Andrew Giles (Scullin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am not placed to comment on the member for McPherson's husband, but I will say that it was a pleasure to be in this chamber for her speech. While I do not share all of the sentiments expressed in it, I think the challenge the member for McPherson outlined in terms of the expectations all of our constituents have on us is a challenge we should all seek to rise to, and I will do my best to begin that process in the course of making these remarks in reply to the Governor-General's speech.

I start, though, by expressing my deep appreciation and gratitude to the people of Scullin for re-electing me in July last year. It is an extraordinary privilege, an honour and a great responsibility for any of us to serve in this place. I know that none of us takes on the responsibility lightly. So I extend my deep thanks to the constituents of the Scullin electorate—obviously, to those who supported my re-election, but also to those who did not vote for me. I am committed to listening to you and working for you through this parliament.

I was particularly pleased that there was a significant swing to Labor in the Scullin electorate, and the credit for that goes to two groups of people. Firstly, to Bill Shorten, the Leader of the Opposition, and his campaign team. I acknowledge the work of George Wright, our then national secretary, and Paul Erickson, the assistant national secretary. And I am very pleased to see the member for Cunningham here, who made such a great contribution in important policy areas. I acknowledge the work of everyone involved in delivering a platform of policies that we took to the Australian people and which resonated clearly with my constituents in Scullin, as it did across the northern suburbs of Melbourne and more generally. So that is one chunk of the credit for my having the opportunity to continue to serve.

The other goes to all the amazing people who I have had the opportunity to work with, and for, in the short time that I have been in this place. I extend my deep appreciation to my staff, to Lori Faraone—and it shows what a long time it has been since the election that, on election day, Lori had one child; she and Jason now have a second and she will be returning to work soon, which I am greatly looking forward to, and I hope that she is too! To Jim Tilkeridis, to Sally-Ann Delaney, to Kali Watson, to Matt Dawson, to Justin Mammarella, and to Eleanor Scott-D' Ambrosio: it is an extraordinary privilege for me to work with you. The quality of the work that you do for people in the Scullin electorate is something that I am in awe of. As I have said more than once, almost all the good work done in the office is done by you; any errors and omissions are down to me. I express my gratitude to all of you for your work through what was a very long—and, in Melbourne, cold—election campaign. I look forward to working with you to meet the challenges of this parliament. I also acknowledge the state members that I am very fortunate to work with: my dear friend Lily D'Ambrosio, Danielle Green, Vicki Ward, Bronwyn Halfpenny and Colin Brooks. I was very grateful for your support and for the opportunity to continue to work with all of you on behalf of the communities of Melbourne's north. I was very fortunate to have a terrific campaign team who ran an excellent campaign and gave me plenty to do. I thank my campaign chair, Samil Demir, a young man with a great future ahead of him professionally and—I hope—in Labor politics.

There are many, many people who deserve to be acknowledged in this place. I will concentrate on a few: Koste Kolevski, Liam McColl, Helen Said, John Pathinathan, Nik Cagorski, Joe Petrucci, Katherine Tilkeridis, Vince Morton, Kurt Cauchi, Alex Collum, Rex Ramanathan, Brian and Ellen Smiddy, Gwen Hamilton, Barbara Breaks, Sucettin and Perihan Unal and all their family, Kim Travers, and Jenny and Neil Delaney. Sadly, since the election, Neil Delaney has passed away. He was a gentleman in every sense of the word, someone who made an extraordinary contribution to community, who never asked for anything for himself. So I take this opportunity to think of Neil and his family: I am indebted for the time that I had to spend with you, and I know many others are grateful for everything you did for them. To Anthony Mancuso, Shorsh Ahmad, Rachael Davies, Elvira Tsecouteris, Sasha Nackovski, Trish Mackin, Harry Williams and Jim Bannon—to all of you and to many others who flew the Labor flag in Scullin last year, I give you my thanks. I have enjoyed the opportunity to continue to work for you, and to be inspired by your energy and passion for a fairer society every day that I am in the job.

