Defence Force has to arrive at DVA and tell their whole story over again to a department that already had every word of it sitting in a file somewhere else. So what the system currently does is make a person who is already struggling prove their own pain twice. This bill ends that. The information goes with the person. The handover happens on their behalf. DVA can reach out before someone's in crisis instead of waiting for them to find the strength to ask. The rest of the bill follows the same instinct, which is to treat the whole of a person's life as the thing we're responsible for, not just the parts that are convenient. It puts the defence health system on a proper footing so risks get spotted early.”
“The royal commission made 122 recommendations. This government accepted the overwhelming majority of them, agreeing or agreeing in principle to 104. By the end of last year, 32 were implemented. By the end of this year, we expect roughly two-thirds will be. This is not a government that received a report, thanked the commissioners and put it on the shelf. This is a government working through it, recommendation by recommendation, because the families who gave their evidence deserve nothing less than that we actually do the things they have asked us to do. This bill enables 35 of those recommendations, it directly implements 15 and it supports a further 20. It is built across five schedules. The biggest thing this bill does is let defence and DVA share what they each know about a person.”
“Underneath the five schedules and all the clauses, what it does is let the system share what it knows about a person so it can act before things get to the worst point. This is the next step on a road that this government has been walking deliberately and at pace since the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide handed down its final report. This bill forms part of this important work. The royal commission was a long and painful reckoning. It found what families had been saying for years, what the welfare officers at Flem/Ken RSL see each week, that suicide in the veteran community is not a private clinical tragedy that happens one person at a time. It is systemic. It is a product of culture, policy and the friction between institutions that were never built to hand a person gently from one to another.”
“2) Bill 2026 is seeking to take that responsibility off their shoulders. I've thought about that conversation a fair bit because there is a lot of talk about veterans falling through the cracks as if somebody just didn't care enough. That's not what's going on. The people at the Department of Defence care, the people in DVA care, the volunteers at the RSLs in my community care, and our government cares. The parts of the system meant to catch a person have never been allowed to talk to each other. Defence holds half of someone's story, and DVA holds the other half. The veteran ends up stuck in the gap between holding both halves on their own right at the point in their life when they've got the least left to hold anything with. This bill intends to close that gap. That's at the heart of it.”
“The Flem/Ken RSL is a small but mighty subbranch down the south end of my electorate. I've stopped by a couple of times, and after one visit a conversation really stuck with me. We got to talking about their welfare program, which is mostly a few volunteers and a lot of phone calls, and one of them said that the part of the job that wears them down the most isn't the veteran who comes in asking for help. It's the one who never comes in at all—the veteran who's been sent back and forth between Defence and the Department of Veterans' Affairs, asked for the same three forms and somewhere in there has quietly decided the whole thing just isn't worth the trouble. Flem/Ken go and find them. They make the call nobody else makes. Today, the Defence Legislation Amendment (RCDVS Implementation and Related Measures No.”
“Behind each of these young people is a whole team—a parent driving to each training session, a sibling spending their weekends in the stands, a coach turning up early and staying late, and a local club that backs their kids year after year. None of these selections happen by accident, and none of them happen alone. They are the reward for years of hard work that most of us never see. They all show the strength of the sporting community here in Melbourne's west. To every one of our recipients: you have represented Maribyrnong with real pride, and you should be proud of yourself. We certainly are. Continue to give it everything you've got and show the country what the north-west of Melbourne can do.”
“Brando Chakour will play for Victoria, while Oscar Dodds was first elected for the state championships and then went one better, earning selection to represent Australia in Auckland. There's Alexandra Webster, off to the Australia Juniors Curling Championships. Curling is a smaller sport here, without the infrastructure many others enjoy, and that makes reaching this national level even more impressive. Well done, Alexandra. We also have real depth in the pool. Eve Dunstan, Hamish Keenan, Jessica Macdermott and Lola Jojic are all bound for the national championships, and Isaac Kelly has earned his place at the national schools triathlon championships, mastering three disciplines.”
“I'm proud our community has so many young people stepping through the door, and what incredible young people they are. Charlotte Dougherty has been selected to represent Australia at the IBSA Women's Blind Football Asia Championship. To wear the green and gold is the dream of so many athletes, and Charlotte has earned this through sheer resilience and hard work, which she has shown across her entire sporting journey. Hugo Hircoe also pulled on the green and gold at the Oceania wrestling championships, one of the toughest sports going around. There's nowhere to hide once you step out onto the mat. Good on you, Hugo. We have two representing us in American football, a sport still finding its feet in Australia.”
