Rowan Holzberger
Forde · Australian Labor Party · Australia
“… … … "Right at the beginning, it was thought that there was an intrusion in the relationship between the doctor and their patient," AMA president Tony Bartone said. … … … At the time Medicare was introduced in 1984, the AMA was heavily influenced by developments in the United Kingdom, particularly the National Health Service.”
“During my preparation for my contribution tonight I came across an article written in 2019, at the death of Bob Hawke, by ABC journalist Norman Hermant, and I'd like to read out a bit from it. The article was titled, 'Before Bob Hawke's Medicare, a visit to hospital forced many Australians into bankruptcy'.”
“My dad met my mum in Mount Isa, and I was born in Brisbane and grew up in Broken Hill, so I'm not sure where that quite places me. I've always actually believed regional Australia should have its own state. The cities could have one state, and regional Australia could have another state—anyway.”
“Mrs Buckingham's quote on thinking twice about going to see the doctor is something that all of us in our electorates have faced and heard about from people who told us that they would choose to put food on the table and feed their kids rather than see the doctor.”
“I think that will go some way to addressing some of those shortages; 17,000 doctors is a shot in the arm to the health system. Finally, the member for Riverina talked about the NDIS, kicking the proverbial out of us.”
“Even though they gave up, I think some time after the 1993 election, realising that they couldn't do what John Howard said and stab it in the stomach, they went around and tried to stab it in the back.”
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“No matter what, pay it before anything else, and then carefully—and this is a theory of this book, written in America—invest in an index; nothing particularly risky or groundbreaking, but a simple index that might return whatever was in that book, three or four per cent or something similar. Over time, it was easy; it was just a matter of arithmetic. You could track at which point your savings, your investments, would pay for the essential services that you needed to pay for, whether that was your housing, your food, your energy. Once you worked out how much you actually needed to survive, you could then track how long it would take saving that money before you actually reached a point at which you could then become financially free. It was not a 'get rich quick' scheme. There was nothing flashy to it.”
“As part of that, I came to appreciate how important it is to be careful with your money, as silly as that may sound. I came to appreciate how important it is to be frugal, to reject materialism, and to use your money, steward it properly and put it into productive assets which create a return for yourself and benefits for the economy. Of those 160 books or so, there are a couple that really stand out in my mind. One of them was very much about that careful approach to saving. The approach—and it was a book written in America—is something which I'm sure would be familiar to a lot of people who have read these books. The approach is that you pay yourself first. You put 10 per cent away of whatever you earn so that you can then build that up to be something for the future.”
“I didn't realise really how important it was that workers invest in assets to create that sense of financial freedom. It probably wasn't until years later, when I became really interested in business myself, that I came to appreciate how important it is to have that goal of financial freedom—so much so that it's something that I talked about in my first speech. But there's something which I didn't really get time to talk about then, which I want to take the opportunity to talk about today, when we talk about superannuation. I became really fascinated in business, so much so that I probably read something like 160 business books. I came to believe that a pursuit of entrepreneurialism, a sense of finding one's own individual destiny, could be one driver in life to give satisfaction.”
“What I'm trying to say here is that there was a realisation, in the eighties, that it wasn't good enough for working people to just be reliant on an income. At some point, we wanted to create a system in which working people could become financially free. I think that is something which I hope—which I know—unites both sides of this chamber. Sometimes we disagree on how we're going to get there, but I think financial freedom is one of the core economic objectives of an individual and I think is a core objective that we try to facilitate as a parliament. It is very much a reflection of my own personal story as well. When I first became interested in politics and economics at about the age of 14, I really thought that they were about achieving better wages and better working conditions on the shop floor.”
“Let's not forget that, while it stands at 12 per cent today, which was achieved in 2025, originally it was Labor's plan that superannuation would be at that point in 2019. It is quite an easy mathematical exercise to see that that delay cost Australian workers billions of dollars and a healthy retirement. It's a real revelation of what the coalition feels about superannuation. Superannuation is something that I'm familiar with and that I feel in my bones, like other Labor members. But, within the Labor Party itself for many years, from our inception until our latter days, there might have been some sort of perceived hostility between workers and capital. At its formation, over a 100 years ago, I think there was a lot of scepticism.”
