Teresa Gambaro (Brisbane, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Citizenship and Settlement) Share this | Hansard source

Madam Deputy Speaker, thank you for your indulgence and your generosity. It is with great pride and humility that I stand before the House to deliver my address in reply contribution and my first speech as the federal member for Brisbane in the Commonwealth of Australia parliament. I have the honour of having represented two federal electorates in this House. I served proudly as the member for Petrie from 1996 to 2007 and now I have the privilege of having been elected as the 950th member of the federal parliament since Federation, representing the seat of Brisbane. Only 28 people before me have had the distinct privilege of serving different federal electorates following an absence from parliament. I was proud to serve as part of the Howard government. John Howard, as well as being the second-longest serving Prime Minister of Australia, will be also remembered as a man of principle, dignity and vision.

Brisbane has a truly remarkable history as a federation seat. Brisbane is home to the Jaggera and Turrbal people and today I wish to acknowledge them and pay respect to their elders past and present. It was in 1825 that European settlement began in North Quay in what is the edge of the Brisbane CBD. The city was named after Sir Thomas MacDougall Brisbane, who was then the Governor of New South Wales who had succeeded Governor Macquarie. Brisbane in 1825 was not a place of high society and was the destination and the new home for the worst and the repeat offender convicts who were rejected by New South Wales.

Despite our inauspicious beginnings, a city of promise, enterprise and opportunity was born. One hundred and seventy-five years on from the settlement, I stand before you as the federal member for Brisbane. I am the 11th federal member for this electorate and the first woman to represent this seat. I wish to acknowledge my predecessor, Arch Bevis, who represented the seat for 20 years. I acknowledge his service to the House and I wish him and his family the very best.

The seat of Brisbane truly personifies the way that Australia has evolved. Brisbane has emerged as one of the great cities of the world. It is dynamic, it is diverse, it is proud of its past and it is excited about the promise of its future. From its early beginnings, the Brisbane River has been a source of food and life, and the river continues to be the focal point of the electorate of Brisbane. It weaves through the suburbs of Milton, Teneriffe, Newstead, Hamilton and my beloved New Farm, the suburb of my childhood. Once called Binkinba by our local Indigenous population, New Farm derived its name from the fact that the peninsula was used as a farming area from early settlement.

The Brisbane electorate is truly unique in that it is made up of many community villages, including Wilston, Paddington, Red Hill, Spring Hill, Ascot and Kelvin Grove. These villages are dotted with coffee shops, art galleries, boutiques and restaurants. And of course the young people who work and play in the entertainment precinct of the vibrant Fortitude Valley have enriched the suburb and made it their own.

Sitting proudly in Fortitude Valley is Brisbane’s Chinatown. The father of Brisbane’s Chinatown is Eddie Liu, who is the longest serving honorary secretary of the Chinese Club of Queensland. He is indeed a distinguished Chinese Australian. He has been the driving force behind Chinese cultural heritage in Queensland and has been a tireless advocate for the less fortunate.

Close to Chinatown is the bustling CBD of Brisbane, the heart of commerce and industry for Brisbane and Queensland. On the edge of the city sits the beautiful botanical gardens, overlooking the Brisbane River and next to the Queensland parliament house. The gardens are often a place of frenetic activity as students make their way to the Queensland University of Technology, a centre of excellence in tertiary education for over 40,000 students. I have had a long association with QUT as a student and a tutor, and as an alumnus. I wish to acknowledge the outstanding work that is being done by the QUT business school in innovation, research and fostering business leadership both domestically and internationally.

Under the leadership of Professor Peter Little, one of Australia’s leading business educators, groundbreaking QUT partnerships have been developed with external organisations such as the Defence Materiel Organisation. The DMO understood that there was a need for improvement in the delivery of complex, high-priority, long-term, multibillion-dollar projects and that the current ageing workforce would be unable to meet these requirements. QUT, in conjunction with DMO, developed a new award course, the Executive Master of Business (Complex Project Management), to fill this gap. Support for this program has come from companies as diverse as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Mincom and John Holland. QUT works internationally with the International Centre for Complex Project Management as they raise awareness and provide solutions to complex project management needs across the globe.

Today provides a unique opportunity to thank Su Mon Wong, an inspirational lecturer who instilled in me a great passion for marketing and business. Su Mon, you have had a profound effect on thousands of business students throughout your 34-year teaching career at QUT. I am delighted that you are in the gallery today. This year I had the pleasure of working with Professor Peter Little, the Executive Dean of the QUT School of Business, and the QUT business alumni to establish the Su Mon Wong scholarship, to recognise students of outstanding marketing ability. Su Mon, your educational legacy will live on for future generations.

Just as QUT and education have been a driving force for me professionally, my family have had a profound influence on my personal development. Today I stand before you as the proud daughter of Italian parents, Domenic and Rosetta Gambaro. My parents’ story is the story of millions of immigrants who migrated to this country after World War II. They fled the devastation of post-war Italy to make a better life for themselves and for their family. Many of my achievements can be attributed to the values and the standards instilled in me by my family.