Out of this campaign, something special happened in the communities I represent. A group of people—Trish, Nik and Alex, who I just acknowledged—came together to form a group called the Scullin Volunteer Action Network, recognising their sense that politics and Labor politics should not just be about elections. It is about building stronger, more resilient and fairer communities. I have been really excited by their activism in seeking to engage others in the political process, and to break down some of the sense of malaise in politics and in our political institutions—something that the member for McPherson touched on very effectively and something I will return to briefly. But I wanted to particularly acknowledge their work in taking action locally to correct a problem that is bedevilling all of the developed world—that is, the rise of a reactionary form of populism and a decline in our sense of faith in politics and our political institutions. While it is critical that those of us in this place rise to the challenge of overcoming this sense of cynicism and alienation, it is so wonderful to see people outside of the formal political process—people who do not enjoy the privilege that all of us have, to speak in this place—take action to show their faith in their fellow citizens; their faith that working together we can make a change for the better.

I have reflected on the last term in this parliament, my first term, and there are a couple of things I would like to particularly share with the House. There were two campaigns that I was associated with in the Scullin electorate that made me feel very proud to be a local member of parliament in Melbourne's northern suburbs and proud to be a member of the Labor team. I am so proud of the way that the communities I represent came together to reject the proposals for a GP tax and how people stood up for Medicare—standing up for everyone's entitlement to health care. But also, more than that, in standing up for Medicare, the communities that I represent made clear to me that they have a very strong sense and they expect from me a strong articulation of our sense of what it is to be an Australian—a sense of a social compact; a sense of a society in which no-one should be left behind; and a rejection of a dog-eat-dog, Americanised society whereby but for the fortune of your birth, you may not be given the security of having the health care that you deserve.

I was also really pleased by the way that the diverse communities that I represent came together when it was proposed in 2014, as it has been proposed since, that laws be changed to license racist hate speech. I was so proud of the way that people came together to speak up for communities that felt under pressure. I was pleased that the shadow Attorney-General, the member for Isaacs, spent much time working with concerned and affected communities in Scullin. I particularly think of those who congregate around the Thomastown mosque to say that we do not believe in our part of the world that there can be such a thing as a second-class citizen in Australia and that we do not believe it can ever be right to license racist hate speech.

The other matter that was important to me in my last term was this process of better connecting people to politics. I took up the invitation of the member for McPherson to consider my own first speech, where I spoke of an aspiration to be a listener and a problem-solver as a member of parliament. I have tried to live up to this, particularly so when it comes to recognising that too many of my constituents—and most of our constituents, I suspect—feel that there is not much point to politics. They feel that whatever happens in terms of their electoral decisions, that cannot change the circumstances of their lives. I passionately believe that they are wrong in this and I equally passionately believe that we must all work harder to correct this misapprehension in the community, particularly when it comes to younger people. We know they are not enrolling to vote in worrying numbers and are not voting or voting informally in very worrying numbers. They are also falling prey to some voices of division within our communities, which must be squarely rejected in this place and in the community. I made it a big priority to try and engage with communities who I felt were marginalised from the political process. I think some progress has been made in Scullin in this regard, but there is much, much more to be done.

I was also pleased over the course of the last term to support the election of an Andrews Labor government. When I think about positive change that has happened in Melbourne's north, I think about the impact of the election of this government. I think about that when I see the physical environment of our schools and the investment in healthcare services in the north, but most importantly I see it in the infrastructure rollout, particularly the extension of the train line to Mernda, which will open in 2019, as well as very significant road projects. These infrastructure projects are a huge investment in dealing with a major concern I also spoke of in my first speech. It is my concern that Melbourne, the world's most liveable city, as I am sure all of us in this place know, is at risk of becoming a city in two halves: a very prosperous core and an outer rim, where access to jobs and access to amenity becomes much, much harder. This is a course that can be corrected, that must be corrected soon. We need to recognise all of the costs of congestion—economic, social and environmental—and recognise that they are disproportionately borne by those who live further from the CBD of our major capital cities like Melbourne.

So, I am proud to have made a contribution, over the life of the last parliament, to a change in our national conversation around urban policy whereby we now have a government that is committed, at least on paper, to an agenda for our cities and to investments in infrastructure that are not solely about road construction. I am hopeful, despite the continued imbroglios over the much needed Melbourne Metro project, that we will again see the sort of city-shaping public transport projects that our major cities need, with significant federal involvement based on evidence, not ideology.

