Matt Thistlethwaite (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to reply to the Governor-General's address which occurred in the wake of the election last year, some time ago now. Nonetheless, I do wish to thank the people of Kingsford Smith for re-electing me to this wonderful position as their local member for this term of parliament. I love my job and I feel privileged to represent such a beautiful area and such wonderful people.

When people come to the electorate of Kingsford Smith, they are often struck by the great natural beauty of our area: the magnificent coastline, the wonderful beaches, the historic Botany Bay, the wide open spaces, and the beautiful parks and gardens. But I often tell people it is not the natural beauty that makes Kingsford Smith such a wonderful place to live—it is the people. It is the people, their attitude, and the fact that we look after each other and we care for each other. And that was on display during the last election campaign, and in the lead-up to it. On 5 June 2016, an East Coast Low and a massive swell hit our community and the coastline along the beaches of Kingsford Smith. That massive storm occurred on the Sunday, predominantly. I remember this very well, because it was actually the day of my campaign launch—and my campaign launch was at Maroubra Surf Life Saving Club—and it poured. The wind was howling and the surf was massive, and when I woke up in the morning, I thought, 'Oh no, no-one is going to come to the campaign launch because the weather is atrocious.' But I was quite surprised to turn up there and see that there were literally hundreds of people that had turned up to my campaign launch for Kingsford Smith. I was very grateful to the members of our community who supported my campaign during that period.

One of the casualties of the East Coast Low at the time was Coogee Surf Life Saving Club. On the evening of 5 June, the Coogee surf club was battered in that massive swell. In the morning, the damage became apparent. The whole eastern wall of the surf club—in particular where the gymnasium was—had been completely knocked over by the power of the waves. The wall is on an elevated platform that stands probably 15 to 20 metres above sea level, and it had been completely battered in. All of the heavy steel gym equipment had been picked up and smashed against the back wall. The front wall of the surf club had been knocked over. The foundations and the platform of the surf club, which sits high up above a cliff face, had been damaged as well, and there was, of course, much internal damage—to gyprock walls, to carpets and the like. I went down to the surf club the next day at 7 am, and what I saw was quite amazing. At seven o'clock in the morning, here were club officials and volunteers already at work, bracing up the walls and the floors, cleaning up, and ensuring that the foundations were safe and that the place could be quickly repaired. That day, the Leader of the Opposition, Bill Shorten, rang me to express his sympathy and to say that his thoughts were with our community in the wake of the low. Within a couple of days, Bill, with Mark Dreyfus, came to the Coogee surf club. They visited and surveyed the damage, talked to club officials and gave Labor's commitment to ensure that we would do all we could to repair the surf club quickly.

What happened over the course of the next week in particular was quite amazing. The number of local volunteer organisations that got involved in the clean-up and the repair was astounding. The SES at Randwick Botany were simply fantastic. Their members spent literally hours and days and weeks not only repairing Coogee surf club but repairing people's homes and businesses in the wake of that damaging storm. The fire brigade were sensational; they were out helping in the community and at the surf club. Surf club and community members from all over the area came in to help repair the damage. On the Saturday after the East Coast Low, there was a working bee where literally hundreds of members of the community came together. I felt quite privileged to be working with those people on that morning. We were shovelling out sand from the boatshed, trying to clean it up and repair some of the damage that occurred because of the sand that had been picked up from the beach and washed into the boatshed.

The concrete foundations of the old Coogee Pier, which was taken down many decades ago, are still there and are only ever visible when the surf at Coogee is massive and wipes away most of the beach. I have only ever seen one of them before, but, in the wake of this storm, all four or five of those concrete pillars were visible on the beach at Coogee. The storm did massive damage to the promenade at Coogee, which took years to repair. It was wonderful to see the community come together to repair the damage during that election campaign. There was a dinner hosted by the Coogee Bay Hotel in the wake of that, where community organisations and businesses came together and raised $30,000. I said earlier that it is the people of Kingsford Smith who make the area so great. This was a perfect demonstration of our community's greatest assets: our people and how we care for each other. That is the approach that the electorate took and the policies that they saw as important in determining their vote in the 2016 election.