“Last week I had the pleasure of hosting an afternoon tea in my office for the newest recipients of the local sporting champions grants. Today I want to recognise this remarkable group of young athletes from Maribyrnong in this parliament. The Local Sporting Champions program exists because representing your state or your country can be expensive, with flights, accommodation, equipment, competition fees and simply getting to where the event is being held. The costs add up quickly, and, for a lot of families, they add up to the difference between an opportunity taken and an opportunity lost. Local Sporting Champions helps make sure a talented kid from Melbourne's north-west isn't held back by where they live or what their family can afford.”
“It's very easy for the Leader of the Opposition and those opposite to come in here with manufactured outrage and for Senator Hanson to air her grievances on 'Sky after dark', but grievance politics does nothing to lessen the blow of cost-of-living pressures. Out in my electorate, I'm proud to tell my community that this government is focused on them—how we spend every day in this place focused on how we can make their lives easier and fairer. Those opposite can stay focused on themselves and how they can rebrand. We'll keep delivering for working Australians.”
“Today we are celebrating. Millions of working Australians will be earning more and keeping more of what they earn because this government will always back working Australians. Today those in the member for Hume's electorate get a tax cut, those in the member for Goldstein's electorate get a tax cut, those in the member for Gippsland's electorate also get a tax cut—not because those members voted for it; in fact they voted no. But this Labor government is delivering them anyway because on this side of the House we back working people and we believe that aspiration belongs to all, not just some. In this place you can choose to complain or you can deliver real change. From today, paid parental leave is now six months, minimum and award wage earners are getting a pay rise, and we've banned supermarket price gouging.”
“Our government is not handing that over to a handful of companies that are more interested in their profits and performance. We have made a cracking start. We are leading the world, and this bill seeks only to make it stronger for parents and safer for our kids. I commend the bill to the House.”
“I've spent my whole working life arguing that the early years of a child's life aren't a warm-up act for the important stuff later on; they are the important stuff. And these years, the teenage years, matter every bit as much in their own messy but brilliant way. They're not a rehearsal; they are the real deal. They are the years that decide who our kids turn into and how they come to see themselves. We all get one shot at it. My own two girls are growing up in this online world, the same as every child across Maribyrnong—the same as every child across this country. I want them to have a childhood with a bit of room left in it—room to be bored, to be curious, to muck around, to be young for as long as they get to be before the world starts to ask them to be something else.”
“You make doing the wrong thing harder rather than easier, and the evidence right in front of us says that there are fewer kids on this platform today than there were a year ago. So it is working. We know this because the data says so and because parents are telling us so. The idea that you have to get everything right all the time is nonsense. Legislation, especially legislation involving technology, will always require room to grow. The debate in this chamber shows that, while others may wish to continue to bury their heads in the sand so they can continue to play cheap politics, our government understands the modern world in which we live. In the end, while this legislation and the restrictions it aims to strengthen are about technology, it is really about childhood and what we owe it.”
“But a whole country and its government that sets a clear rule, stands behind it and hands its regulator the teeth it needs to back it up is a lot harder to ignore. The whole point of doing this is to give our kids the time they need to grow and to give Australian parents some breathing room. I know there are members in this House and people throughout the country who still don't believe in these restrictions. I sometimes hear the argument that a kid who is determined to get around the rules will find a way and that, by pushing them off the big platforms, we might push them somewhere worse. I get it. But what I will say is that you don't judge a law by whether someone is determined to break it. We don't scrap the speed limit because some people speed. You continue to set the standard.”
“They can clear this bar without breaking a sweat. The only real question—the only one there's ever been—is whether they'll choose to, and our government is determined to make sure the answer is yes. When I discuss these restrictions, I always come back to the parents, because this goes to something I feel strongly about. No parent, however on the ball they may be, wins this by themselves. You can take the phone from them at night; they'll still find a way. You can set every control the device has got, and the design on the other side is still a step ahead of you. One parent, on their own against a massive company with AI on its side, gets worn down, worked around and, in the end, ignored.”
“So, basically, if a company says its age assurance works, the commissioner can go and ask the people who built the age checker and find out whether that's actually true. The second change is about consequences. The bill lifts the maximum penalty for breaking the minimum age rule to $99 million. These are companies that can build a car that drives itself and build software that writes emails for you, but somehow they can't tell a 13-year-old from a 30-year-old—I don't buy it. Our government doesn't buy it, and I'd hazard a guess that most parents don't either. Lifting that penalty and lining it up with the changes we've already made under our consumer law will make sure that doing the right thing is the cheaper option and that doing the wrong thing is not. To be fair to these companies, they're not short of money or brains or talent.”
