Tony Smith (Casey, Liberal Party, Deputy Chairman , Coalition Policy Development Committee) Share this | Hansard source

It is a pleasure to rise in this important debate, the first debate of the new parliament. In beginning my contribution, like many other members I want to point out what a privilege it is to be the member for Casey in Victoria and to have been elected as the member for Casey for the fourth time. As many members have articulated during this debate, none of us would be in the House of Representatives without the support of our electorates and without many people working long hours to ensure our election.

I want to first of all thank the electors of Casey for the confidence they have shown in me again. As has been the case since my election in 2001, that confidence will be reciprocated as I work my hardest to represent them to the best of my ability in this House of Representatives. As members know, we all rely on the strong support of party volunteers who believe in us and want to see us elected and re-elected, as the case may be.

At the outset I want to thank a number of members of the Liberal Party in Casey who worked so hard, not just throughout the election campaign but in the lead-up to that campaign, as they have done in previous elections—Fran Henderson, the campaign manager; Annette Stone, the Chair of the Casey Federal Electorate Conference; Jill Hutchison; Byron Hodkinson; Jim Dixon; Peter Manders; Brian and Maria McCarthy; Rex McConachy; Neil Gryst; John Lord; Brent Crockford; Denise Jeffs; Nadia Carretta; Pamela Gemelli; Andrew Hallam; Nicole Blair and Estelle Wallingford are some of the people who worked very hard on a daily basis. I also want to pay tribute to the many other branch members who also contributed in the lead-up to the campaign and, naturally, on polling day itself. I want to pay tribute and say thanks to so many members of the community who were prepared to help on election day. They were not necessarily members of the Liberal Party but people who wanted to support me and our cause in this election and who volunteered their time.

Election day in a democracy is an incredible thing, as my friend here at the table discovered for the first time. And my colleague across the way has experienced a couple of times now the sheer event of nearly 90,000 people voting at however many polling booths you have in your electorate. In my case it is about 40. In both of your cases it is many more, I suspect. To see that happen and to see the volunteers and the man-hours that go into that is incredible. We are all here because of the dedication of so many others. That dedication of volunteers beyond politics is something that is very evident and key in the case of my electorate. It is a community that stretches from the outer eastern suburbs beginning in Croydon right out into the Dandenong Ranges and into the Yarra Valley. It is a diverse community but it is a very united community and it has a very strong volunteer spirit. We see it in the contributions of individuals. We all see this in our electorates and in the contributions of community groups.

In this address-in-reply contribution I want to pay tribute to some of the people I have had the pleasure of working with. As a member of parliament I work very closely with people who are dedicated to important charities and causes within the electorate and with people who are dedicated to their own particular community within the wider electorate. I want to take the time to single out a few who have put in extraordinary efforts on individual events. There are some who, for many years—decades, in fact—have contributed to not just one or two organisations but to many organisations.

Firstly, I pay tribute to Hendy O’Toole from the Croydon Lions Club. I first met Hendy a couple of years ago. She came to me because she wanted to raise money for and promote awareness of bionic ears for people with hearing loss. She was profoundly deaf as a younger lady and benefited from a lot of the research. She decided to give something back and to raise some money, and she did so by walking the Kokoda Track. She put those two events together. It was a pleasure to work with her and so many of her friends. It is a tribute that she completed the walk and raised $10,000 for the cause, but she also raised a lot of awareness in the local community and that will have a ripple effect going forward. I want to, in this House, pay tribute to her. The money that she has raised will go to a very great cause.

I want to also say thank you to a number of local business men and women in the electorate. As we all know, small businesses in particular are very much the backbone of our local economies. Their decision to employ someone can make the difference between a young kid having an opportunity, particularly in some of our traditional trades. Last year I began the Casey apprenticeship and traineeship awards. I called on a number of local business leaders to not just judge the awards but also conduct them, select the criteria and choose some of the winners. I wanted to recognise some of the outstanding apprentices who are embarking on careers not just in traditional trades but also in the new and emerging trades that we see in so many of the industries that are transforming the outer east and the Yarra Valley. I want to thank Phil Munday, of a Phil Munday’s Panel Works; Jeynelle Forrest, of Rustic Charm Restaurant; Clive Larkman, of Larkman Nurseries; and Nick Fraraccio of Stevens Glass. They all put in a lot of time—and it is very busy running a business. We often met at about seven in the morning. They received nominations from right across the electorate and judged them together as a group. As you can imagine, it was a very difficult task. I thank them for that.

I also pay tribute to those who received the awards. The two encouragement award winners were Steven Miller and Aung Luri, the two runners-up were Ashley White and Ashley Turnham and the ultimate winner was David Donchi of DBM Plumbing. David is an apprentice plumber but he made a mid-career change. He is a mature age apprentice who decided well into his working career that he wanted to take up a new trade. He was prepared to make that incredible sacrifice and he dropped a lot of income to do that. He is a first-class employee—his business recognised that—and his award was very well deserved. Of course, those awards will be occurring again next year and that committee I mentioned will be there again putting in the volunteer hours to promote trades and apprenticeships and jobs and careers in small and medium sized businesses in the electorate of Casey.