I would like to take this opportunity to pay respect to my father, a proud Italian Australian. Domenic Gambaro, like so many Italian immigrants from the war and immediate post-war years, hoped to forge a better life for himself in a new land after seeing the horror and the havoc that war had inflicted on his beloved homeland. He taught me the value of work. He was driven by the opportunities this country provided. He flourished in a country where the past and where you came from did not matter, and the efforts of your labours were rewarded.

My father began as a farmhand in North Queensland, eager to make a start in Australia. His beginnings were humble but his dreams were not. From the toil of North Queensland, he was able to save to buy a small fish store in Petrie Terrace where, in accordance with a time-honoured tradition, other members of his family soon joined him in building what became a prosperous family seafood business that incorporated restaurants, wholesaling, exporting and retail. Together with my mother Rosetta, they are a wonderful partnership at work and at home.

My mother Rosetta taught me the value of service to others, kindness, generosity and the value of family. They worked hard so that my two sisters, Elisa and Ida, and my brother, John, could have a better life. All this from two Italian immigrants who arrived in a distant and unfamiliar new country, armed with nothing more than optimism, an unstoppable work ethic and a genuine feeling of gratitude towards this country.

There are so many distinguished Australians of Italian descent who have forged careers in this place, particularly those who have assisted me in my career. There are countless Australians of Italian descent who have made amazing commitments to the development of the social fabric of our suburbs. It is these connections and the service of these unsung heroes in our Brisbane electorate community that truly deserve praise in this place. In days gone by, remarkable achievements were made by Joe Rinaudo and Annibale Boccabella through the Associazione Nazionale Famiglie degli Emigrati Australiani—that is, the association of immigrants of Australia—and today, in the spirit of this association, Nereo Brezzi and Dina Ranieri keep our community connections as strong as ever through Co.As.It.

Whether my local residents are involved in Co.As.It, Lions, Elley Bennett Hostel, the Red Cross, the Multicultural Development Association, National Seniors or the countless other community and non-profit organisations in my electorate, they all perform a remarkable service to our local areas, and for that I thank them. Indeed, as the shadow parliamentary secretary for citizenship and settlement and shadow parliamentary secretary for international development assistance, I very much look forward to increasing these connections with many local groups, churches and non-government organisations. As recently as last weekend I attended a remarkable event in Brisbane, the Bridging the Gap Sudanese community forum, which was organised by the Gateway Presbyterian Church. Reverend Guido Kettniss and Jounis Adwanga, as well as the members of the Sudanese community in Brisbane, made me very welcome, and I look forward to working with them and will be keenly watching the 2011 referendum in Sudan.

My father once said to me before I departed for an overseas holiday many years ago, ‘You go and see the world but you will realise that the best country in the world is Australia.’ How right he was, and that is why so many people have wanted to come to this country. Australia is known for its hospitality, its openness, its respect for others, its culture and its harmony. These characteristics make us the envy of the world.

My parents instilled in me a great love of education. I will be eternally grateful for the standard of education of the Catholic Sisters of Mercy at All Hallows School. I am proud to have in the gallery my former principal, Sister Ann Hetherington. If Sister Ann had not chosen a life of religious service and vocation I suspect that Lend Lease and Mirvac would have been fighting to have her as the CEO of their respective companies. Her business acumen and common sense is well regarded in Queensland. Next year the Sisters of Mercy will celebrate 150 years of service in Queensland. Perhaps the best way to sum up the Sisters of Mercy philosophy is with what they instil in their charges: strong minds and gentle hearts. Their philosophy has also been my guide in this place and in my business life. Sister Ann, thank for your contribution and that of the Sisters of Mercy. Thank you for all that you have done for the education of young women in Queensland.

I am committed to ensuring that every child in every school has the best education; that one day we can say that no child will slip through the cracks. The importance of education cannot be overemphasised, and in the past three years working in my family’s business I saw firsthand some of the results of the inadequacies of our education system. It is a sad reality that many of our young people are incapable of filling out a form, writing a legible letter or even counting out the correct change. I hear this complaint echoed by business people throughout my electorate, and amazingly some businesses have resorted to offering literacy classes in workplaces. It is a shame that while listening to locals in my electorate in the recent past I have heard many young parents from suburbs like Ashgrove, Dorrington, Kalinga and Clayfield observe that, while they did not wish to reject a Julia Gillard memorial hall, they were very concerned about the continued wasteful spending that casts a shameful pall over the provision of education in this country at present. I, along with Christopher Pyne and my parliamentary colleagues on this side of the House, will continue to call for an inquiry into the BER program and its plethora of faults. Physical monuments are no substitute for quality teaching and that is what makes this wasteful spending so appalling—millions of dollars wasted on amphitheatres when teachers are crying out for basic educational resources.

