2024-10-04
By Penny Allman-Payne
Senator for Queensland
It's been over two years since I was elected to the Senate and a year since my Gladstone electorate office finally opened. Fighting for the material concerns of everyday Australians alongside my Greens colleagues, members, supporters, stakeholders and the community is a challenging, joyful and, at times, heartbreaking privilege.
There is still so much to do.
My office in Gladstone is working hard to change public expectations of what a Senate office does and is capable of. We know that becoming authentically embedded in a local community works—it has directly contributed to our electoral wins in Queensland multiple times. Like regional areas elsewhere, regional Queenslanders often face challenges in different ways to their metropolitan counterparts. And their elected representatives have served them poorly for far too long, so we're trying to set a new standard.
Juggling parliamentary work, representing the entire state, and running a regional senate office like a lower house electoral office is a lot of work, but it's certainly paying off. Through their interactions with us, more and more people living in Gladstone and beyond have come to understand what genuine community-minded political representation can do. That it's the Greens who are doing this work alongside them is often a surprise at first, but like all hearts and minds projects, it becomes powerful when that morphs into gratitude.
With the Albanese government continuing to defend its corrosive budget austerity measures during a cost-of-living crisis, Labor has chosen to dig itself a deeper hole. With a growing list of broken election promises and no progressive legislative wins, public anger and disillusionment are at an all-time high.
With that in mind, I'll run through the work my team and I have been doing this past year across my portfolios and in my neighbourhood to build our movement and become the real opposition to Labor.
On the Ground in Gladstone
Our community pantry and dinners have fed hundreds of people since our Gladstone senate office opened in September last year. This year alone, my staff, a steadily growing crew of volunteers, and I have served 305 meals at our monthly community dinners and provided 48 emergency hampers to people in crisis.
Building local trust through our ongoing mutual aid, community care and advocacy for anyone who needs it without question has been crucial to this project. Feeding people, both literally and figuratively, listening to their stories, and supporting them in meaningful ways, changes lives.
Growing our support base in Gladstone will take a while, but we're sowing seeds.
Primary & Secondary Education
This year we’ve held a number of Save Our Public Schools forums, in Queensland, SA, NSW, Victoria, and online. Four of these were recently held across Brisbane to boost the state campaigns of Katinka Winston-Allom for Cooper, Rebecca White for Greenslopes, Holstein Wong for McConnel, and Liam Flenady for Miller.
These forums are a fantastic opportunity to talk directly with teachers, parents and carers and the community about our vision for a fully resourced, inclusive, world class public education system and how we get there.
Over the course of the year and especially in the last few months, I've gained increasing media traction by spotlighting the obscene inequity between public and private school funding perpetuated by both Labor and the Coalition at federal and state levels over decades. There are so many gross examples, but when the Albanese government is proposing to lock in underfunding for our public schools for another decade whilst handing over $1bn to the wealthiest private schools in Queensland alone, while 19% of public school principals say they don't have enough classrooms and struggle with underequipped science labs, halls that are too small and decrepit bathrooms, it's criminal.
I’ve also spent the past year drawing attention to a range of other issues that impact on or intersect with primary and secondary education. I've given speeches in parliament on youth justice, school can't (aka school refusal), social support, as well as the impact the decline in public school funding has on ordinary people during the ongoing cost-of-living crisis.
Estimates provided me with an excellent opportunity to grill the Department of Education about school refusal/school can't, the worsening teacher workforce crisis, the Better and Fairer Schools Agreement negotiations, capital works funding, gaps in funding distribution of the school wellbeing program and the damaging effects retention of the 4% depreciation loophole has on public schooling. We’ve also used budget estimates to interrogate the work of the Australian Education Research Organisation.
Social Services and Government Services
In late March, I took on responsibility for the Social Services and Government Services portfolios. I've hit the ground running, building on and extending the powerful work done by Senators Rachel Siewert and Janet Rice to amplify the voices of targeted, marginalised, and vulnerable community members in this space.
I've used Senate estimates to question key officials from the Department of Social Services, Services Australia, and the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations on their operational processes (the what) and procedures (the how) in relation to debt recovery, the lack of income support increases, extreme blowouts in DSP wait times, staff shortages, mutual obligations, dodgy job providers, and work-for-the-dole schemes. These have proven fruitful in attracting increased media scrutiny of the targeted and collateral damage caused by Centrelink compliance frameworks, the unchecked power handed to companies in Australia's privatised employment services network, and Labor's ongoing embrace of neoliberal market solutions.
In parliament, I supported an order for Production of Documents into a report on the Cashless Debit Card and spoke to the Social Services and Other Legislation Amendment Bill. During the debate on the bill, I questioned the Minister on issues relating to the low rates of Youth Allowance and the Disability Support Pension, and asked why the government was failing to adopt the recommendations of its own Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee on poverty line payments and screwing over people with a reduced capacity to work. I also moved and spoke to an amendment to increase all income support payments to above the poverty line but Labor and the Coalition voted it down.