“I rise today in support of the Treasury Laws Amendment (Supporting Choice in Superannuation and Other Measures) Bill 2025. As a relatively new member, I was a bit surprised to see that there were other measures in this bill that deal with our tax arrangements with Portugal and the Rugby World Cup. I'll concentrate, though, on the thing that I know a little bit more about and that I feel in my bones, just like every Labor member in this place, which is superannuation. We feel it because it has been a Labor scheme right from its inception. At every point along the way, the coalition has really been dragged kicking and screaming along to it. Who knows what plans they have for its future.”
“They have linked in their minds that renewable energy somehow means agreeing that climate change is human induced and they just cannot bring themselves to do that. Unfortunately, that failure to accept reality, that failure to work together on energy policy, just as Labor and Liberal governments did in postwar Australia, is going to cost Australians, just as the failure of the current opposition leader, when he was energy minister and during his 10 years of inaction, is responsible for people paying higher electricity prices today. Labor is fixing it. Labor is fixing it with the most sensible approach, and I just wish the opposition would join us rather than trying to score cheap points.”
“What we see today, though, is a divergence from that agreement around what was sensible, what was scientific and what worked. Whereas we agreed post war on economic and energy strategy, for some reason the coalition has gone off on a complete tangent and is now, on the other hand, supporting the most expensive forms of energy: coal and nuclear. I really am looking forward to the next election, which I believe is going to be about energy. It's going to be about renewable energy, firmed by gas and batteries—the cheapest form of energy—or it's going to be about the most expensive form of energy, which is coal and nuclear. I can't work out why they have got this ideological obsession with the most expensive forms of energy.”
“There's somebody else who I might quote to also shock people a little bit, and that is the former member for Dickson, Peter Dutton, who I think summed it up quite well when he said that energy is not just part of the economy; 'Energy is the economy.' And I can't attribute this to anybody, but I did hear it somewhere—it's certainly not my original thought, this one. But somebody said that the 19th century was very much about coal and steam, the 20th century was about oil and the internal combustion engine, and the 21st century is going to be about electric motors and renewable energy. At each point of those new energy sources, we have seen living standards rise dramatically—just as, with renewable energy and electric motors, we're going to see material abundance, material wealth, beyond our wildest imagination.”
“It is really what drove Australia's economic success story, and Labor and Liberal both agreed to the point where I can say—this is a bit of a surprise to people—that one of my economic role models was in fact a Liberal premier, Thomas Playford, who was the Premier in South Australia from the forties to the seventies. Labor premiers and Liberal premiers and leaders around the country invested in public energy and they invested in public housing, not out of the goodness of their hearts but because they knew that providing cheap energy meant keeping the cost of living down, which took the pressure off wages, which helped business. It was the secret to Australia's success.”
“I think that he's been saved by a quirk of the standing orders that he at least had the opportunity to speak on it under the former leader, saving himself the discomfort of speaking to it under the current opposition leader, who I think more than anybody else is responsible for the failures in energy affordability and has practised policy opaqueness, to put it politely, more than any other practitioner in this parliament. The motion here is an opportunity for me to talk about two of the things which I think are the most important things in the economy, and they are affordable housing and affordable energy. Indeed, I think it is the history of postwar Australia, the economic miracle that was postwar Australia, that governments, both Liberal and Labor, believed in cheap public housing and cheap public energy.”
“I rise today to speak against the motion. When the member for Wannon moved this motion originally, in the last sitting of parliament, I'm not sure that he was really watching the state of play of the Liberal Party leadership because, had he worked out that the member for Hume, the former minister for energy, was going to be the Leader of the Opposition today, he might not have wanted to talk about failures in energy affordability and also policy transparency.”
