Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Health and Ageing) Share this | Hansard source

Like all members in this place in the debate on the address-in-reply, I particularly want to thank my constituency of Ballarat for again giving me the great privilege of representing them in this parliament. The 2010 election was a very memorable one. For me personally, it was the first time that I have faced an election while also running a household with a two-year-old. I have great sympathy for the member for Moncrieff and for his partner.

The election was also memorable in the sense that I think that, if any election showed just how stark the differences are in this fantastic country of ours, it was this one. Victorian representatives often felt during the course of the election campaign that to some extent we were in a very different place to Queensland as we watched some of the news that was unfolding. Certainly the results in my home state of Victoria, in Tasmania and in South Australia often point to those differences. After the election campaign, it is important to remember our incredible responsibilities as members of parliament, whether in opposition or government, to ensure that this country remains united—where debate is welcomed but where we are all respectful of each other. As we go forward in this quite different parliament, it is important for us to continue to respect each other.

It is a very challenging time. Within this parliament, the Labor Party is very proud to have been able to form and deliver a strong and stable government. The agreements that we have reached with the crossbenches allow for that strong and stable government and I certainly look forward to working with members and senators to ensure that this nation is represented well and that we continue to respect each other in this place.

The election was very hard fought across Australia and on the ground locally. The people across the electorate of Ballarat have again given me the opportunity to represent them. They voted to support a member of the Australian Labor Party to represent them, their families and their communities. I can tell them absolutely that the result in the electorate of Ballarat is not taken for granted. It follows long hours of effort and a commitment to represent the people of my electorate with all the energy and intellect I can muster. I do not take this privilege for granted and I constantly reflect on the importance of the role of a member of parliament and what that represents in our community.

I would particularly like to thank my campaign team for their hard work. They are a tremendous group of volunteers who believe very strongly in the Labor cause but also believe in and have committed to working for me. I would also like to thank my staff, who have been tireless, obviously not just during the course of election campaigns but with all the many, many hours of work they have to do well and truly beforehand. Working for politicians is not just a job; it is absolutely a cause. I know that their families feel that very much as well.

I most of all thank the people who live across the diverse community of the Ballarat electorate. It is a very diverse community. It includes the springs and spa country of beautiful Hepburn and Daylesford, the historic goldmining towns of Clunes, Creswick and Ballarat itself and the thriving destination for young families that is Bacchus Marsh and Darley. The electorate also includes a number of other lively communities in Ballan, Trentham, Blackwood, Myrniong, Learmonth and Elaine to name just a few. It is a very diverse electorate and at times the calls that come to my electorate office reflect the diversity of views and opinions that come from across the country.

It is true that through the hard work of families in these communities and the responsible economic management of the Gillard government we have tackled the global financial crisis. Over recent years, families across the communities have faced significant challenges. People pulled together and they worked alongside the Gillard government in the rollout of the economic stimulus to support jobs and to grow infrastructure. That hard work is developing into long-term prosperity for regional and rural townships. Benefits are flowing to families and to businesses, but it is still slow.

As we head into the Christmas season and hear from retailers about what is happening within their sector, we should remember that despite the fact that we have managed to weather the global financial crisis we are not out of the woods yet. I heard the Leader of the Opposition try and dismiss the global financial crisis as a six-week nonevent when he said that it really did not matter too much to people. I can tell him well and truly of the thousand people who lost their jobs in my community and the 42 workers who lost their jobs just recently with the closure of Hilton Fabrics and of the absolute fear that many companies within my own constituencies have as private sector investment has not started to flow. I absolutely know and understand and get why the government put in place an economic stimulus package and why this package continues to be important. I find it quite extraordinary at times listening to the opposition, as they just do not seem to quite understand that and do not understand how important those economic stimulus packages have been, particularly for regional and rural communities.

One of the things that I am very proud of which led us into the election was that we promised and delivered on our commitment to abolish Work Choices. It was a draconian set of industrial relations legislation and the importance of that reform has not only put fairness back into workplaces but also shown an understanding of the need for productivity and the need for good, sound workplace relations to stimulate economic growth. This is something I am very proud of, and I am very proud to be part of a government that has done that and that has also today announced and delivered on its election promise of extending and improving the GEERS arrangements for unemployed workers. I think that has been a long time coming. In fact, I remember almost nine years ago asking my first question in this place about it, so I am delighted to be part of a government that does understand the need to support industry and also the desperate need to support workers when things go wrong.

