Tony Pasin (Barker, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Being a member of this place is a complete and utter privilege, and I know that anyone who I have the privilege of calling a colleague agrees with me. These are roles that are on loan to us by the Australian people. In my case, it's a privileged position, one that I don't take for granted, provided courtesy of the people of the great electorate of Barker. But the federal parliament is here in Canberra. On average we spend about 20 weeks a year in our nation's capital. By its very nature, being a federal member of parliament drags you away from your constituency. You spend a lot of time away from the very people you're representing, because, quite frankly, the national parliament, the seat of parliament in Australia federally, is here in Canberra.

The best and most effective members of parliament are those that are connected to their community. They're in touch, they're wired in, they've got the electorate's Zeitgeist. I find that the best way to do that is to remain connected. Whilst the job seeks to drag you away, you need to fight hard to clamour to stay connected. It's the reason I have programs that I commit to, like spending each Saturday at the local footy club and cooking a barbecue or selling cans. It's the reason why I do a number of things, but one of the programs I've embarked upon in order to remain connected, particularly to the smaller communities in my electorate, is a series of 40 community meetings that I convened over the course of 12 months leading up to the election in May of this year.

These were 40 community meetings in many of the much smaller communities in my electorate, where I simply invited the constituents to come along and share their views. They could raise their concerns about their community and make me aware of issues that might be idiosyncratic or perhaps broader issues both across the electorate and across the nation. I must say that a few things struck me. My electorate is 64,000 square kilometres and it takes me a good six hours to drive from one end of it to another, but there was great commonality of the issues raised at these community meetings. I want to speak about a few of those issues that were common across the communities.

There were lots of little issues and we had lots of little wins along the way. I think that being present in a community in that way was very valuable. I won't speak about those idiosyncratic issues, whether they were about the tree shedding limbs in the memorial park at Tarpeena or a particular intersection or a speed sign causing grief around Cobdogla. I want to talk about the broader issues that were common across my electorate.

I will speak first of roads. It's no surprise that the No. 1 issue that people wanted to come and talk to me about was the state of roads in the electorate. We would spend some time running through the nature of road funding architecture in this country. I think that as members of parliament we should do a better job in educating people about how road funding is structured between the federal, state and local governments. When I spoke to these constituents across these 40 meetings I would always ask a common question: if there was one singular thing you could do to make the roads in your community safer, what would it be? On balance, the answer was always, 'Make them wider'. Widen the roads.

That might be hard for people who live exclusively in metropolitan settings to understand, but at times roads in the country are relatively narrow. They can narrow even further if the bitumen at the edge of the road breaks away. What my constituents want to see, particularly in terms of those secondary roads, is that they are widened. I can name some, whether it's the Horrocks Highway, the Thiele Highway, the Brownswell Highway or the Princess Highway, and in another context they would be federal government roads. Indeed, constituents believed they were federal government roads, but they're in fact state roads. Note that it costs about $100,000 a kilometre to widen them, and that we would achieve a significant reduction in fatalities and serious injuries. That's something which we need to do more of: make roads safer. As someone who drives 100,000 kilometres a year in this role, I can tell you that I feel safer on a wide road. I relax into the drive and I'm a much better driver for the relaxed nature of my driving. So that was the issue around roads.

In terms of health, they were concerned about access to GPs. Affordability is a separate question, and whilst they were somewhat concerned about ensuring that there were increasingly higher rates of bulk billing, they were principally concerned about ensuring they can get to a GP. Not all of these communities were concerned about this issue, but the test I would ask in a community was: if you woke up crook tomorrow morning, what are your prospects of seeing a doctor? And I specifically asked about 'a doctor', not 'your doctor'. The answer was mixed, but in communities where there was a lack of GP services it was a very significant issue. Of course, our government, and indeed this parliament, need to do more to ensure that we have a correct distribution of general practitioners around the country. In my view, we have a pretty significant maldistribution of general practitioners. There are very high concentrations in our capital cities and major regional cities, and a much lower per capita availability of GPs in the regions.

So those were their issues: wider roads and GPs in communities. We then talk about the questions around telecommunications, and you might not be surprised, Mr Deputy Speaker, to learn that their concern was their ability to make a phone call from the paddock. They were less concerned about high-speed broadband, because, on balance, they knew and they could see that our government had a significant plan—a plan that runs at close to $50 billion—to provide NBN services across the nation. In my electorate, 99 per cent of that has been rolled out, but they remained focused on issues around mobile phone connectivity. Of course, we've got the Mobile Black Spot Program. Whilst that is addressing some of the black spots, we need to continue to work through them. In my respectful view, we need to ensure the community has a greater say about which sites are serviced. Communities are such intelligent ecosystems; they know exactly where the next priority is and they have a deep empathy for their neighbours, so they're not going to campaign for a mobile phone in their community if it would be less significant or impactful than a mobile phone tower in another community. Empowering and enfranchising, if you like, the community to provide detailed input in relation to those sites would be, I think, a significant improvement. It's something we need to do.

The other issue that gave me really significant cause for concern was the labour force. On more than one occasion—indeed, on multiple occasions—employers would attend the forums and speak to me about the fact that they were keen to invest, to double down in terms of their business enterprise, but were nervous about doing so not because of the nature of the international markets they were selling into or because of issues in and around the vicissitudes of the weather but, rather, because they were very nervous about access to labour. This is something that gives me really significant cause for concern. In places in my electorate like the Riverland, if it weren't for programs like the Pacific Islander Seasonal Worker Program that this government has established, we simply wouldn't be picking sufficient fruit to make these enterprises viable. Yet, in those same communities, there are people who are long-term unemployed. This tension was an issue that was drawn to my attention across the electorate as we travelled and spoke at these community meetings. It's an issue we, quite frankly, need to resolve. As I said in a news interview today, my parents travelled from Italy. They travelled across continents in the 1960s for a job. In fact, it wasn't even a job; it was the prospect of a job. But we seemingly are having difficulty with jobs that are available in areas like the Riverland and in the Tatiara in my electorate, where they're close to full employment. They're not being filled, particularly where there are other areas in our state with high rates of unemployment.

In any event, I remain one of the luckiest people on earth to have this role of being the voice of the people of Barker in this place. I love remaining connected to my electorate, and the community meetings I convened over the course of the last 12 months have really helped me remain connected. That's what you need to be if you want to do a good job for them here in this place.

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