John Cobb (Calare, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I join with my colleagues in saying that I strongly support the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Interest Charge) Bill 2016. In supporting that, it does remind me that over the last 15 or so years it has been an incredible thing to be, initially, the member for Parkes and now, over the last nine years, the member for Calare. Western New South Wales is an incredible place, and I think I have probably been the member for most of it over the various redistributions that have happened. When I think about it, I have no doubt that I am the only person at the state or federal level who has been the member for both Broken Hill and Lithgow, which is right on the mountains. They are over 1,000 kilometres apart, which is a long way in New South Wales. It is not very far in Western Australia, but it is a long way in New South Wales.

When I think about the differences over those years, what happens in that part of the world is quite phenomenal. The most remote town in New South Wales is Tibooburra. It is a place that maybe runs one sheep to every 20 or 25 acres. At the other end, in the central west you have got areas running over five sheep to an acre. That is such an incredible variation in climate, in temperature and certainly in rainfall. Processing in the far west at Milparinka was a roo works. Processing in the east in Blayney and in Bathurst is Nestle and Mars. That is the incredible variation that you see in what is obviously the oldest and, to me, the most precious part of this country.

My first three years as the member for Parkes were an absolute ball. That is when you get to know your people. It is when you get to know your LGAs, your local governments. It is when you get to know the heart and soul of it. After that, you do not quite have the same amount of time. I guess I am pretty much an expert at small towns. I grew up at Mount Hope, which, when I was young, had a pub, a store, post office and about four houses. Now it has just got a pub. The houses and the post office and the store seem to have gone.

What I did learn in the far west of New South Wales is that they are the toughest, the most resilient, the most adaptable people and they make their own fun. When you do not have much you have just got to make do with what you have got. In most of those small towns and those places, if you want to see people you go to the pub, and I am pretty good at that. My staff and I used to leave Dubbo and go away for a week, and we would come back a bit the worse for wear—headaches and all. But by God we knew our place, we knew our country and we knew our people.

The western region of New South Wales is a very special place. It is a tough place, and I will talk a little about the problems it has had in the last decade in a moment.

When we come here, we owe our first duty to our country. We all do. I do not care what your political persuasion is; you have to put your country first. After that, you have to put your people and your electorate—what they do is what really matters. It is the country that Lawson and Banjo talked about, wrote about and sang about. When I think about it, I have Broken Hill in the far west, which, I guess, is the most famous mining town in Australia. It was a very Labor place in those days, but they were so honest and so up-front. It was just fantastic. If you did something for them, if you were able to, they would thank you. They would thank you publicly. They would not vote for you, but they would thank you in public, on the air or on TV. They are just wonderful people.

Lithgow, at the other extreme, is kind of similar, but different. They were both mining towns: one was copper, zinc, lead and all those strange minerals, and the other, Lithgow, is a coalmine. Lithgow had the first iron ore smelter in Australia. It had the early coalmines, and they brought the coal to Lithgow. Not only that, Lithgow had Australia's first serious munitions factory. It is still there, with the most talented, special tradespeople you will ever see in your life. One town was isolated mentally and physically, and the other—maybe Lithgow is a little mentally isolated, but aren't we all? We all like where we are.

As I said, they are the toughest, most resilient, adaptable people, but what I really have not said is that they are also the most hospitable, wonderful people that you will ever come across. They were so good to me. I will die thinking that western New South Wales is the best place, whether it is the driest at Tibooburra or the wettest at Oberon. Talk about different—Tibooburra is probably the hottest place in New South Wales, and Oberon is almost a country town lichen, right up against the mountains. They are people who are into forestry—some of the best forestry in the country is at Oberon. Aside from the Snowy scheme, probably the highest dam in Australia is at Oberon. Let me tell you, it is also one of the coldest places in Australia. When it blows, you know it.

But they are doers. In all the part of Australia I am talking about, they are not paper shufflers. They are not looking to avoid this or that. They grow things. They mine things. They export things. We do things. That is why it is so special. It does not matter where you are; they are not whingeing about the fact that there are a few pigs nearby or the fact that all that smoke is going up; that is what life is and that is what we do. Whether it is Lithgow and Oberon in the east or Tibooburra and Broken Hill in the west, they are just the most tough, wonderful people you will ever come across.

Originally my electorate was Dubbo, Forbes, Parkes and everything west, so I never, ever dreamt that I would also, two redistributions later, be the member for where I was born—Bathurst. Bathurst is a very historical place. It is much older than Melbourne and much older than Brisbane. It is the third oldest city in Australia, after Sydney and Hobart. I guess Parramatta might have some claims, but we will not worry about that. It is where mining started. It is where gold was found. That is where Hargraves got paid for finding gold. They actually found it quite a long time before that, but they did want competition so they did not tell anyone. It is where agriculture got serious in Australia—and irrigation and the whole lot. That is where it started. Since European settlement, that is where Australia really got going, and in those days, without ag, you had nothing.

As I said, at that stage, when I became the member for Calare instead of Parkes, suddenly I had three cities instead of one—Lithgow, Bathurst and Orange—and I suddenly realised too that I had the best country in Australia. Some of you might argue about that, but I would not argue too hard. You have to remember that we were growing things before you guys even found your country. As I said, in the east of the electorate there is gold, and wine! I did my best to check it all out—you cannot skite about your country if you have not tried what it does, and I have tried most of them. In the last 25 years, Orange has gone from being unheard of to having some of the best wineries in the country, and now they are adding Mudgee to it, so it will be pretty hard to toss Calare in the future. As I said before, it is just amazing—the fat lambs, the mining—it is just a wonderful part of Australia and it has been an amazing privilege to look after it. And to be looked after by it, I might add.