My staff and I have met with multiple stakeholders, including the Anti-Poverty Centre and the Australian Unemployed Workers Union and will continue to engage in an ongoing dialogue with them. As many of you will be acutely aware, Australia's social security system has been used as a blunt instrument of control by both Labor and Coalition governments for decades. With insubstantial poverty payments, crushing mutual obligations, a privatised job service network, and compliance processes designed to be as unsympathetic and punitive as possible, there's a lot of scorched ground to cover. The recent addition of another policy advisor to my team will help with our capacity in this space. Stay tuned!
Older People
In late March I also took carriage of the Older People (which used to be known as Aged Care) portfolio. So far, this has involved numerous stakeholder meetings and utilising Senate estimates to grill officials from the Department of Health and Aged Care about reduced care minutes, aged care wage increases, waiting times for homecare packages, and administrative/accessibility bottlenecks. In August I gave a speech to a meeting of the National Aged Care Alliance - a representative body of peak national organisations in aged care, including consumer groups, providers, unions, and health professionals. Everyone in the sector is hoping the Government introduces its Aged Care Reform legislation into the parliament before the end of the year, with advocates telling us they are desperate to see a rights based framework passed before the next election.
Sport
We haven’t spent a lot of time on the Sports portfolio since acquiring it in March. However, during Senate estimates, I took the opportunity to question the Australian Sports Commission about the impacts of periods of extreme heat (and climate change more generally) on community and major sporting events. I also participated in the Senate Inquiry into Australia's preparedness to host the Commonwealth, Olympic and Paralympic Games, pushing hard for further hearings to be held in Brisbane so that stakeholder groups from East Brisbane, Redlands and the Victoria Park area could give evidence in person.
Transition, Industry and Regional Development
I continued developing the Greens’ response to the US Inflation Reduction Act, including seeking library advice on transition, meeting with industry and transition space stakeholders, and forward planning for the following stages. I also grilled the department in estimates over the upcoming Net Zero Economy Authority legislation and planned implementation.
Much of the work in this space lately has been reactive, including to Peter Dutton's trial balloon musings on nuclear energy, which are mostly designed to prop up gas exploration and export.
The Industry component of this portfolio is now the responsibility of Victorian Senator Steph Hodgins-May as our new spokesperson for Science, Industry & Innovation. I look forward to working closely with Steph as our transition and industry portfolios often intersect.
Northern Australia
In the Northern Australia portfolio, I participated in hearings for the inquiry into Workforce Development and Cyclone Reinsurance Pool conducted by the Joint Standing Committee on Northern Australia.
We've also deepened our relationship with communities in the Torres Strait, which face the prospect of extinction due to rising seas. We will continue to find ways to amplify their message and advocate for their needs. I also actively used this portfolio and committee work to assist the NT Greens.
As you may have read elsewhere, I handed over responsibility for this portfolio to WA Senator Dorinda Cox in March. Dorinda is doing fantastic work in pushing back against Labor and the Coalition, who both primarily see the entire northern region as a place to rapaciously exploit resources, people, and the environment.
Standing up against complicity in genocide, working for peace
Many people have written to me about the horrific violence that continues to escalate in Gaza as well as the West Bank. Like you, I'm distressed and appalled to be witnessing a genocide in real-time, one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes of our lifetimes. My heart breaks for the millions of Palestinians who are experiencing this unspeakable horror on the ground, or witnessing it from afar.
The Australian Government's wholly inadequate response to this genocide is disgraceful; their complicity in slaughter is obscene, and their enabling of corporate profiteering from weaponry is now a matter of record.
While the media use Israeli Government talking points to aggressively criticise the Greens, I've felt proud to resolutely stand alongside Adam, Mehreen and my other party-room colleagues in defending our ongoing support for the people of Gaza against violent colonialism and genocidal hegemony and tactics.
What's next?
People seek stability in tumultuous times. With the Albanese government's honeymoon well and truly over and Labor's poll numbers hitting rock bottom in Queensland, the Greens are in prime position to continue building our organising capacity and winning more seats.
Labor and the Coalition are increasingly struggling to connect with their communities. Both have a shrinking, ageing base and lack a coherent theory of change. Neither is capable of growing a movement.
In contrast, we know how to meet people where they are at.
We know how to talk with them about their anxieties and concerns and how to address their genuine fears about the material conditions of their day-to-day lives.
We know that universal access to affordable and secure housing, inexpensive fresh food no matter where you live, lifelong free education and training for all, and a guaranteed minimum income means people aren't merely surviving but having a good life.
We know these things aren't privileges or impossible to implement. They are the very least all of us deserve. We know poverty has been a political choice.
Let's get out there and fight for them together.
In solidarity and with kindness,
- Penny