Janelle Saffin (Page, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I come to this place as the first female to represent the people of Page, and I come to this place as a fighter, having first fought my way out of the housing commission estate where I grew up. I do not mean the locality, which is still a nice place to live; I mean the thinking that confined and constrained me. We never went to university or did things like that. That was not our world. Although I lacked confidence, I always had a yearning, an intellectual curiosity, that drove me to seek something more. I have achieved some good things—great things, really, for a girl with no education who went up the ladder, so to speak. My instincts and therefore my responses to situations are still very much rooted in the working-class girl from One Mile, Ipswich. I have to say these instincts have served me well.

Ipswich was my stamping ground for the first two decades of my life, and I accept membership of the parliamentary Ipswichians, Shayne.

See this speech in context