We also have volunteer groups putting in hours on a week-by-week basis. There are a couple of groups I want to single out for mention, including those in the Montrose community who worked very hard over so many years to redevelop the recreation reserve there. They were able to do that with some money from the state government and a significant grant from the previous Howard government. That has been a long-term project and it would not have come about if it had not been for the hard work of the community and leadership from people like Julie McDonald, who led the way in raising community funds for a state-of-the-art playground that has now become a hub for young families within the electorate. So I pay tribute to that community. I also pay tribute to those in the township group, who have worked on so many town improvement projects, including the alleyway artwork project with the help of so many young artists from the local primary schools in the area.

Similarly, the Monbulk Living and Learning Centre is a major redevelopment in the centre of Monbulk. It will be a community hub with a library, childminding facilities, cafes and galleries. It will be the central hub. It opened just a few weeks ago—unfortunately, that was on a Thursday when I was here in Canberra. It had received a $2 million grant from the previous Howard government—and I must point out that that money was made available when we were running surplus budgets.

It would be remiss of me not to point out so many of the other groups, but time does not permit me to mention them all. The RSLs, which work so hard right throughout the year, were in fact running services in our community just last week. Eric Dosser from Lilydale, Neil Gryst, Sam Berry and Ron Batty from Croydon, Ted Beard from Monbulk, and Derek and Betty Crittenden from Mount Evelyn, thank you for everything you do. Over the last few years, we have seen a return of the Anzac Day service at the Cenotaph in Montrose. This has been possible due to the hard work and effort of Bob Hovenden and the Montrose Lions Club.

We in this parliament who are speaking on the debate that began with the new parliament must rightly reflect on national issues as well. Of course, as we begin this new parliament, we cannot help but reflect on what has occurred within the government over its period in office from November 2007. Before the election—in fact, 4½ months ago now—the new Prime Minister on her first day stated that the government had lost its way, and for 4½ months the government has demonstrated it has well and truly lost its way. The Prime Minister said that the government had lost its way on a number of policies. What we saw in the last parliament was the government failing the key tests of government. Those tests include the test of competence and the test of honesty.

On the test of competence, we all know only too well the policy failures from ceiling insulation through to school halls and solar panels. But we have also seen a failure of honesty when it comes to policy promises from this new government, and we have seen it in the period since the election. During the election campaign, the Prime Minister made it very clear that Labor would not introduce a carbon tax. In fact, not only was the Prime Minister insistent but the Treasurer, Mr Swan, said that claims that Labor would introduce a carbon tax were hysterical. Now we see them planning just that. There was a promise to open a detention centre in East Timor, even though it was news to the East Timorese, and now we are seeing more detention places here in Australia.

There are other examples but the important and disappointing point with this new government that has had two Prime Ministers in less than three years is that, when it comes to promises, the promises are always big but then one of a few things happens to those promises. If they are kept, they are implemented incompetently, and, if they are not implemented, it is because they have been dumped—or, in some cases, there is a combination of the two. Ultimately, we see that the poor decision making by the government here in Canberra, be it on economic management or on policy implementation, is paid for financially by all our communities. The policy failure here is borne in the towns and suburbs of our electorates. A government that announced it had lost its way on 24 June and is still lost today is not a government that is going to find its way. As the member for Casey, I will at every turn hold this government to account and at every turn stand up for my constituents who pay the taxes and bear the brunt of this incompetence and failure.

I have, from time to time, agreed with members of the Labor government on various issues. There have been a couple of instances where we have seen members of that side recognise the dire situation of incompetence and policy failure. One such person, of course, is Senator Doug Cameron, who recently—and you will have heard this, Mr Deputy Speaker Slipper, from many members—likened the Rudd government to ‘having a political lobotomy’, and referred to backbenchers becoming zombies. Nothing has changed. Senator Faulkner, an elder of the Labor Party, recently pointed out:

… Labor is struggling with the perception we are very long on cunning, and very short on courage.

In one of the member for Griffith’s final speeches before he became Prime Minister, an address in 2007, he said:

… Australia needs a government that will help the nation fulfil its promise, rather than a government that makes promises it can’t fulfil.

Those words haunt this government. We have seen administrative failure. We have seen a government that demonstrates that it cannot govern competently, as I have said. But we have seen a government that is quite prepared during an election campaign, on a number of fronts, to make promises, with its fingers crossed behind its back, only to go back on them as soon as the parliament returns.

It is our democratic duty to hold this government to account. I will do so with full vigour, in all the forums of the House, because it is my job to represent the best interests of the electors of Casey, because the decisions taken here very much affect the sorts of lives and opportunities that families, small businesses, pensioners and retirees have in Casey, in Melbourne’s outer east and in the Yarra Valley.

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