“She fights not only for herself—and when I say 'herself' I mean her kids and her family—but for many parents that I send her way as well, including the woman that sent me that text today. Obviously, we lost that fight. But, together, I think this parliament and people in the community with good spirit will keep fighting and will keep winning for the millions, the 20 per cent, of people in Australia that live with a disability. Debate adjourned. Federation Chamber adjourned at 17 : 35”
“It may be at the school level, though of course they won't be able to cope with everything. It may be back at the community level, though they will need to be better resourced. What is true is that it's not working now and we have to come up with something else. While I've got a minute, there are many people in Forde that do an incredible amount of that personal advocacy. One of them is Shannon Manning, who I want to give a shout-out to today. She is a mum who has, well and truly, real life experience, with one severely disabled child and a younger autistic child as well. If there is any woman who is an example of how you do not lose if you keep on fighting, it is Shannon Manning.”
“I'm not sure whether it's called Centrecare, but the Catholic Church's arm in Queensland that was looking after it has exited the field because they could not make it work. With a scheme costing—what is it?—$50 billion a year or somewhere around there, they couldn't make it work. Something is going wrong from the end to the beginning, and there have to be changes. Those changes, as has been mentioned, are causing anxiety in the community. So, again, it was very good to hear the opposition's contribution that people need to know the kids aren't going to be worse off—that anybody who's getting the NDIS at the moment is going to continue to get the NDIS, for a start. This is not about trying to just shove people back into a dark corner, which is what existed prior to the NDIS, but about trying to come up with something better.”
“The Productivity Commission said that the NDIS in Queensland was supposed to cater for about 95,000 people. Right now there are 175,000 people on it. It's totally unsustainable. We all know in this place that, when a scheme like that is unsustainable, as it is, it will lose community support. So it is vital, in order to maintain that support, that the community have faith that it is actually returning value for money and doing what it's supposed to do. I've got 10 minutes. I could go on forever with the problems. There's one other problem I suppose I would just want to say, which is that, even with all of this money being spent and all of these participants in this system, there are still businesses going out of business. They still can't make the money work.”
“Among the schools in Forde there's Eagleby South State School and Waterford West State School. I never quite get the term right—I think it's called an inclusion term or something—but generally it means kids with disability. Something like over 40 per cent of children at that school have a disability. Not only are all of those families and all of those kids really set back to begin with; the 60 per cent of kids in that classroom with them are also struggling with the behaviours. The teachers are struggling with those behaviours, and it holds the whole community back. So, while there are 7,000 people in Forde who are actually getting the NDIS, it probably makes you think maybe there's another 7,000 people that should be getting the NDIS, but the scheme was never meant for that. In fact, there's one number I know that comes to mind.”
“It was really very good to hear him list those things that the opposition are setting as preconditions to support Thriving Kids—not that a first-term MP like me is going to be able to hold the government to any of them, but I'm sure the sentiment is something we all agree on. I hadn't understood what the opposition's position was on this, so I was very, very pleased to hear the member for Fadden go through that. In the electorate I represent, Forde—and these figures are three or four years old now—there's something like 7,000 people on the NDIS. Compare that to another electorate—an inner-city electorate, in fact. I remember the comparison with Griffith. There was something like 3½ thousand people on the NDIS. So, in a working-class area like Forde, you've got twice as many people as you do in an inner-city electorate.”
“We have been in a motel for two months now, with my son's behaviour getting worse and worse and no end in sight. I'm really not okay, and I can't get anyone to understand or help.' Probably it would be best to leave my contribution as that, because I'm not going to be able to say anything. I think nobody, none of us, could say anything that would match the power of that. That is a story that, as MPs, I'm sure we see all the time, and it's just unfathomable what people are going through. I was very pleased with the contribution from the member for Fadden. I think there is a genuine sense that we all want to make this work.”
“Try as hard as I might to help, I got this message 39 minutes before I walked into this chamber, and she is going to say it better than I could. There are a couple of spelling mistakes, and I just might stumble through it a bit, but the sentiment will be clear: 'Sorry I haven't reached out. My son and I have had a rough few months. After we spoke last, the provider spoke with me and told me a week before Christmas that my son needs the funding if he wanted to return this year. I was devastated. I didn't have time to organise a review or even try to do anything. My housing arrangements fell through because I had to leave work and my son was no longer in care, and the person I was living with could not handle him. We lived in our car for a week before YFS put us in emergency housing.”