Health care was a primary concern of the people of Kingsford Smith. They certainly rejected the coalition's cuts to health care, to hospitals and to Medicare. Over the course of the last few years, the Prince of Wales Hospital has had its operating budget cut by $30 million. Staff have been made redundant and services have been closed. Staff at the hospital are under more and more pressure. The community saw that. The fact that the Turnbull government was continuing the cuts of the Abbott government when it came to hospitals was something that deeply concerned our community. I believe it was one of the reasons why they supported Labor and our better policies on health care.

With respect to education, I have a community that deeply understands the value of investment in needs-based funding and the Gonski principles for funding schools. It was great to see many teachers and parents supporting that principle throughout the election campaign. I am very, very proud of the relationship that I have with local schools and with local teachers. I will always be an advocate and a fighter for needs-based funding for our schools, because I have seen the difference that it makes on the ground to the education of kids and the opportunity for kids, particularly those from an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander background—which we have an active community of in the south of my electorate, around La Perouse and Chifley—and kids with disabilities. This funding makes a big difference to their educational opportunities and their outcomes in life. It was pleasing to see representatives of the Australian Education Union and principals here in parliament today and on the lawns of parliament this morning, making the case for the full funding of Gonski, and, in particular, the last two years of funding.

In our electorate we are very fortunate to have the University of New South Wales, one of Australia's leading universities and a university that gets better and better every year. I am very proud that I am an alumnus of the University of New South Wales. I am the first of my family to have had the opportunity to get a university education—something that I have no doubt my parents would have been able to achieve, but they simply did not have the opportunity because of a working class background. I had that privilege. I had that opportunity. Because of Labor governments and because of HECS, I was able to invest in a university education. But the government is proposing to dramatically increase the cost of getting an education at university. Their $100,000 degree program would see people in our community that would not be able to afford to go to university in the future, and that restricts their opportunity in life. Many in our community saw the devastating impact that $100,000 degrees would have on their children's opportunity to get a good education and voted accordingly in this election.

We are also privileged to have the TAFE college at Randwick on the outskirts of our electorate that does fantastic work in providing people with a vocational education. And, again, TAFE has been absolutely smashed by the combination of a federal Liberal government and a state Liberal government who have taken the guts out of the TAFE system. This has ensured that many of the teaching professions and many of the trades that were offered at TAFE are no longer offered, and some of those, unfortunately, have been removed from Randwick. That will affect our community and that is something that people in our area were vehemently opposed to. And, of course, the cost of child care in the electorate of Kingsford Smith is a massive worry for families and it is ever growing and it is ever expanding. We have seen today that this government was intent on making cuts to family payments and cuts to pensions to fund a new childcare package that, at the end of the day, did not offer more money or more funds or more investment to solve what is a big problem and will not make child care more affordable in our community.

The people of Kingsford Smith understand the importance of investing and providing better opportunities for their kids. They all want a better future for their kids and they understand that the effects of climate change and the threat of global warming has the potential to undermine the living standards of future generations of Australians. Therefore, they want strong action on climate change. I was very proud to be able to campaign in our community on Labor's policy of 50 per cent renewables by 2030. It is a strong commitment to doing what is right by our kids to ensure that we tackle climate change now. We, as the decision makers, must take responsibility for what we know is one of the most immediate threats to living standards and to growth in the future, and that is climate change. That is why we proposed an emissions trading scheme for our full economy to ensure that we have a price on carbon emissions that caps emissions, and then reduces over time to ensure we actually do reduce emissions, unlike this current government. When they got rid of the carbon price—guess what?—emissions started to go up again and our kids are going to pay the cost of that. We also advocated an emissions intensity scheme for the electricity industry, a baseline and credit scheme by which you have a baseline for emissions and any business that seeks to emit above that level has to buy a permit to do so, and those that install new technology to reduce their emissions have a permit that they can sell on the open market as a benefit. And, of course, new vehicle emissions standards were all part of that policy of 50 per cent renewables by 2030, and actually taking responsibility for and taking action on climate change.

Malabar Headland is a sacred piece of land in our community. For close to 100 years it has been the Anzac rifle range, and the people of Kingsford Smith do not want to see development on Malabar Headland. It is the only tract of pristine bushland that is left between Botany Bay and Sydney Harbour on our coastline. My community wants to see this protected.

