Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I continue my contribution to the address-in-reply. The second priority issue raised by GetUp! is making high-quality primary, secondary and tertiary public education accessible to all Australians. GetUp! wants public education at all levels to be both world class and affordable. That means more funding to provide better trained and better paid professional teachers at all levels and ensuring the universal availability of edu-cation. It says it wants teachers to be better paid, the national curriculum more broad based and class sizes smaller. I note some recent survey work which suggests that perhaps the better pay issue might prove to be more important than smaller class sizes.

The third issue raised by GetUp! relates to respecting the rights and improving the living standards of Indigenous Australians. GetUp! wants the new parliament to address Indigenous issues in both a symbolic and a practical way, seeing the two as intertwined and mutually dependent. I think that is spot on. It expects parliament to make it an urgent priority to close the 17-year life expectancy gap and to make vast improvements to health, education, housing and other areas to improve the living standards of Indigenous communities. It has a couple of quotes. Firstly:

No Australian citizen should be living in third world conditions in a first world country.

Secondly:

It sends fundamental moral and ideological messages to inhabitants of this country and to the rest of the world about how we think about ourselves and treat all our citizens.

As well as those three priority issues, GetUp! identified seven other issues to round up a top 10. No. 4 was making high-quality, prevention focused health care accessible to all, putting an end to the federal-state blame game, and also seeking to address the private-public health care disparity. No. 5 was combating entrenched poverty and narrowing the divide between the rich and the poor, with affordable housing being a focus. No. 6 was withdrawing the troops from Iraq and urging the United States to change its approach to the ‘war on terror’. It said:

We want Australia to be a good global citizen ... We would prefer our resources be put into increasing our foreign aid as a percentage of GDP and working multilaterally to decrease global poverty. We expect future potential conflicts, such as Iran, to be resolved through the United Nations, not unilaterally.

I read another quote:

The current approach of the US in its war on terror is an absolute disaster for world peace, the lives of citizens and soldiers and human rights.

Issue No. 7 was protecting our human rights and civil liberties. It is looking for equal rights and recognition of same-sex couples and for protections to extend to Indigenous people, asylum seekers and refugees, and the disenfranchised. No. 8 was improving community infrastructure and planning. GetUp! said:

We want our taxes spent on community infrastructure and planning that improves and sustains our way of life. We want serious investment in public transport to both ease our environmental burden and allow equitable access to services for all—and we want support for it at a federal level.

Issue No. 9 was the protection of workers’ rights. It said:

We want WorkChoices to be repealed as soon as possible, and in a comprehensive manner. We want fairness restored to employee/employer relationships—fair pay, fair protections from unfair dismissal and safe working conditions for all workers. The right to collectively bargain for conditions the majority of workers want should be restored.

Finally, there was strengthening our democracy. GetUp! said:

We need reforms to strengthen our democratic processes that increase government accountability and transparency. We want Freedom of Information laws brought to the highest international standards and steps taken to protect whistleblowers.

It said we should restore political integrity and dramatically reduce the threshold for political donations and that bodies, such as the ABC and CSIRO, should be depoliticised. I think this is a very commendable set of propositions and priorities, but the more important thing is not so much whether or not I or other individual members of parliament agree with each of them but the fact that there has been a very constructive and creative process gone through by GetUp! involving tens of thousands Australians in thinking about the kind of country in which we live and the kind of country which we hand on to our children.

I indicated in my opening remarks that we live in a time of big challenges. We have had discussions about global warming, and I certainly hope that we have more discussions about global warming. There is no doubt in my mind that it is a show stopper. The amount of carbon that we have managed to put into the atmosphere in the last couple of hundred years has changed the earth’s climate and is continuing to change the earth’s climate. The increased frequency and severity of floods, droughts, bushfires and storms will be no good for Australia and will have very deleterious impacts in other parts of the world. When we think about the melting of the polar caps, rising sea levels and the threat to the Great Barrier Reef from coral bleaching as a result of warmer water temperatures, increased typhoons, cyclones and hurricanes—the severity of those things—it is clear to me that action is needed urgently to deal with it. The proposals that the government has brought forward for international cooperation through the Kyoto protocol, an emissions-trading regime and increasing the renewable energy target are all important initiatives. There is a role for the whole community in doing everything it can at an individual and a collective level to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and to move to more sustainable ways of living.