“It was so difficult for her to even have a conversation with me while she was trying to manage his behaviour, that it was just unfathomable what it must be like for her everyday trying to manage that behaviour alone. She saw me because she was about to run out of funding for her child, who was in a specialist day-care centre, because, of course, there are very few day-care centres that are set up to take kids with those sorts of behaviours. She was desperately worried that she was going to lose the funding for that child care. That result would mean that she would have to leave her job, and because of that, it would mean that she would then be living in a car with her severely disabled three-year-old child.”
“We decided as a family that we wouldn't pursue applying to the NDIS, because I know through the work that I've done in the community that the supports they would have got through the NDIS just would not have been worth the headache and the hassle of going through that process of diagnosis and making an application and going through that torturous project. But, as it has been said, the NDIS is the only lifeboat in the ocean, and with everybody trying to climb on it because there's nothing else there, it has collapsed the system. I did promise never to read a speech from my phone, but it was literally 39 minutes before I walked into this chamber that I got a follow-up message from a constituent that I tried to help last year. She came to my office with her three-year-old autistic child, who was non-verbal and biting.”
“Thank you to the Deputy Speaker, who is becoming a regular audience of mine in this chamber. I'm glad to be able to make a contribution to this report. It's unplanned, but it's also something which is very, very close to my heart. In fact, in many ways, I'd say that I've come to this place with a few priorities that are very important to me. My head priorities are probably cheaper housing and cheaper energy, but my heart priority would be the NDIS and looking after the disabled in my community. I have a very close family member who is autistic.”
“When you look at the areas that the government is focusing on—housing, care and support services, and clean energy—that really does sum up the other thing that I'd like to say, which is that Australia's post-war economic miracle was an investment in public housing and an investment in public energy. Getting those skills together in those two critical areas is going to not only give individuals a great future and a secure job but also secure the productive capacity of our economy and Australia's future.”
“These are facts here—the fact that we were left with the biggest skills shortage in more than half a century; the fact that we have secured a landmark five-year national skills agreement; the fact that we have reset how Australia plans, funds and delivers vocational education and training; and the fact that you can see the proof in three statistics. From 2023 through 2024 to 2025, we have seen the shortages falling from 36 per cent to 33 per cent to 29 per cent. These are measurable returns on the investment that we are making in the National Skills Agreement, the heart of which really has to be free TAFE. Again, that's showing the values differences between the government and the opposition, knowing that we can invest in our people through free TAFE, that it is not a cost and that it is certainly not virtue signalling.”
“You can invest in your plant and your people and improve the productive capacity of that business, or you can run it into the ground, strip the profits out and delay the investment. Just as you run a business, so you run the country. Whereas the government believes in investing in that to improve that productive capacity, the opposition has believed in delaying those investments and stripping the profits out. Unfortunately, we have seen the country run into the ground. When I look at this motion, I find it impossible, really, to disagree with.”
“Unfortunately, I only ever got to the level of breaking things and not being able to fix things at Procraft, the mining contractor. I'm not sure if Procraft still exists, but I desperately wanted to be an apprentice machinist. I didn't make the grade, and, because unemployment in Broken Hill during that time in the nineties was running at about 20 per cent, I was easily replaced. We've got a completely different economy now. There is no way that you can easily replace somebody who has the will to become an apprentice, so there is an opportunity here to train the people for the future. There are two things that I'd like to say here. One is that I believe very strongly through my own experience in small business that there are two ways to run a small business.”
“For those opposite to try and say that it was us that was responsible, I suppose in many ways that shows that skills may not be the most interesting area of government, but it is one of the most clear examples of the difference in values between the government and the coalition—a government that believes in free TAFE as being a force to liberate the entrepreneurial aspirations of future carpenters and plumbers, compared to how the opposition sees it, given that the member for Cook in this very chamber, the Federation Chamber, described free TAFE as virtue signalling. The problems that we have today are different from the problems that I had when I was living in the electorate of the member for Parkes, in Broken Hill, where I come from, where I desperately wanted to do an apprenticeship as a fitter and machinist.”