It is at this point that I wish to acknowledge the tremendous contribution that Julie Bishop made towards the introduction of a national curriculum during the time she was education minister. She should be applauded for that.

Education can take us to so many places, whether it be to a trade or to the boardroom table, but one of the areas where education truly can make a difference is in running a small business. During the past eight months I have had the wonderful opportunity of meeting many of the 10,000 small business operators in the Brisbane electorate. From a very early age I have had many years of working in the retail, hospitality, personnel and franchising industries, so I know that more often than not small businesses out there—in Bowen Hills, Albion, Kelvin Grove and Lutwyche—are doing it tough. They are entangled in red tape and interpretive issues that even the employees of those government departments tasked to assist small business do not understand. We all know that small businesses are the job generators of our local economies. They employ our mums and dads, our children and our friends, and it is for this very reason that I will continue to fight for and be a champion of small business.

The electorate of Brisbane is at the centre of health and medical research, with the Queensland Institute of Medical Research at Herston being associated with the electorate for more than 65 years. Groundbreaking research is currently being undertaken at the institute into dengue fever, schizophrenia and bipolar disorders, parasites associated with giardia and many other areas of research. I wish to place on record my praise for the institute’s director, Dr Michael Goode, and his team of world-leading scientists. The Queensland Institute of Medical Research shares research facilities with Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital and the Royal Children’s Hospital where world-class work into childhood leukaemia is taking place.

Unfortunately many of the clinical and research synergies that currently work to the best advantage of all Queenslanders will be lost because of the short-sighted decision by the Queensland government to close the Royal Children’s Hospital. There was no community consultation regarding this closure and residents were kept totally in the dark. This is a decision which is both hasty and illogical and hardly transparent in my opinion—sadly a process that is all too common for the Queensland government.

There have been many champions who have fought and continue to fight for the retention of the Royal Children’s Hospital on the site at Herston. I wish to acknowledge Dr Harry Smith, Dr Chris Davies and of course Queensland parliamentary colleagues Tracy Davis and Mark McArdle. I know that these dedicated people truly have the interests of Brisbane’s north side at heart, as do I. The northern suburbs of Brisbane including Windsor, Alderley, Gordon Park and Grange are fast-growing areas for families and these are the very suburbs that will be adversely affected by the loss not only of their dedicated paediatric emergency department but also of 130 years of medical expertise and excellence. These are the issues that I will be fighting for locally in this term and hopefully in future terms in this place.

In my maiden speech to parliament in 1996, I spoke of my first steps in this place. This, for me, is the second step on the journey to representing the people of Australia, this time through the residents of Brisbane. I wholeheartedly dedicate myself to their service for as long as I have their support.

My journey here would not have been possible without the support of many colleagues. I would like to pay tribute to the Leader of the Opposition, Tony Abbott. No-one can doubt his commitment and his dedication to public service. I am proud to be part of your team and working under the strength of your leadership.

I wish to thank all my colleagues who assisted me in my recent campaign in Brisbane: Julie Bishop, Joe Hockey, Greg Hunt, Brett Mason, Sophie Mirabella, Bronwyn Bishop, Eric Abetz and Bruce Scott. In particular, I would like to recognise the support of shadow Attorney General and deputy leader in the Senate, Senator George Brandis. Senator Brandis, thank you for your generous counsel during my campaign. Your constant statewide campaigning, including your dedication to Brisbane, cannot be in doubt—especially when you braved torrential rain on Kingsford Smith Drive during those early mornings. Yes, senators do campaign in the rain. I thank LNP president Bruce McIver and deputy campaign director James McGrath and their dedicated team. Thank you so much for your collective efforts.

Campaigns are run on the strength of their volunteers. Mine was no different and that is why I want to say thank you to all those who assisted me from within the party in any way—my campaign director, Mark Wood, Vicki, Tony, the three Roberts, the two Helens, Jan, Trish, Shirley, Lyle, Paul, Maddy, Rennae, Kate and all the YLNP crew who came out every weekend, staffed our booths, letterbox dropped and ran the office. Your smiles and laughter kept me going and for that I thank each and every one of you.

I wish to acknowledge my family—my brother John, my sister Elisa and my brother-in-law Glenn, who also campaigned for me. Family is everything to me, and I am delighted that they are in the gallery today. My thoughts and thanks go to my sister Ida and to my parents Domenic and Rosetta, who could not be with us due to ill health. I wish to acknowledge my father-in-law, Michael Duffy. Thank you for raising such a wonderful son. To my husband Robert, thank you for your steady guidance, your constant encouragement and your love. To my daughter, Rachelle, who is in the chamber today, and to my son, Benjamin, who is studying for university exams at home in Brisbane, you are the joy of my life and my inspiration to help others. As Winston Churchill once said:

Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak,

Courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.

To the residents of Brisbane, thank you for allowing me the privilege of representing you. I will always listen to your wishes and display the courage to stand up and speak for these aspirations as your federal member. I will work tirelessly on your behalf and be your voice in Canberra. Thank you for this honour.

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