Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

We have just passed an anniversary for those of us first elected in 2013. We have just ticked over six years in the parliament. For me, that's six years of representing the community that I was born in, the community I raised my family in, the community that I worked in as an educator for some 25 of my 27 years in the education sector and a community that I have always loved. But it's also a community that is growing at a rapid rate, and with that comes new and emerging arrivals into our community.

Five years ago, 50 per cent of the people who call Wyndham home now did not live there. The rate of growth is enormous. With that comes certain challenges as well as lots and lots of opportunities. I stand here in this chamber representing that opportunity. I'm a kid who grew up in Werribee, a kid fortunate enough to have had the capacity to get through year 12 and go off to university to become a professional—to become a teacher—and a kid fortunate enough to live in a country where things were there for me to connect with that, ultimately, led me to this place to be the representative of that community. It's extraordinary.

Tonight, I want to recommit to my community that I will continue to be the strong voice that my community needs so desperately, to call the government to account and to help shape policies that a Labor government could implement that would make their lives easier and that would make our community more prosperous. To do that, I need to share a little about the community.

We had a redistribution in Victoria, so the boundaries shifted at the 2019 election. It's with sadness that I no longer represent a part that the previous boundaries gave me to represent, which was Laverton, where I spent many, many years teaching in that community. When boundaries shifted, half of Point Cook went to Gellibrand, as well as Laverton and parts of Seabrook. I'm tinged with sadness to say goodbye to some of those communities that I've come to known over the last six years as their member of parliament. But I want to ensure that people understand that Tim Watts, the member for Gellibrand, is a fabulous representative. The city of Wyndham has reached a new milestone. It now has two representatives in the federal parliament rather than one, which, of course, is always a good thing. Two voices, two strong members here—two strong Labor members—prepared to fight for our community.

I want to give people a bit of a snapshot about what that community is. There are 100 babies born a week to mothers who live in the city of Wyndham. At the heart of Wyndham is the old country suburb of Werribee, where I grew up. I first remember being conscious of the population sign when it said 13,000. In that city it's now a population of over 270,000. The rate of growth has been incredible, dramatic and sustained over many years now.

There are other things about our community. There are 17,000 registered businesses and that's up 32 per cent from 2016. So more and more people are opening small businesses or registering as a small business. We had the highest number of dwelling approvals in Victoria between July 2018 and 2019. The population of Wyndham would fill 2.7 MCGs and the projections are that it will fill almost five MCGs by 2041. The birth rate means that there are 4½ primary school classes born each week. Of every three people you meet in Wyndham one has probably moved here in the past five years. Just under 99 per cent of net migration into our community is from people born overseas. It's a young community. Millennials and younger generations dominate the Wyndham population. Fifty-eight per cent of residents are below 35 years of age. Fortunately, I spent many years in secondary schools and worked with young people. So it doesn't matter how old I get; I feel I can still connect to the people I represent.

The Wyndham Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population is the largest in all of Greater Melbourne. You can see the opportunities and the challenges—the opportunities for us to learn about First Australians and their history. Wyndham City Council, our local government, has been doing some fabulous work in that area. If you call 100 random Wyndham residents, 53 of them will speak a language other than English. Together with the cities of Casey and Hume, Wyndham is home to the largest family households in all of Greater Melbourne. More than half of Wyndham households are families with children. The majority of these households have children under 15 years of age. So you can see that the challenges are real.

We currently have 52 schools inside the boundaries of the electorate of Lalor and the demand for new schools continues to grow. One of the parts of the debate that is missing, even locally, is that it's always about: where's the next new school? It's always about the provision of new schools and not often enough about the maintenance of our established schools. Also, it's not often enough about the quality of the education in those schools. As someone who worked in education for so long, I know the challenges that our principals and their teams face when a school opens its doors for prep to year 2 with 200 children and the next year it has 800 children in prep to year 6. There are recruitment challenges and training challenges. There are the challenges of recruitment of experienced staff to come to the new schools. There's an opportunity for the training of teachers in our local schools that very few communities have. But, by the same token, we need leaders in our schools and we need to know that they've been tried and tested—that they can build a school culture and that they can have a focus on teaching and learning rather than extraneous things, to ensure that we're building quality schools. Our community demands that quality education.

I think one of the challenges we face needs to be put on the record. We talked about citizenship last night. Everyone assumes that the world will stay the same: migrants will arrive in Australia and they will dig in; they'll save for a decade or 20 years before they go home on a big trip. The world has changed. The globe is much smaller, not geographically but emotionally. In terms of travel, it's certainly much smaller. Our new communities want a quality education for their children. That is our biggest challenge once we are mobile and living in this global world. I have conversations with people in my electorate who may have just become citizens. They'll go through their family tree and they'll talk about their brother living in Singapore, their mother living in Ireland and their cousins living in the UK. A young girl who works for me recently took eight months to do a world tour. She didn't have to pay for accommodation in any country because she comes from a refugee family that is all over the world. Her travel diary was extraordinary. It brought home to me that, if we don't provide what these families are looking for in our country, they have other options. So the world has changed. Most of our families who came from overseas, those who came in through skilled migration, returned home within two years of receiving their citizenship. They went back to visit family. The world has certainly changed.

One of the extraordinary things in my electorate, and it is another of our absolute challenges, is that we have the largest jobs-to-work deficit in Victoria. That means that, with 270,000 people living in the city of Wyndham, too many have to leave our area to find employment; too many do the long road trip or the long train trip. Not enough jobs are being created in our area. It's a focus for our local government, it's a focus for our state government and it's certainly a focus for me.

I want to finish on the things that we kickstarted out of my office in recent weeks. We had a visit from Jason Clare, who is the shadow minister for homelessness and member for Blaxland. He talked to our not-for-profits and our community organisations in the homelessness space, where the numbers are increasing. We had a visit from Catherine King, who is the shadow minister for infrastructure and member for Ballarat. She sat with our local government to talk about the infrastructure needs and the directions that local governments see us going in. We've also had a forum with Bill Shorten, the member for Maribyrnong and the shadow minister for NBN and Centrelink. It was absolutely fabulous to welcome Bill back into the electorate in his new role—a stark reminder that, if we had won government, there would have been 40 new jobs in Centrelink to help with people's wait times. We heard a lot of sad stories about the NDIS. They're hard to hear, but they're much, much harder to live.

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