“I'm going after a couple of contributions there. Member for Mayo, even though I disagree with a lot of what you were saying there in terms of us not doing things, I appreciate the constructive contribution that you made there. Australians just want to see us working. Australians just want to see us working together, which I don't think is what we got from my neighbour, the member for Wright, who displayed a spectacular lack of self-reflection by blaming all of the problems on the system, by blaming all of the problems on housing on this government, when those opposite had 10 years and did absolutely nothing. In fact, all they managed to do was leave us with the biggest skills shortage in over 50 years. I know that because I was out there working in the community when the housing crisis really hit while they were in government.”
“Second, the Reserve Bank has made it clear that the unexpected increase in private demand has been what's contributed to inflationary pressure, and the idea there about the shadow Treasurer crowing about somehow getting the RBA to admit that aggregate demand is made up of both private and sector spending, as if that is some sort of economic revelation, only really explains why nobody takes them seriously on economic management anymore. Third, the motion calls on the Treasurer to introduce measurable budget rules, which is remarkable coming from a party whose record and plans for the future show the complete opposite. They left black holes everywhere, and in opposition they went to the last election promising higher taxes and higher spending. So I'm not sure what rules you actually want us to follow.”
“But the argument contained in the motion from this opposition doesn't even withstand basic scrutiny. First, the shadow Treasurer talks about rules, but inflation under the former government that he was a part of was already at 6.1 per cent and rising when we came to government. Spending peaked under the Morrison government at 31.4 per cent of GDP, and real spending growth was at 4.1 per cent, more than double what it is under this government. This government has delivered $114 billion in savings, and the $20 billion in savings found in the last budget update alone was as much as the former government managed across all of its last seven budget updates combined. So lectures from the opposition about this really are quite extraordinary.”
“One is to invest in your plant and your people to build productive capacity in your business for the long term, and the other way is to strip out profits, to put off the maintenance, to cut the investment and to slowly run the country—I mean the business—into the ground. The key lesson is this: not all spending is the same. There is good spending and there is bad spending. The second thing I'd say is that the government understands that people are doing it tough. The fact that we're even having this argument is not the message that I want to get out to the community, because I know that in my community people are doing it tough, just as they are in most of the communities who are represented in this parliament. Inflation is higher than we would like. Cost-of-living pressures are real.”
“The shadow Treasurer talks a big game, but, as usual, I think the record talks an even bigger one. The shadow Treasurer talks about higher taxes and about real wages coming down, but the breathtaking part about that is that this is from a party that took tax increases to the last election and that kept wages down as a deliberate part of its economic architecture. The shadow Treasurer is also trying to pursue the line that you run the budget like a family runs its budget. While there is merit in that argument, I think there is more merit in the maxim that a government should run the economy the way a good business is run. The problem for the opposition there is that there are two very different ways to run a business. As somebody who's actually run a business, I know that there are two ways to do that.”
“My question is to the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government. What is the Albanese Labor government doing to deliver the infrastructure Australians need? What other approaches to infrastructure are there?”
“The real Australia out there that believes in justice and the Labor Party that has always believed in justice is the community that won't tolerate an opposition that washes its hands of looking after the most vulnerable in our country.”
“We've raised the income threshold under which you can come into Australia on a skilled visa. This bill makes it easier now for that young woman who came into my office, desperate to stay in Australia but also desperate to fight for the rights of the workers she left behind when she was sacked, to find an employer who is properly accredited and who is going to sponsor her dream. The opposition are out there talking about mass migration. They're out there marginalising already marginalised communities. They're out there punching down on some of the most vulnerable people in our community. They should take a good hard look at themselves. The result they got at the last election will be the result they get in future elections because they are now talking to the fringe.”