During the last term of government, it became apparent, through an FOI request, that the government were considering developing Malabar Headland. They were considering selling off a portion of Malabar Headland for private housing development. Rightfully, our community were up in arms about that. The member for Maroubra, Michael Daley, and I campaigned vigorously against this proposal and, within mere hours of it being uncovered by The Sydney Morning Herald, Greg Hunt was out there saying that they would not be proceeding with development of Malabar Headland.

But then, in the lead-up to the election, with no notice and no consultation at all with the local community, the government announced that, through a dirty backroom deal with Senator Leyonhjelm, they would be entering into a 50-year lease with the New South Wales Rifle Association in respect of Malabar Headland, locking our community out of Malabar Headland for the next 50 years. They have just established a national park at Malabar Headland, but the thing about this national park is that you cannot go onto it for a few days in the week. In every week, you cannot access it. You are not allowed to go there. The reason is, for those days of the week, it is a shooting range. If you did go there, you would be at risk of being shot. This is the sort of national park that the Turnbull government has developed for our electorate! If you go down in the woods today, you might get a big surprise! That is the ridiculous nature of this—that they entered into this 50-year lease with no consultation with the community about the future of a very important natural asset, and the community will be locked out of Malabar Headland for 50 years.

Naturally our community are up in arms about it. They want the issue resolved. They want the area returned to the people of New South Wales for enjoyment as a national park, as parklands, as playing fields, as picnic areas and so that the walk to Botany Bay can continue—so you will be able to walk from Bondi Beach all the way to Botany Bay along the coastline, unhindered. That is a great plan for Sydney. It would be a great tourist attraction and something that preserves our natural environment.

During the election campaign, the New South Wales government's light rail project and the destruction of heritage trees along Anzac Parade in Randwick became a big issue. The New South Wales government saw fit to destroy close-to-100-year-old trees that lined Centennial Park and Anzac Parade in our community. Many of these trees were planted as a commemoration, a tribute, to the Anzacs. They lined Centennial Park, which was bequeathed to the people of New South Wales and Sydney by Lachlan Macquarie. This government roared up the chainsaws and cut down a lot of those heritage trees during the election campaign and before, to make way for a light rail project. I am all for better public transport solutions—I do support that—but there was no need to fell these trees for this. There were other alternatives—namely, moving the stop on Alison Road across the road to the racecourse side of Alison Road, where it should be—that would have avoided the destruction of these trees. This became a big issue during the election campaign, and I thank our community for supporting our opposition to the destruction of Randwick's historic trees.

Housing affordability was a massive issue during the election campaign, and I am pleased to see that most people supported Labor's policies on negative gearing and capital gains tax discount reductions, because they understand that, if things continue the way they are, their kids simply will not be able to afford to live in our community in the future.

Infrastructure was a big issue, and Labor pledged to duplicate the rail line into Port Botany. We also pledged $10 million to upgrade Botany pool, which is a much-needed infrastructure project.

I am very proud of the Aboriginal community that exists in our area, but there is a long way to go to reduce and close the gap and to address some of the disadvantage. I thank all of the community groups that I work with—the RSLs, the multicultural organisations, the sporting clubs, Surf Life Saving and the like. I wish to sincerely thank my staff, who have done a wonderful job. I could not do this job without them, and I have had a lot of support from them over many years. In particular, I thank very, very much my chief-of-staff, Leigh Heaney; my media advisor, Nick Moncrieff'-Hill; Kylie Brenton, who basically helps to run my life; Mitch Donohue, our community campaigner; Sam Howes for her wonderful work; and Filip Shu for the work that he does with multicultural communities.

I was also very fortunate to be assisted by an army of volunteers who did a fantastic job and really did support our campaign. This is going to take a while, but I am going to go through many of them: Dylan Parker, who worked on campaign management and did a fantastic job; Amber Wallace; Simon Zhou; Lachlan McGrath; Riley Campbell; Kate Minter; Michael Rosser; Felicity Mallans, who has done a great job volunteering in the wake of the election and on an ongoing basis; Merric Foley; Simeon Ziegler; John Harding Easson; Lorrena Conner-White; Christine Kibble; Pauline Graham; Christina Curry; Zoey Reynolds; Steve Novak; and many others. There were many others who did a fantastic job on the campaign and were basically out every day. I have two more people to thank, and they are Kaila Murnain and Pat Garcia at the New South Wales Labor Party head office. Thank you.

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