***CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY ***

Thanks Susan.

Just how good is the Labor candidate for Longman, Susan Lamb.

 

Friends, there are six days to go and we’ve just got one job to do - we're going to send Susan Lamb back to Canberra.

We're going to send her with a message from Queenslanders - money for hospitals, not money for the banks.

Thank you to Uncle Gordon for your welcome and I too acknowledge the traditional owners of the land upon which we meet, and I acknowledge the elders both past and present.

And because we are at one of our mighty RSL's I'd like to acknowledge every Australian who has served or currently serves in the Australian Defence Forces - thank you very much.

I'd also like to thank my friend and your Premier of Queensland Anastacia Palaszczuk.


And could you give another very warm welcome to my favourite Queenslander, my wife Chloe.

And to Clementine and all the kids who are here, you’ve just reminded us that you're never too young or too old to come to a Labor Party event.

I started this beautiful Queensland morning over at Woody Point on the Redcliffe Peninsula for the Jetty 2 Jetty fun run, good use of the word fun.


Now I concede that I was a little slow out of the blocks but I’m pleased to let you know that I think it was my final kilometre of the run which was my fastest.

Now, that could have been of course because there were more people there cheering at the end. 

But I prefer to think it is not how you start, it is how you finish and this is the Labor way.

And in the next six days, we are going to run all the way to finish line to bring home a win for Susan Lamb and Labor and Queensland. 

It’s remarkable – Julie-Ann Campbell has said there's been a lot of hard work that has gone into the campaign so far, and I am very grateful for the efforts of every volunteer, every union activist, every community minded person.

But it is a tough fight. We are the underdogs. The book makers have the other mob as favourites.

And now of course the LNP and the One Nation political party have teamed-up again and are swapping preferences just to try and knock us, the underdog, off from winning.

And we do not have the big dollars like our opponents, and we do not have the media cheerleaders on our side.

But  what we do have, is we’ve got the best campaign team, we’ve got the best candidate and we've got the best policies for the people of Longman and the people of Queensland.

Our candidate, Susan Lamb she is a fighter, she knows what it is like to strive and then to succeed. 

She’s a single mum who loves her kids and loves her community.

She is and always will be a great champion for Longman.

And there’s the other fellow, ‘Big Trev' - never a good sign to give themselves a nickname.

Now he’s been - he's been in big trouble this week over what he says was just a big typo.

But to be honest, I think his Curriculum Vitae has other problems.

Like his years in Campbell Newman’s Government.

When the LNP cut hospitals.

When they did take out over 1400 health workers in Moreton Bay in the Brisbane North area, over 700 nurses as we've heard our Premier tell us. 

I mean this fellow, ‘Big Trev’ even went so far as to try and sell the local ovals at the schools upon which our kids play.

These though, these cut were not typos that someone else made out when filling in a form - this is his form. 

And it's what the LNP always do: cut the schools, cut the hospitals, look after the top end of town, look after the big money.

There is only one way to stop cuts to hospitals, there is only one way to stop cuts to schools and to TAFE.

It is to vote Labor in the upcoming Longman by-election. 

This is a great gathering on a lovely Sunday morning in a fantastic part of Australia, but I have to say I bring some bad news - Pauline Hanson is not happy with us.

Goodness me, she's not happy.

You see, she doesn’t like us bringing up the times that - all the times that she said penalty rates should be abolished altogether.

She doesn’t like hearing how she's voted with the Liberals to cut $17 billion from schools.

She certainly doesn’t like us calling her out for being an imposter and pretending to be a friend of the battlers, when all she wants to do is get back on the plane to Canberra and vote with the big end of town.

Every day it goes on more and more people are learning the truth about One Nation and their leader.

What she says on Sunrise, she does not do in the Senate.

What she says in Caboolture is not what she does in Canberra.

In fact – and it is a fact – 90 per cent of the time in parliament, One Nation lines up - whatever part of One Nation that is left behind her, lines up and votes with the government.

She is a more reliable LNP voter than half of Mr Turnbull's backbench. 