“In summary, this bill is the latest in a long line of measures the Albanese Labor government has undertaken to put out the bin fire that is our migration system. The hypocrisy of the opposition is exposed the most when it comes to migration. While they are out there stoking division and people's fears, they benefit from a system where people come in and get exploited because they can drive down the wages and conditions of Australian workers. These changes are the latest in a long line of Labor Party initiatives stretching back 150 years, where the Labor Party has stood up for Australians by standing up for the Australians who come here to work and who come here to make a life. This government has brought in new measures to crack down on dodgy employers.”
“Just as it is with migration, they are out there constantly beating their chests, but they totally underresourced the Australian Border Force. They totally undercooked the legislation to allow the Australian Border Force to crack down on unscrupulous employers. Yet again that burning wreck, that smoking wreck of a migration system left to us—it's in their DNA to turn a blind eye to the companies that are doing this. It's left to us to fix it. In fact, that 2019 report from the Migrant Workers' Taskforce recommended tougher penalties and a better resourced Australian Border Force—and what did you think they did? Absolutely nothing. They sat on their own report and left it to us to clean up the mess.”
“This bill also builds on previous bills which crack down on unscrupulous employers. This is where I think—I really do want to be bipartisan as much as I can in this place, but here there is a fundamental difference of values and philosophy. This is probably the best example of the hypocrisy of the opposition—they beat their chest a lot about law enforcement, but they don't fund it. On a slightly different topic of the NDIS, the measures that we've introduced around the NDIS to crack down on fraud mean that we are now reviewing more claims every day in the NDIS in one day than the previous government did in a year, which is an example of the sort of chest-beating that we've come to expect from the opposition, who talk a tough game but are completely missing on the field.”
“Arising out of more than just that process and arising out of Labor's deep commitment to protect the rights of migrant workers and to protect the rights of us all—protecting the rights of migrant workers protects the pay of everybody in the community, which might sound self-evident to us, but those on the other side know that, if you undermine the wages of migrant workers, you undermine the wages of the whole community. Coming out of that philosophy, we commenced that migration review, and, coming out of that, here are some of the measures, in this bill. There are two things here particularly—the whole point of this legislation is to create a register so people like the young woman that came into my office will be able to easily search for another employer who is able to continue to sponsor her. That's essentially what this bill does.”
“It must surely be terrifying. When we came to government in 2022, like in so many areas, we inherited a burning wreck of a migration system—a burning wreck that had failed in family reunion and that had failed in skilled migration—and the government commissioned the migration review, which I was very happy to be a part of. Having worked in the community for years, making a statement like 'burning wreck' doesn't really convey the pain and pressure that people were placed under because of a poorly resourced department and also because of poor policy. It was that awful mix of poor legislation and poorly applied legislation. The migration review, which I was very happy to be a part of locally—I remember we organised local businesses and community leaders and local multicultural leaders to feed into that process.”
“She had come here to work in aged care and had become involved in a dispute regarding the workplace treatment, and, acting as a union delegate, she was dismissed. She believed that her dismissal was related to advocating for her workplace rights and is now pursuing a claim in the commission. She was somebody who was working 12 hours a day and being paid for six hours a day. It is like a modern horror movie. It's something that—I'm sure none of us here can imagine what it is like to be in Australia on a temporary visa, working as a virtual slave for an employer that is humiliating you, that is degrading you and that is hanging over your head the threat of whether or not they remove your visa and kick you out of the country that you have come to love and that you want to make your life in. None of us can appreciate what that is like.”
“So it was from both stopping that outrageous practice out of the sense of justice that working people have but also protecting the wages and conditions of Australians that the Labor Party was formed. That was our birth. And here we are 150 years later still fighting the same fight against forces that are more concerned about the dollar than they are about justice or Australian workers. It is in our DNA to stand up for workers who have been brought to this country, for two reasons: (1) some employers are just trying to get that cheap labour and (2) the opposition will do anything they can to drive down wages and conditions. Here we are, 155 years later—the latest example is a young woman who came into my electorate office, having been exploited at work.”
