David Jull (Fadden, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to declare that this is my final speech—although I may have to make a speech in tabling a report tomorrow. This is also the 371st speech I have made since 1981. If you go back to the beginning of my career in 1975, I suppose you could add 100 on to that—so we are probably getting very close to the 500th speech I have made in my 30 years in this place. I was not going to make a final speech. I thought it might be more appropriate just to ride off into the sunset and let others judge my career and what I may or may not have achieved. But I have been convinced that I should speak today, and I looked at maybe getting a text on which to base my speech. I thought an appropriate one was the 129th psalm, which opens with: ‘Many a time have they fought against me. Yea, many a time have they fought against me from my youth up, but they have not prevailed against me.’ I think that is a fairly appropriate opening for this final speech, because the thing that I appreciate more than anything is that I am leaving this place in my own time—they did not get me.

It has been a wonderful career, and I hope that I will be recognised over the years as making some contributions. From my own point of view, I think the highlight of it has been my association with the electorate. I have been very fortunate to represent a huge part of southern Queensland. When I first stood in 1974, my electorate ran from the north of Moreton Island to Springwood and west to Sunnybank, an area of something like 642 square miles with a population of 125,000 voters. It was also one of the fastest-growing areas of Australia and included not only the Wynnum Manly district and great areas of metropolitan Brisbane but also the Redland shire—which at that stage had a population of about 25,000 people and now enjoys a population of about 180,000 people—and parts of Logan City, which then, I think, had about 30,000 people and now has a population of more than 200,000 people. Over the years, by means of various distributions, that electorate has gone further south, to the point where I now represent the northern end of the Gold Coast, which in itself is still the second fastest-growing area of Australia, with growth rates of 14 per cent.

In that respect, my job in this place was to be an advocate for those very fast developing areas and to become involved in areas like local government, particularly in education, to make sure that the infrastructure and the facilities were available to the people who were flooding in to the south-east corner of Queensland. As somebody said at a farewell function recently, one of my epitaphs will be the number of plates on school buildings which I opened. That is probably true. One of the most satisfying things has been my involvement in local schools to see that the best possible infrastructure and the best possible education could be achieved. I think of some of the great schools that I have represented—for example, the new Moreton Bay College and John Paul College, which are two of the finest private schools in Queensland. I think of my association with MacGregor high school, which produced the honourable member for Moreton, and, in more recent times, Springwood High School. These are great institutions. It gives you a great deal of confidence when you visit them to see what they have done.

There has been tremendous Commonwealth investment in my electorate in areas such as roads—and the demand for that infrastructure is going to be more and more as the years go on and the population continues to increase. It really has been a challenge to work out what the attitude should be in our approach to local government. There have been moves and suggestions that local government should become part of the Constitution. I do not know whether or not that would work, but there has to be a much greater relationship between this place, the government of the Commonwealth, and local government. It is a plain fact of life that, with the inefficiencies of the system we have at the moment where the state governments are involved, it does not always work and is not necessarily to the betterment of  the people in those areas.

I was originally a radio journalist. I was thrown into the coverage of the Queensland state parliament at the ripe old age of 19. It was that period in the early sixties when radio had decided that they were really being threatened by television and they were going to take them on. Macquarie Broadcasting Services set up about 57 stations. They all had news representatives and there were key stations in every state. And, frankly, they took on the ABC. I am not quite sure whether or not the writing or the accuracy were always quite as good but, in terms of the speed in delivering the news, we used to beat the ABC hands down. The news editor walked in to the station one day and said, ‘We need a state parliamentary roundsman.’ Obviously no-one put their hand up, so he looked at me—a cadet at 19 years of age—and said, ‘You’re it.’ For a number of years I had the experience of covering the state parliament and the state government of the day under Premier GFR Nicklin. I guess that is what really opened my eyes to politics and what it was all about. I made a decision then that one day I would enter parliament, because you had to be on the inside to change things. I then went to television but still had that association with state coverage.

See this speech in context