I am also very proud that we delivered on a major pension reform by increasing the base rate of the pension. We went even further in our support for pensioners by implementing higher indexation measures to better reflect pensioners’ actual expenses. These two measures have seen pensioners receive increases of around $115 per fortnight for singles and $97 per fortnight for couples combined. We understood the poverty being experienced by people on pensions and we did something about it. We did not just talk about it, we did not just despair about it and we did not just say it was too hard. We did something about it. We can argue that people continue to live in poverty and continue to have difficulties as expenses rise, but Labor stepped up and increased the base rate of the pension. That is on the budget for ever as a net cost to the budget, and that is incredibly important for those people.

I am also very proud of the reforms we have undertaken in education. I know it is easy for the opposition to try and dismiss the Building the Education Revolution; unfortunately they have got some traction in the Australian about that. It has been an extraordinary program. I have had the privilege of being able to open some of those BER projects certainly over the course of the last few weeks, and they have absolutely transformed many of the schools I have worked within. The program has not just transformed the buildings themselves; it has transformed the way in which education is being conducted in those schools. These are schools that have never had libraries before; that have never had electronic whiteboards. This is the case particularly with some of the small rural schools that might have only 15-17 students. They are now able to offer the same standard of educational experience that their larger school counterparts can provide in inner city and regional centre schools.

These sorts of improvements will make an enormous difference to the opportunities that are being provided to the young people in those primary schools, whether they be in the public education system or the Catholic system or are other independent schools. This will mean that we are leaving a lasting legacy for a generation of children and providing an opportunity for a generation of children which will hopefully see them do better than many of their counterparts have done in the past.

I have talked to all of the builders in my own community, and what the BER did was ensure that there was work for these kids’ parents so they stayed employed through the global financial crisis. It also left behind a lasting legacy for the children. In my own district we invested $116 million in local schools. That is a huge amount of money in a regional community when private sector spending had absolutely dried up. That has made an enormous difference and, again, it has left a lasting legacy of new primary school classrooms, school halls, libraries, computer infrastructure and a science and language centre at one of our secondary schools. It has been a great delight to see how that opportunity has been embraced in the school communities in my own district. A lot of the school communities, particularly in the Catholic education system, have been saying, ‘We had this on the wish list but we thought it would be 10 years down the track before we would ever be able to finish the project.’ I absolutely put on the record my thanks to the Prime Minister for this investment—it has made a real difference in my area.

In the area of infrastructure, we have made enormous investments in roads in my district. People who drive down the Western Highway will see that Anthonys Cutting is well under way and well ahead of schedule. The $160 million for that has been part of the Nation Building Program, and it will achieve a number of outcomes in terms of both road safety and relieving the infrastructure bottleneck that has meant that many freight companies have been finding it very difficult to commercially use that route as much as they would like. We have also provided some $404 million for the duplication of the Western Highway from Ballarat to Stawell, and that project has also started. This work will be of enormous benefit to those communities to the east of my electorate, on the Western Highway, who rely on that road for all of their employment and also for the economic trade that occurs along that route. It is a huge investment of over half a billion dollars in the Western Highway alone, which affects the entire community of my electorate. This is only a snapshot of the commitment to infrastructure that the Gillard government has put into my electorate.

It is important in this address-in-reply debate, as we start a new parliament, to look at what else we need to do in the future. It is clear in my constituency that the global financial crisis has not finished. Many private sector companies in the building industry are still very concerned about where their next pipeline of jobs is going to come from. We are slowly starting to see a rebuilding of that, but clearly there are lots of pressures, particularly in a town that is heavily reliant on manufacturing for employment and has to look at diversifying its economic base continuously in order to make sure that it is providing jobs.

One of the really important initiatives is the National Broadband Network. I have been lucky enough in my constituency to have one of the stage 2 rollout sites—the town of Bacchus Marsh, which is very close to Melbourne. Certainly there will be a significant change in the way in which that community does business. There will be an enormous opportunity not just for that township but for all of the townships along the Western Highway as we try and convince NBN Co. that the rollout should then occur not towards Melbourne but out into regional Australia to provide that connectivity to Melbourne. It really is going to transform the way in which people work, the way in which health services are provided and the way in which people actually understand the connectivity not just between regions and capital cities but between regional cities and the rest of the world.