“They are out there causing division and beating their chests about migration while, at the same time, wanting to bring in workers so that they can be, effectively, exploited in order to drive down the wages of all Australians. The reason why this issue is so important for the Labor Party is that, in many ways, this is the history of the Labor Party. This is our origin story—combating migrant exploitation. The member for Moreton said it much more eloquently than I could when she described the process of bringing in South Sea Islander workers during the late 1800s. She said that the people not only lost their wages but lost their lives. I could be corrected, but I think she also said something like 30 per cent of the people who were brought into that unthinkably horrible operation lost their lives due to European diseases.”
“He characterised that it had somehow got out of control and had now made it uneconomical for companies to bring in overseas temporary migrant workers. I think that really does show where they are coming from here. I would hate to characterise it as a deliberate feature of their economic architecture to keep wages down, but they said it themselves. And it makes me think that maybe they want to use temporary migration as another part of the architecture to keep wages down. Because, if you're keeping the TSMIT down at $53,000 and if you're saying to employers that they can bring people in from overseas to work for $53,000, you are keeping wages down and you are suppressing wages. It makes me think that they are deliberately trying to do that in so many areas, but in the most despicable way.”
“Ultimately, despite all of the other contributions, it was the member for Nicholls who really belled the cat on where the opposition are coming from in this, when he criticised us raising the TSMIT—which, at a quarter to 10 in the morning, might be a little bit more of a conversation than it was going to be at 7.30 last night when people were ready to go home. The TSMIT sounds all very complicated, but it really just means 'temporary skilled migration income threshold'. It may have been replaced now, but it means that that's the amount which an employer has to pay in order to bring in a skilled migrant. From 2013 to 2023 it remained at $53,000, and the member for Nicholls criticised the government for lifting it. We lifted it to where it would've been had it kept up with CPI to about $70,000, and he said that it had soared.”
“But as is always the case with government programs—with immigration in particular—the public needs to have some sort of comfort that we have control over how it's working. So allowing the public to know that employers out there are being held accountable for their part in the arrangement gives some sort of comfort to the whole community that the system works. Because, as the member for Mallee said in her contribution, migrant workers aren't an option; they're essential. In order for that to proceed, you would think that the opposition would support this bill to give the sorts of guarantees which people in the Australian community are looking for.”
“But I think, fundamentally, he missed completely the point of this bill, which is: it is not about saying which employers are good or bad but about saying whether or not an employer is accredited to be a sponsor for a skilled visa. Hopefully, that might allay some of the concerns that the opposition has about this bill. I would urge them to reconsider their opposition to this bill and support it. Or maybe it was the member for Riverina, who very typically said people in the city don't understand what it is like to work in the bush. But I know, Deputy Speaker Claydon, that you and I both worked in the bush, we both worked on farms and we spent a lot of our time out in there in the sticks. And we know that, by and large, farmers are really just trying to do their best and that most of them are trying to do the right thing.”
“I rise in support of the Migration Amendment (Combatting Migrant Exploitation) Bill 2025. I am just looking around the chamber. I am not sure that anybody who is here this morning had the absolute experience of sitting through the member for New England's speech on this bill last night. Even people who have been here for a long time, who are used to the long rollicking performances that the member gives, may have been a little bit stunned by some of the things which he mentioned. Apart from the fact that it could be characterised as an impassioned speech against multiculturalism, it managed to somehow drift from the Inca empire to calling Australian workers 'lazy'.”
“So I think this was something, 50 years ago, that really shows that even though we've come a long way there's still a lot to do. It reminds us that 50 years ago Australia was really coming out of that White Australia policy. And it's remarkable to think that I, now at the age of 52, was born so close to that period in time. It's been a great thing for Australia. Before I conclude, I've got to say that the one thing I never thought I would appreciate so much as a federal member of parliament is going around to school assemblies, particularly primary school assemblies, in Forde, a very multicultural electorate. Seeing all those little kids with different coloured faces and different shaped faces all looking up and singing the national anthem has got to be the most moving thing I have experienced as a federal member of parliament.”