The thing which strikes me most about my time in this place is the almost decade-long drought that we had. Whereas drought is no stranger to Tibooburra or even Condobolin and all the Western Division and even much further in, it is not often places like Orange and Molong cop a drought, but they copped that one. The 1982-83 drought is the worst drought I ever struck in my life, but it did not go on for the best part of a decade. There were no allocations on the Lachlan for seven years, and irrigation had never been affected like that before—not in my lifetime. I have to tell you I was proudest of our government, of our party and of our leaders in the way we dealt with that drought.

It started off, in an official sense, when John Anderson and I met John Howard in Cobar on the plane. We drove him out just south of Cobar to Frosty Singleton's place. Frosty has since passed on. He was not that wrapped with us, because he was a real rifle man and he was not keen about the 2006 deals on firearms, but he rose above that because he knew there were was a much bigger issue involved. He took us out to his place, and he actually took us to the wrong dam. He wanted to show us how the water was bad and the stock were bad, but he took us to the wrong one. I think I was driving, which worried the Federal Police a bit because they did not like the way I did it—they are nervous lot. Anyway, we went to this dam and Ando and I were in front. We walked up and damn me if there was very little water in this dam and a heap of mud. A few hundred sheep took off, but there was a lamb stuck in it. Without thinking, we both walked down. I lent over and grabbed this thing. Ando held onto me, and Howard came down, and that became quite a famous photo. Everyone thought we set it up—you do not know much about farmers and stock if you think you deliberately drop a lamb in the mud. But that was kind of when Howard accepted that this drought was here to stay and that it was a really bad one. The two of them made sure that, as the drought got worse, so the government got more generous. It was answering the call when we needed to. I think he came out to my electorate four times in the course of that drought.

The last time the two Johns came out was at Forbes, and that was when the irrigation was in it up to its neck and everything was very crook. I remember this day particularly well. A friend of mine I went to school with—from further out west; it does not matter where—and his wife had lost a son and they had lost a neighbour. I said to John, 'There are two people I really want you to talk to.' He said, 'What about?' I said, 'Look, they have lost a son and a neighbour and they want to talk to you about depression.' Drought does not cause depression but it certainly exacerbates it. I should say at this point in time that, if it is possible for any good to come out of bad, what came out of that decade of drought was that farmers and country people accepted that depression was an issue that had to be dealt with, and they started talking about it. That was the only good thing out of a very bad few years. Nowadays people will put their hand up a lot of the time and talk about it, whereas once that did not happen in the bush. No-one accepted that depression even happened.

That day John said, 'Where are they?' I introduced him to them and—I can still see him—he put an arm around each of them, walked away and talked to them for about a quarter of an hour about it. It was a pretty good thing for a PM to do. The issue was huge, but he accepted that at that point in time talking to those people was the biggest thing he was going to do that day. Out of that we got special funding for people with real issues—and not just farmers either—to help them deal with those issues. I have never forgotten that day and thinking that it is an ill wind that blows nobody any good. I thank John Howard for that and I thank both John Howard and John Anderson for their support through what was the worst period in the bush that I ever saw.

I do want to mention a few people. Firstly I thank Sue Sillovich and the Nats out at Broken Hill. When those guys started with the National Party branch at Broken Hill it was not the popular thing to do. It was serious country in those days, but those guys toughed it out to the point where we had both a state and a federal member. I do not care what people's political persuasion is, the further west you go the more fantastic people can sometimes be. Places like Condo and Dubbo were just fantastic. Pauline McAllister and all the Nats in Dubbo, who now look after Mark Coulton—and they will do that very well—are just wonderful people. I also have to thank Mark Olsen at Parkes and Yvonne Glasson from Forbes.

I was in agripolitics for a long time before I got into politics. Agripolitics taught me about western New South Wales, but politics taught me to be intimate with it. You learn about everything. You learn that it is no good saying someone is useless or asking, 'Why do they do it?' Saying that does not solve a problem. What you do learn in politics, which you do not really learn outside of it, is that problems are not insurmountable but they are there, and talking about them without trying to do anything about them is a total waste of time—whether it is getting a settlement with Aboriginal people or whatever it might be. Something that has been talked a lot about lately is domestic violence. Talking about those things does not prove much; we just have to do them.

I have met some incredible people. I inherited a woman called Evelyn Barber, who ran my Dubbo office. Mark inherited her from me and, as far as I know, she is still looking after him and probably will see him out. Both now and during my time as a minister some of the people who have been really fantastic are Ron Kelly, Joy Thomas and Anne Filmer. There are a lot of other people, and I am not going to try to name them all because there are too many. All those who are connected with this parliament look after us far better than we look after them. I thank Caroline MacSmith, Melissa Inwood and all the staff I have had over time. With the changes in electoral boundaries and one thing and another, I think I have had five different homes—and I suppose I still have a couple. It is a very strange life that we live and when you are on the front bench it is an absolutely crazy life, but it is for a purpose. Let's face it: this chamber is not about running Australia; it is about giving democracy a name and people having something to look at and being able to say, 'That's our member,' or, 'That's our minister.' The work goes on outside irrespective of what we do and say. All I can tell you about all of that is that you are defined by the people you represent and woe betide you the minute you forget that.

You find that there are so many incredible people, with the experiences they give you and the funny things you see. I remember being in the Tibooburra pub one night—just the once. I forget what year it was, but it was the night we won the third State of Origin game.

See this speech in context