I had a union delegate once who used to race pigeons and he would have said this. He said that One Nation - they're basically a Liberal Party homing pigeon, they let ‘em out, they flap around in a circle for a bit, but in the end they always come home to the roost.

And this is my message to all those who might be thinking about voting for One Nation, especially the people who’ve voted Labor in the past.

It is a fact that if you vote One Nation, you are voting LNP.

You are not protesting, you are being used to send a vote to the LNP. 

And if you want - and what you will get with that is you will get the cuts to schools and hospitals and TAFE.

You'll end up seeing fewer apprenticeships, harder for working class kids to go to university and the pensioners and the penalty rates will go backwards.

If you want better funding for hospitals and schools, more apprenticeships, more places for working class kids in uni.

If you want to get your penalty rates back and if you want the pensioners to get a fair deal - vote for Susan Lamb and vote Labor next Saturday. 

I said at the outset that we had the better candidate, but we've also got the better policies.

We've got the best plan for education.

We're going to fund schools and the early years education of our children before school - we're going to fund it properly.

We will renovate our TAFE campuses, we will pay the upfront fees for 100,000 apprentices doing TAFE in the next three years.

We are going to invest in universities. 200,000 people will get the chance to go to university in the next ten years, under a Labor government - they just simply won't get under the current LNP Government.

And we do all of this investment in education because, I like you believe funding education, funding our kid's future is better with that $17 billion - better to give that to the education, the teachers, the parents, the kids than to give $17 billion to the big four banks.

A very straight forward choice. 

But it's not just about education, it's about living standards too.

We are going to give a bigger, better, fairer tax cut for 10 million working Australians who earn less than $125,000.

That's good for your living standard, more back in your tax. 

We're going to have a fight with the big Private Health Insurers, we're going to cap their Private Health Insurance fee increase to a maximum of 2 per cent for the first two years of a Labor government.

We have a wages policy which is more than just cutting penalty rates.

What we intend to do is restore the penalty rates of 700,000 Australian workers within the first 100 days of a Labor government - that's what we'll do.

And we are going to crack down on dodgy labour hire companies - not just in Queensland but right across Australia.

If I am Prime Minister I will have a simple rule: you do the same job, you get the same pay. Same job - same pay.

We can afford to make these promises because we're not giving $17 billion away to big banks.

And Labor is going to help with your power bills too.

In this Government’s last budget, they cut the Energy Supplement.

Now that’s an extra $14 for a single pensioner - that's $365 a year and what that is going to mean for a married couple pensioner, is $21 being cut from the energy supplement, $550 a year. 

This is not a king’s ransom, Labor doesn't expect a pat on the back for doing the right thing but we will do the right thing.

The LNP are now saying that they cannot find enough money in the budget to provide an Energy Supplement for 395,000 pensioners. 

Do you know why they can't find money for an energy supplement for pensioners, hundreds of thousands of our fellow Australians?

Because they are giving it all to the big banks in $17 billion. 

And it's because of Susan Lamb's particular and passionate and effective advocacy - of local delivery and of knowing what a local needs. 

I’m proud to say that Labor is offering the best suite of local policies for voters in Longman.

And we can afford to make these promises because we are not giving $17 billion to the big banks.

So when you look at it, when you look at what we're proposing, Susan is putting the pensioners as more important than the bankers. 

That is why, and I congratulate her policy for pensioners, for veterans, for parents who shouldn't have to spend hours on the phone to Centrelink because we don't think that if you get a government pension you should be treated as second class.

What we are going to do is bring new Medicare and Department of Human Services workers into Longman - an extra 50 people to treat the thousands of pensioners with respect that is long overdue in the northern suburbs of Brisbane.

Now friends, the current Prime Minister was on the radio the other day and he said that the by-election was about him versus me.

And maybe in his mind that's what it is.

That maybe that contest makes all of these other problems just go away magically.

I mean on his flying visit here yesterday he said "Bill Shorten" 11 times - whatever floats your boat.

But he didn’t mention the word ‘schools’ once.

Couldn't get his tongue around the 'hospital' word once. 

I'm different, I don’t actually think this by-election is about him or me.

I say this to the voters of Longman - it's not about Malcolm Turnbull or Bill Shorten, it’s about you.