“If they receive a fine, they treat it as if it's just a cost of doing business. Because they have done this over and over, we know the game, and our response is that the bare minimum does not cut it when we're talking about children's safety. The bill strengthens the law we've already got, and it does it in two ways. The first is about getting to the truth. Right now, when a platform tells the commissioner it's taking reasonable steps, that's a very hard claim to check from the outside because the platform is basically the only witness to its own behaviour. This bill addresses that head on. It lets the eSafety Commissioner demand information and documents not just from the platforms but from anyone who holds the goods on whether the law is being followed—the age check providers included.”
“But the same update found something else: too many kids are still getting back on, not because the law is weak but because these companies are letting them. A kid gets knocked back because of age restrictions, so they just try the age check again and again until it finally clicks. An account gets shut down on Monday, and it's back up again on Tuesday. And a parent who goes looking for somewhere to report to finds, half the time, there's no-one on these platforms listening. We know these aren't accidents. They are deliberate choices, and we've seen this playbook before from some of the very same companies. They believe they can do as little as they like and get away with it while telling everyone they're doing heaps. They also make it as hard as possible for anyone outside to check whether it's true.”
“Bedtime is a thing again, and even the odd kid has picked up a book. Others whose children are not quite at the age of wanting social media have also said what a relief it is that they now have these laws to point to when eventually they have the conversation with their children. So change is happening in homes right across Maribyrnong and right across the country, yet, in the months since, we have learnt something else, and that is why this bill is before us today. Some of these platforms have looked at their obligation and decided that the bare minimum will do just fine. Earlier this year, the eSafety Commissioner put out an update on how the law is going, and the headline number was good: more than five million underage accounts removed or restricted. It also said that these measures swept through the platforms.”
“That's simply how growing up works and how it always has. What my daughters are experiencing now is exactly what I and my siblings experienced a little while back. But what's new is that we've handed some of the cleverest companies on earth a direct line into exactly that, and we've let them turn it into profit. The endless doomscrolling, the notifications pinging left and right, the little lift that you get when someone likes your post and the gut punch when nobody does—none of that happens by accident; it is the whole design. It's doing precisely what it was built to do. But the Online Safety Act 2021 is already pushing back. Since it came in, parents in my community have told me what it's meant at home, and the stories rhyme. At the beginning it was difficult, but now the evenings are calmer. The late night scrolling has stopped.”
“These platforms are not public areas that happen to have a few teenagers in them. They are products that are brilliantly built, backed by billionaires and designed to do one thing above all else, which is to get a hold of a person's attention and never let go. We all know what being a teenager is like. As a parent, I've seen it from both sides. The science confirms that, in all of the years of your life, it is when your attention is the easiest to grab. Your mind is at its most curious because you're working out who you are, and what people think of you feels like the biggest thing in the world. Part of your brain chases that next hit of excitement, and that part is way out in front of the part of the brain that's meant to say: 'Wait. Hang on—maybe not.' And there's nothing wrong with that.”
“We did not undertake these measures because we thought badly of young people or we didn't trust them. We did it because they had been allowed into a world that had been designed to target them, not to support their development, and today with the Online Safety Amendment (Strengthening Enforcement for the Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2026 we make that law stronger, and I'm very proud to support it. Before being elected to this parliament, I trained as an educational and developmental psychologist. I spent years studying how young minds grow, and it has stuck with me. So let me tell you how I see these platforms, because I think we keep describing them all wrong. We talk about social media like it's somewhere people go to hang out in the same way my generation hung out at Hungry Jacks, the local park or a shopping centre. It's not that.”
“What we heard from the UK prime minister in his announcement speech was a phrase that we had heard throughout the debate last year in this chamber, which was that this was about giving children their childhood back. While the UK is taking the next step, the likes of Canada and parts of Europe are also considering doing the same. The formula they are using came into effect in Australia on 10 December last year, when our government brought in a minimum age for social media and took under-16s off the platforms that were doing them harm. The idea behind it is as simple as it gets: keeping kids safe from these platforms should not be the job of 14-year-olds or their parents around the kitchen table; it should be the job of the people who have built the platforms in the first place.”
