Mrs SALLY QUINNELL (Camden) (15:14): I support the Parliamentary Remuneration Amendment Bill 2023, which follows the Government's election commitment to impose a two‑year pay freeze for politicians. I call into question some of the assertions made by the member for Kellyville. One of the mistakes being made in the Chamber today relates to the idea of responsible management of the budget. As a former business owner, I know that, with a business, when you sit down for the yearly budget, you have incomings and expenditure. It is really quite simple. Money comes in and money goes out. If you do not have enough money coming in, you cannot have money going out. That is the way a simple budget works. One of the easiest and more responsible ways to take that on is to freeze the wages of the people who are in control of the budget.

In the past, when Opposition members were part of the previous Government, they would freeze the wages of the people who had no control over the budget and continually bump up their own wages. That was completely irresponsible. In any small business, if the owner was to continually bump up their own wage while continually freezing the wages of their frontline workers, they would end up with no workers. And—surprise, surprise—that is the situation New South Wales has found herself in. You cannot be responsible without freezing the wages of the people making the decisions. Looking at the budget, Government members have decided that the most responsible thing to do is say that, as politicians, we get quite a reasonable wage and our wages should be frozen for two years so that the people who we employ, our frontline workers, can have their wages unfrozen.

Those people have been on the front line for us for many years. As a former teacher, I can tell members that it is tough being a frontline worker. I have many stories of kindergarten students whose parents were working at local hospitals sneezing in my face during COVID, because kindergarten students do not really understand personal space. Those teachers were on the front line, risking their lives and their families' lives, and not earning a stable wage that was growing with inflation. It is the same with paramedics. Many paramedics have told me that it is really hard when both income earners in a house are on a paramedic, teacher, nurse or firefighter wage. If both parents in a household are on one of those frontline worker wages, it is really tough to make ends meet. On top of that, a lot of those workers are casual and they then find it difficult to get loans. We are looking at starting to rectify that and balance it out, because we are losing teachers and nurses. They are moving interstate, because the conditions are better and the pay is better.

People do not go into those industries for the remuneration; they do so because they care about our community. They serve the community. As the member for Heathcote said, we also, hopefully, went into our jobs in service of the community. For long enough we have asked all of those frontline workers to accept a wage freeze in order for the community to be better off. The Minns Labor Government is saying, "Enough is enough." We are going to freeze our wages for two years and fund the increase of wages for those frontline essential workers and essential services out of those savings. Those people are serving our community day in, day out. The idea that we would not want to put those people first as our priority in the Chamber is quite abhorrent to me. It is about leading by example; it is about saying that we are willing to do this for our State because we are responsible fiscal managers. Government members are happy to look at our State budget—which, to be honest with you, is probably slightly larger than my business budget was. But when looking at a budget that is a little tight, and much tighter than we expected it to be, the first thing we can do is be responsible ourselves. We should not call on our frontline and essential workers to do that for us. I commend the bill because it is a fantastic example of leading by example, and I am proud to speak for it today.