It's about your families, it's about your health care.

That's what motivates Susan Lamb and Labor.

When you boil it all down, when you get rid of the gossip, the trivia, the commentary. 

What really matters in my experience, what Chloe - what matters most to Chloe and I is our family and our health. 

And you don't need to have a PHD in political science, you don't have to be the Government or the Opposition.

What really matters - and we over complicate it in Australian politics, is how is your family going and how is your health going. 

And if your family is okay and if your health is okay or either of them are not you can get help when you need it, that is what really matters. 

So what Labor is offering the voters of Longman, it's all about your health and it's all about your family: 

What motivates Susan, what motivates me, what motivates our whole team, what motivates Premier Palaszczuk, is we just want to make sure that your kids school gets proper funding.

So if they are falling behind they can get that extra help, if someone is picking on them there's some resources in the school to keep your child safe.

If your child just loves mathematics or loves music or loves sport, they can get that extra support so they can fulfil how good they really are if given that chance. 

What matters to us is if your kid can get an apprenticeship, what matters to us is if your kid wants to go to university they can go to university.

They can go to university in the northern suburbs of Brisbane, not so far away from home as they currently do.

What matters to us is better roads and public transport, what matters to us is about the proper NBN for small businesses - not a copper cop-out.  

What matters to us is that you've got a job where it's not putting you below the poverty line, you can actually pay the bills, you can take the family out on a Sunday for a treat and a bite of breakfast and a bit of fun. 

What matters to us is that you've got enough that you don't have to delay going to see the doctor or spreading a prescription beyond the authorised time because you don't have enough money to pay the energy bills and to pay for the medical prescription at the same time. 

 

And what matters to us is not if you're the king of the castle or you're the CEO of a big bank or you live on the eastern suburbs of Sydney with a view of the water.

What matters to us is that when it comes time to pay the bills, you can.

What matters to us if you're a pensioner, is you're not made to wait on the telephone for three hours to get a legitimate entitlement which you've paid taxes for forty years and you should be able to get.

And most importantly though, it is about your health along with your family. 

If you vote for Susan you will see a new MRI machine for the Moreton Bay region.

If you vote for Susan we will see a new $10 million Chemotherapy treatment at the Caboolture Hospital, rather than taking longer trips elsewhere.

What matters to us is an urgent care clinic on Bribie Island so for the thousands of people who currently have to spend half an hour in an ambulance going to the Emergency Department at Caboolture, you can get the urgent, non-life threatening treatment right where you live.

This is what matters to us. 

And what matters to us is what we read on the trucks of truth going around this electorate - we will make sure that we put back the $2.9 million cut from Caboolture Hospital.

Do you know why we say these things, because your heath and your family are what matter to us. 

That's what gets a passionate advocate like Susan out of bed in the morning and makes her work as long and as hard as she does. 

Because she's really interested in the whole community, not just those who are already doing very well off. 

So next Saturday, July 28th - you get to exercise your democratic choice.

You get to exercise your voice, you get to have your vote. 

And I would put to you, the choice is crystal clear.

If you vote LNP or One Nation you get the same outcome, which is tax cuts for big banks, tax cuts for the very well off and $10 a week for everyone else.

But if you vote for Susan Lamb and Labor you’ll be voting for Tullawong State School or St Peter’s Primary School.

You’ll be voting for Caboolture TAFE or Sunshine Coast University.

 

You’ll be voting for restoring penalty rates, helping pensioners with their lower power bills.

 

You’ll be voting for fair pay and a wages policy and better wages.

You’ll be voting to save the ABC even. 

And most of all you’ll be voting to help properly fund Caboolture Hospital - not to give $17 billion to the big banks.

But at a deeper lever when you strip away all of the sort of - the show business and the razamataz of politics. 


You'll be voting to put the community back into the community.

You'll be voting to put Aussie battlers back into the decision making in Canberra.

And it's about the sort of person you want fighting for you in Canberra.

If you want a fighter who is on the side of working class and middle class Australia, who will prioritise hospitals and Medicare and schools and TAFE, over tax cuts for the top end of town - let's return Susan Lamb.

ENDS