One of the issues that I think we have failed to pursue adequately, both in Australia and in other countries, is the need to transition out of petrol. A couple of the new members of parliament made reference in their initial speeches to the fact that Australia and, indeed, many other countries have a great reliance and dependence on petrol. We can see the price of petrol rising dramatically but very little is being done to move us to a future in which we should be using other fuels. In Australia we have an LPG distribution system which is quite sophisticated and advanced. I have an LPG car and I have no difficulty finding places to fill it up. Indeed, Australia has great reserves of natural gas located off the North West Shelf. Those reserves of gas could, in my view, be made to serve a domestic Australian automotive industry. It would have major environmental benefits through dramatically reducing the greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles and it would also bring regional development benefits, jobs and reduced prices for motorists. It would give Australia more energy independence instead of being, as we currently are, at the mercy of the international price per barrel of crude oil. Transitioning out of petrol is an important policy area, in my view.

I think we need to do much more by way of skilling young Australians. It is clear that there is a skills crisis and it is clear that it is generating inflationary pressures and pressures on interest rates. I believe that, rather than turning to skilled migration as the way to deal with this, what we should be doing is directly making the investment into educating and training our young Australians. The previous government had a lack of interest in and support for TAFE. They effectively undermined TAFE. We need to see more investment in TAFE colleges, secondary schools and universities to train young Australians and give us the skills to produce the kinds of economic activity which will support our ongoing economic prosperity and wellbeing.

The agenda of the GetUp! people made reference to urban transport, and I want to register my support for that. It is an area that the last federal government had no involvement in whatsoever. The road budget, the AusLink programs, can be used to support urban public transport. When you look at the congestion in my own city of Melbourne and in Sydney and Brisbane, we could do better in terms of the way we move people around. This is from an environmental point of view and also from the point of view of the comfort of those concerned. It is certainly no fun to spend your life on the outer motorway trying to make your way into central Brisbane or other similar locations. This has been an area of neglect and it is something which the federal government could well be doing.

There are important quality of life issues that we have not addressed as well as we should. There seems to be something of an epidemic of mental health issues amongst our young people. It saddens me to see so much depression and anger management problems and body image issues amongst teenagers. We need to look at the causes of these problems and what we as a community can do to assist people who are experiencing mental health problems by tackling the causes and providing better support for them.

There are issues surrounding obesity. It is quite remarkable to hear that we may now be coming to the first generation of Australians who have a lesser life expectancy than the generation before them. We are accustomed to improvements in our health and living standards, yet we have allowed lifestyle issues like diet and exercise to contribute to obesity in a way which is prejudicial to the health of the next generation of Australians. In my view, the obsession of young Australians with the internet and computers and the like contributes to obesity and represents a social problem that we need to recognise and tackle.

There are groups of Australians who have fared poorly under the previous government, and I hope that they will do better during the life of this parliament. There has been a lot said about the Aboriginal people, the Indigenous people, and how they have suffered. What we have seen in the last week has been amazing and wonderful, and I hope it leads to better things for Aboriginal people in the future.

I think our support for and relationships with the people of the Third World need to be better and closer. We can do more in terms of our aid budget and what we do to assist Third World countries, particularly in terms of moving to sustainable energy paths, having regard to the challenge of climate change.

Those opposite always present themselves as the party of small business, but in practice they do nothing for them. What they gave them during the life of the Howard government was red tape and the GST. I think we can do more to support small business, particularly in their dealings with larger business.

Some singles and some older people have not received the sort of support and acknowledgement to which they are entitled, and I hope that they fare better under this government, during the life of this parliament.

Above all else, I hope that we regularly ask ourselves the question: what kind of world are we leaving to our young people? I hope that we resolve that we will not pass on to our young people a country and a world which are in poorer shape than when they were passed on to us.

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