Joel Fitzgibbon (Hunter, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a great pleasure to follow the Deputy Speaker and member for Fisher. He reflected somewhat on his time in this place and the electoral success he has had over many years, albeit with a short time in the sin-bin. I think that reflects the conscientious way in which he approaches his work in the electorate. He is doing a great job as Deputy Speaker helping to settle the parliament down and playing a positive and progressive role, and the government appreciates that. I make these remarks very genuinely, Madam Deputy Speaker, not just to ensure that when I go to the Deputy Speaker’s drinks tonight I get a glass of one of the Hunter’s finest reds.

It is true that this has been a very tumultuous year. I am sure that, when the history of Australian political life is written in future years, there will be much reflection on 2010. There was a fascinating and somewhat strange election campaign in late August followed, of course, by a very long 17-day wait for a determination on who might form a government. And now there have been almost five weeks of parliamentary sittings under—and I will say it only once, for the benefit of the member for Fisher—the new paradigm. It is an environment in which things are much different for all of us, but I welcome the fact that it is an environment in which the parliament is operating very, very effectively. I am obviously in a position to observe that very closely. Just as importantly, if not more importantly, to the Australian people, the government is functioning very well. It is getting on with its progressive and forward-looking agenda, and I know that will be welcomed by many people.

We will never know why the election was so close, in many senses. It is difficult, despite all our capability through opinion polling and other research, to get into the minds of every one of the 10 million or more voters in this country. If there is a lesson to be learned, I think it is more likely that none of us—neither individuals nor the political parties—can assume that they will be returned to government just on what they have done; they will need to demonstrate what they intend to do. It is an interesting thing to analyse, because there is no doubt that the first-term Labor government, the one elected in 2007, was a successful government. It had many, many achievements under its belt, not least the way in which it protected us from a global contagion, the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, and indeed in those first three years created 650,000 jobs—a very, very significant achievement.

Then there was, just to name a few, the apology to the stolen generation, long overdue and long called for by people on my side of the parliament. There was the signing of Kyoto and what we did in significantly increasing the mandatory renewable energy target, now known as the renewable energy target, to 20 per cent. Of course, there was the Building the Education Revolution, much criticised by some, an ongoing program which is transforming the way in which we deliver education in our country in the 21stcentury. Then there is the new industrial relations system. It is strange how quickly we forget how bad our system was not all that long ago, and there has been a bit of a debate about that this week. It is interesting to note there was no equal pay case under the old regime; that has only been facilitated under this architecture. One achievement very close to me is the defence white paper, the first one in more than a decade—long overdue. There has been pension reform, with pension increases. Under family assistance more generally, paid parental leave has been a historic reform. Health and hospital reforms are still rolling out. Just one aspect of that is 20 new cancer centres throughout the country. Our GP superclinics are making a difference in local communities. There is money for childcare support. The list goes on and on.

It is funny to me—for want of a better word—that, in a sense, we did so much that it was all too much for some people to absorb. Too quickly, the media moved on to the next subject. Of course, our ambitious program continues. There are big challenges now and what people will be looking for us to do is to get on with the National Broadband Network. People want it, we need to deliver it and others should get out of the way. There are also the ongoing reforms in health and hospitals.

We need to tackle climate change, of course, but the community and business are simply crying out for certainty. The overwhelming majority of Australian people recognise that climate change exists, that it is a problem, and they want government to do something about it; and, again, people who want to interfere should simply get out of the way. Tax reform will be important, and I should have included in the list of successful reforms under the last government what we did in terms of a more focused, equal and profitable mining tax—a way of returning the dividends of the mining boom back to the people and back to the infrastructure which supports their local communities.

I want to turn back to the BER for a second, because one of the things that made us even busier than usual during the election campaign was the time we had to allocate to opening new facilities in our electorates. I have now opened a number of facilities in my local primary schools. I am delighted, as are my school communities, that every local primary school in my electorate now has a new facility—a new school hall, a new library, a multifunction centre, whatever it might be. Despite the criticisms from those opposite and some criticisms from the media, I can guarantee members of the House that my school communities—Catholic, public, Christian, you name it—are absolutely overwhelmed by the difference it has made in their capacity to deliver 21st century school programs.

Indeed, I was talking to the director of Catholic schools for the Hunter region—and the member for Newcastle will be interested in this—who pointed out to me that, not long before we made the announcement about the BER and the schools program, the Catholic Schools Office had sat down to work out how much money they would need to bring the infrastructure in all the Catholic schools in the region up to an acceptable standard, a 21st century standard. I will not share the numbers for fear that they are not for public digestion, but they did the sums and sat back in distress, recognising that they could never hope to secure anywhere near that amount of money and therefore lived in forlorn hope of ever achieving their objectives. Of course, as a result of the BER, they got almost exactly the amount of money they had calculated they needed in that difficult and challenging exercise. So that is a small example of the difference the program has made.

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