There is of course much more to be done if we are to ensure that all of my constituents, particularly those in the newer, more northerly areas of the Scullin electorate, have every access to good jobs—including good local jobs in precincts such as the Epping central activity district and the precinct in Bundoora around University Hill and the RMIT campus, but also jobs located in the city—and access to all the fantastic cultural, sporting and social amenities that we enjoy in Melbourne. All of us should be able to enjoy them.

Again I will refer to the question of trust in politics. The member for McPherson said, 'We all need to do better.' That is an injunction I hope I can respond to over the balance of this term, and I recognise that it is an onus that rests on all of us who are elected to this place. I feel much more deeply now the concerns about alienation that I expressed in my first speech. Again, I think we must be concerned about the rise of reactionary forms of populism, which threaten our collective sense of government's responsibility, and capability, for doing good in people's lives. The buck stops with us and how we behave—our capacity to have the sorts of robust debates that the member for McPherson referred to, where we do test ideas, ideological propositions and different visions for maintaining Australian living standards into the future. We need to find better ways to do that, with less rancour.

This is particularly pressing when you look at the world as it is today and the drift towards inequality that is happening across all developed economies. In Australia, of course, inequality is at a 75-year high. We are the least equal we have been since the Great Depression. This raises profound challenges for us, as to the sort of society we wish to live in, as well as for our economy. It is clear that the Australian economy today is working for the few and not for the many. This no doubt is driving some of the sense of alienation, some of the appeal of populism, that I spoke about earlier. When we have company profits at a record high and these profits are not being reinvested productively, that is a problem, and it is a problem that does not call for company tax cuts as a solution. We have changes in the world of work that are exacerbating the trends driving income inequality and wealth inequality. Wage growth is at a record low, and growth of insecure work is outstripping good, secure growth in good, secure jobs. Increasingly, we are seeing new forms of work outside what generally has been understood to be the formal economy—the sorts of jobs regulated under the Fair Work Act and its predecessors. These are profound challenges that government must respond to, and I am pleased to be part of the Shorten opposition, which is starting work on that response as well as facing up to the other critical challenges that Australia needs addressed.

No critical challenge is more pressing than climate change. It is beyond disappointing that we have a government that is not facing up to that challenge, to that moral imperative to do good for future generations. Today I had the privilege of receiving a presentation from the Australian Marine Conservation Society about the state of the Great Barrier Reef. To say that the prognosis was shocking is a great understatement, and that is only one illustration of the scale of the challenge we must rise to to begin our journey to a sustainable, low-carbon economy.

Over the life of this parliament, I have been given the great honour of working in the schools portfolio by the Leader of the Opposition. I am very excited by this opportunity to work with the Deputy Leader of the Labor Party, the member for Sydney, Tanya Plibersek, as part of Labor's education team, with some terrific colleagues—the member for Adelaide, the member for Griffith, Senator Cameron and Senator Collins—and to build on the work of people like the member for Cunningham. I am excited about the challenge of getting Commonwealth involvement in schools right, and I am determined to fight every day for needs-based schools funding. I think the two enduring achievements of the Labor governments that held office from 2007 to 2013 will be the NDIS and getting schools funding right, after more than 40 years of inertia and division.

The fight for schools funding is not over. We on the Labor side are looking to the evidence. We are looking to the experiences that we are seeing in every school around Australia. We are committed to holding the Minister for Education and Training in this government, Senator Birmingham, to account for the promises that the government made back in 2013 and for the government's moral obligation to give every kid every chance of a decent start in life, knowing what we do about the value of education—not only as the best guarantor of productive work but also of so many other benefits, particularly in terms of health. A good education is fundamental to a good life nowadays, and for me it is simply unconscionable that we have a government that is rejecting the evidence before it and that has failed to put any alternative proposition on the table. We are nearly in April, and schools, school communities and school sectors have no certainty about what will apply to them next year. This is not good enough.

What is also not good enough in the area of schools is our failure to deal with the pressing issue of making sure that every Australian counts when it comes to school education. There is so much more to be done to ensure that children with disability can effectively participate in inclusive education. This has been left in the too-hard basket for too long, and, of all the challenges I am looking forward to embarking upon over the balance of this term, this is the one that I am most keen on making progress on.

There is not much time left, so I will end where I began: in thanking the people of Scullin for their confidence in me. I will do my best to discharge their faith to the best of my ability, and I am very proud to do so as part of a strong and united Labor team.

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