Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The electorate of Bowman is Moreton Bay based, and one of the great passions of anyone who lives around Moreton Bay is, of course, access to the bay for fishing and other recreational activities. Moreton Bay currently stands under a shadow because the state government is conducting a Moreton Bay Marine Park review. No-one would disagree for a moment that we need a sustainable bay for the future. The great concern of local fishermen and anglers from fishing clubs, including Redland Bay, the Capalaba Muddies and Victoria Point Sharks, is a simple one: is all the science going to be considered? This has been a six- to eight-month battle. Ever since the environment minister announced the review, the great concern has been that there would be a one-sided analysis and that great tracts of Moreton Bay would be locked up. History tells us it can happen.

I would like to congratulate the Fisheries Research and Development Corporation for funding up to $195,000 to make sure that evidence on fishing activity in Moreton Bay is considered and is available so that we can be certain that there is not going to be lock-up based on very limited science. We have already seen leaking to the Courier-Mail of pro-environmental articles which are clearly anecdotal, often spurious and far from a complete picture of what is happening on the bay. Hundreds of thousands of people use that wonderful resource responsibly—fishing in wonderful locations, teaching their children to fish—and I think it would be a great loss if the marine park were to be extended purely on limited science, without consideration of the very renewable and sustainable activities that occur on the bay at the moment.

The second great issue for Redlands—as you would know well, Mr Speaker—is traffic and roads. The southern part of Redland Bay and Victoria Point is one of the few 20,000 population communities that have single-lane roads leading out of them. Slowly, that is changing, but Pinklands exit is one significant bottleneck that was never fixed. We had a state government that was effectively nickel-and-diming the council and calling this important sporting exit a ‘driveway’ for which it had no responsibility. That is exactly how it would have stayed for three or four years, as local families tried to negotiate this dangerous intersection. I am delighted to say that that impasse was broken. It cost in the order of $30,000 to extend that intersection, to broaden it and to provide turning lanes. It was a simple solution and it should have happened years ago. It took a petition, and it took the netball club, the rugby league club, the Yurara art group, the bridge club and the pony club an enormous amount of work which was simply talked down as politicking before the solution was provided.

Finally, in Redlands we share something with the rest of the country, and that is a belief in the importance of chaplaincy and pastoral care. I will never truly understand, being on this side of the House, the curious equivocation about pastoral care that exists on the other side of the chamber—the sense that it does not have a really important role to play in government schools. You only have to walk into a schoolyard to see just how important it is. You only have to recall your own childhood to remember just how important it was to have someone that you could talk to, to trust and to recount some of those stories of crisis times to. I am not saying for a moment that you cannot do that with teaching staff, but there is something wonderful about the presence of a chaplain providing that sort of moral support—from breakfast right through to when kids go home in the afternoon—and providing a quiet place to go and talk about things that cause enormous stress. We are already discovering just how large a proportion of morbidity can be ascribed to mental health issues, and it starts from school. We know that chaplaincy plays a significant role.

Late last year, it looked like there was no hope. Chaplains all around the country were running chocolate wheels and sausage sizzles to try to pull together a living wage. That has changed. It changed with the $70 million announcement by the Prime Minister last year, and it was rolled out in time for the 2007 school year. That is funding that every school, government or non-government, can apply for. It will be funding new chaplaincy services to schools that have never had them before.

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