I know the benefits of NBN are well beyond what people think they are going to be now. I do not think that we can even imagine the sorts of things that people will be able to do when they have the high-speed capacity that is offered by the NBN. I am certainly looking forward to working with the business community and the community sector in those areas, and working with local government and also other broader industry sectors to make sure that that rollout actually occurs well, that it employs local people and that we also absolutely take advantage of every single megabyte of the speed of the National Broadband Network.

There has been an enormous amount of health reform, and I think one of the things that I am very proud of is the way in which we are transforming the health system. A lot of the focus, detail and work have been around how the funding mechanisms are working. But, as someone who has worked in that area, the reality of what that actually means in the health sector is enormous. At the preventative end we are trying to establish the National Prevention Agency. A huge amount of money has now gone into looking at issues around obesity, tobacco smoking and alcohol use, and about how you get better synergies with the states and at the local level through local hospital networks to really maximise how you reduce the burden of disease in a community. That is an important initiative that we have done through the health and hospitals reform.

We have also invested substantial amounts of money within the hospital networks themselves so that they can actually do their business better, providing more beds, providing incentives to get waiting lists down and driving quality within the hospital system. That will see more services available for people, but it will also see better and higher quality services available for people.

Obviously you need a workforce to enact some of that, so we have made investments in increasing the number of GPs and specialists, and we have worked to get those GPs and specialists out into regional and rural communities. Again, this is something that I am very proud of.

There are information systems that go with that. The My Hospital website will provide consumers, who are getting much more savvy about these sorts of things, with information about what is happening within their hospital system and enable them to make some choices around where they go and what services they have. This is also really important, as will be the e-health record. That is something that I hope to see driving better consumer outcomes and, certainly, better consumer information into the future.

I am also very proud of the work we have done about GP practices, really modernising the way in which GP practices operate whether that be through the GP superclinic we have in Ballan, or the initiative to improve the capital infrastructure of GP clinics themselves or the provision of better clinical training within those GP clinics. I know that that will make a significant difference.

Obviously, it would be remiss of me not to mention the regional priority round of the Health and Hospitals Fund. I am sure the member for Newcastle is pretty keen on a number of hospitals in her area. Within my own constituency I have already got $10 million to $15 million worth of projects that I know are going to come in for assessment, from Ballan District Health and Care, our district nursing service, which is desperately in need of $2 million to improve its facilities through to the 100,000 meals that are provided out of an incredibly old hospital kitchen out at Creswick, and Djerriwarrh Health Services in Bacchus Marsh, which is in a 1950s kit hospital that was brought across on a ship. It desperately needs its theatres done. I know that there will be a lot of competition in that round and I certainly want to assure people that I will advocate very strongly for those.

We have also made an investment in regional cancer centres of some $52 million in partnership with the state government, which is going to make a significant difference to cancer sufferers and also for diagnostics for cancer  not just across my own electorate but throughout the entirety of western Victoria. Ballarat is becoming very much the hub for health, education and business services for the whole of the western district and we want to really support that development and growth.

The area of climate change is obviously one that has been dear to my heart and also one where there are some really good practical examples happening within my own city. The Central Victoria Solar City project, which is one of seven large-scale solar energy projects around Australia, really is going to provide some great examples for the rest of the country as to how you may be able to produce energy locally and the impact of that. I know the member for Newcastle has done very well in terms of some of the work that Newcastle is going to do in that too. I think that, because of the discrete nature of regional communities and the populations that live in them, there is some terrific work that you can do in terms of energy generation and also energy savings. I think Newcastle will provide a great example of that.

Again, I want to say thank you to the people of Ballarat for putting their faith in me again for my fourth term. Again, I particularly want to thank my staff and wonderful volunteers and campaign team. I acknowledge that it is absolutely a team effort. I also want to acknowledge my husband, Mark, and my beautiful son, Ryan. I hope that for many years to come, when he is an adult and reads back through these speeches, he gets why his mum was not always around, but I want to thank him and Mark for the sacrifices they have both made. (Time expired)

Debate (on motion by Ms Grierson) adjourned.

See this speech in context