“A few weeks ago, the United Kingdom announced that it too would introduce a minimum age for social media use, and when the British government set out how it would be done it said its ban would be built, in their words, using the 'same model' as Australia. I read that with a sense of pride, because keeping children safe online is something we should all agree on, no matter your political persuasion or the country you call home. I think that, by leading the way, we have put those words into action, and now the world is following. When we pass our laws we're out on our own. There was no shortage of people lining up to tell us it couldn't be done. Our government ignored those naysayers. We saw the data from experts, we listened to those with lived experience and we delivered sensible measures that are now keeping our children safe.”
“I'm proud to be part of a government delivering it, because my community relies on the success of our aviation industry, and that industry relies on my community and on the many others who pass through it every day. I commend the bills to the House.”
“I look forward to going back to my community and telling them that the next time they travel after saving for that well-earned holiday or to care for a sick parent a disruption or a cancellation will mean compensation, not frustration. That's one less thing they'll need to worry about when weighing up their budget. This legislation will mean fewer Marias sitting at an airport gate frustrated, fewer families absorbing costs that should have been the airline's and fewer residents feeling like their concerns about aircraft noise have vanished into a bureaucratic void. It will mean Australia finally has an aviation consumer protection framework that reflects our modern, fair-minded country—one that stands with every passenger and brings real accountability to a crucial industry.”
“She had no plans to fly again any time soon. She just needed the money. She spent hours on the phone and got nowhere. She contacted my office months later, still so frustrated not just at the airline but at the sense that there was simply nothing she could do. Under this legislation, Maria's story ends differently. She would have a right to a cash refund. She would have had an independent ombudsman to contact. She would have known from a clear and accessible charter exactly what she was entitled to. For Maria, and for hundreds of thousands of Australians just like her, that is a genuinely different experience of what it means to be a passenger in this country.”
“These are major, well-resourced commercial operations with the capacity to meet a sensible minimum standard of passenger treatment, and the airlines and airports are already doing right by their customers. The charter simply formalises what they're already doing. What this reform ultimately does is create the conditions for a sector that competes on quality and service, where treating passengers well isn't just right; it's expected. That's a better industry for everyone working in it. I want to also reflect in my contribution to the debate in this House on a story about a woman in my electorate. Her name is Maria, and she is one of many. Maria flew interstate last year to be with her mum, who was unwell. Her return flight was cancelled, and the airline offered her a travel credit, but Maria didn't want a travel credit.”
“If the cancellation costs you a hotel, meal or transport, the airline will now need to cover it. It's that simple. I also want to speak directly to the people in my electorate who work in aviation because I've heard some of the conversations happening in the industry about what these reforms mean for them and their employers. This framework has been designed with careful attention to industry impacts. Costs will be kept as low as practicable, and small airports handling fewer than a million passengers a year, including most council owned facilities in regional and remote communities, are intended to be exempt. The framework applies to the 14 largest airports across the country, covering 93 per cent of all passenger movements.”
“It belongs in the same conversation as the other measures this government is delivering. When I talk to people in my electorate about the cost of living, they talk about rent, mortgage, the cost of groceries and the cost of everyday living. Australian households are stretched right now, which is exactly why the last thing any Australian needs after saving for a well-earned holiday or rushing to book a last-minute flight interstate because a loved one is unwell is cancellation—a cancelled flight that somehow leaves them out of pocket because the airline won't cover the hotel or hand back their money. For families I meet every week, that's a genuine financial hit. Under this legislation, cancelled flights will result in cash refunds, not credits.”
“When they raise a genuine concern, they want to know that it's actually being heard. For too long, that hasn't been the case. Residents have told me they have followed every process with Airservices Australia and attended every consultation only to be met with silence. The Aircraft Noise Ombudsman changes that. Independent of both Airservices Australia and the Department of Defence, it will hold complaints processes to account and make sure people's concerns are properly examined. People in my community just want to be heard. They just want to be treated fairly. I'm proud that this Labor government is delivering an independent body that will hear them out. The Albanese Labor government remains focused on delivering cost-of-living relief. This is our No. 1 priority. Consumer protection is a cost-of-living issue.”
“For the first time, there will be a body whose specific job is to hold this industry to account on behalf of the travelling public. For passengers with an individual dispute they can't resolve directly with an airline, the Aviation Consumer Ombudsperson will provide an independent, not-for-profit avenue for resolution, a genuine umpire with no vested interests. For my community specifically, there's one more part of this package I'm particularly pleased about, the Aircraft Noise Ombudsperson. My electorate has lived alongside aviation for generations. (Quorum formed) As I said, my electorate has lived alongside aviation for generations—two airports, the flight paths that come with them and a community that has built their lives around them. But, for some, aircraft noise can be disruptive. What those residents have asked for is simple.”