Joel Fitzgibbon (Hunter, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture and Resources) Share this | Hansard source

After 20 years at ClubsNSW, including ten years as the organisation's CEO, Anthony Ball is leaving ClubsNSW. Our registered clubs play a vital role in our communities, particularly in rural and regional Australia, where they provide a venue for so many organisations—charitable, sporting, service clubs, just to name a few. Too often we're lacking the infrastructure that our city cousins enjoy, and our clubs fill that void. During Anthony Ball's tenure, our clubs have gone from strength to strength. As a consequence, so too have the services, facilities, infrastructure and sponsorship they provide to our local communities. It's rare to go to a children's sporting event in my electorate without seeing sponsorship provided by one of our local clubs or one of our local hotels.

Anthony Ball will be missed in this role. His supervision of the growth of the clubs is not just about their profitability and longevity but also about the role he has played in addressing a deep seated community concern about poker machines and problem gambling. On that front, he has been an innovative leader, introducing codes of conduct into our clubs—for example, introducing ClubSAFE to our registered organisations. These initiatives, with others, have made a substantial and proactive contribution to community concerns about those issues. Most recently our clubs played a role in regional Australia by providing evacuation centres for bushfire affected local communities. Local club boards, CEOs and staff can be very, very proud of that.

So we thank Anthony Ball for his legacy, not only for the way in which he has been able to further strengthen the registered clubs movement but also for the way he has shown leadership on addressing community concern about problem gambling and the way in which he has extended the reach of clubs into our local communities, providing so much infrastructure and so many local services. We wish him well for the future, as we do Josh Landis. Josh Landis has been at ClubsNSW as Executive Manager Public Affairs for some time, and he is well known around this place. I know he will do an outstanding job replacing Anthony Ball, and we wish him the very, very best in those endeavours.

Each year, the New South Wales branch of the Australian Labor Party holds what we call Country Conference. It's an opportunity for rural and regional delegates to talk about the things that are important to rural and regional Australia, including their own local communities. It's considered a great thing to host the Country Conference because delegates come to town and spend lots of money. They do like to eat and they do like to drink—I know that is well noted—and, of course, they need somewhere to stay and to sleep. So it's a great boost to the local economy. I've been in this place for 24 years. Happy anniversary to me and happy anniversary to the member for Grayndler, who also is celebrating 24 years in this place today! Happy birthday to the member for Gorton and the member for Grayndler and, I think, the member for Rankin, who are all celebrating birthdays today! March 2 is an auspicious day in our annual calendar of events here in Canberra. Sadly, the member for Grayndler, the Leader of the Opposition, and I are the only two remaining members of the class of '96, but it is still a class of very high quality, obviously. I'm proud to boast that over the period of time, the Hunter electorate has hosted the Country Conference on three occasions: once in Cessnock, once in Muswellbrook and, more recently, over the course of the weekend just past, in Singleton. I attended my first Country Conference in Singleton in 1987, so Singleton has hosted the event on two occasions. It has been a great honour for me to be able to deliver Country Conference to Singleton on a couple of occasions.

Welcoming the delegates to Singleton on Saturday was the deputy mayor—and, I should disclose, member of the Labor Party—Tony Jarrett. Tony is a highly regarded and respected member of the community—he's a former high-school principal— and took the opportunity to boast of the town's many attributes, and there are many, and to speak about its challenges, as you'd expect him to do. He spoke very, very robustly about the importance of the coal-mining industry. I don't think it would be an exaggeration for me to say that there is not a person in Singleton who doesn't have their fortunes tied in some way to the coal-mining industry. Whether they're at the coal face or are driving the trucks or the transport in between, even right down to the local coffee shops, which thrive on the activity generated by the mining sector, and those who work in the Mount Thorley industrial estate with companies devoted totally to servicing the mining organisations, they are all in some way linked to the mining industry, and Deputy Mayor Tony Jarrett highlighted that for the conference. He also took the opportunity to lament the fact that, while we send so much bounty to both Sydney and Canberra in the form of taxation and other royalty revenues, we feel, I think quite justifiably, that we don't get sufficient return on that investment. There are plenty of examples in Singleton. We've been begging for a bypass of the town for far too long now. I thought we were getting close when, in the lead-up to the last election, the now Leader of the Opposition announced that a future Labor government would make a substantial contribution to that project to get it up and running. We grew tired of waiting for the New South Wales government to get the project to the point where you'd expect Commonwealth monies to flow, so we took the initiative, went on the front foot and I suppose attempted to embarrass the New South Wales government into accelerating the design of the project by saying we would put money up front if we won the election to try to drive that project forward.

Alas, we lost the election. We accept that. But of course that project has gone very, very quiet. We saw a report from Infrastructure Australia only last week. We welcomed the fact that the project was still in the books, but it is one amongst many other projects, and one can't hold any confidence of seeing anything happen on the Singleton bypass given the timeline that the Infrastructure Australia report sets out in that policy document. Similarly, in Sydney we've seen no activity from the New South Wales government since the election. There is no indication that the government there is taking the project more seriously or trying to accelerate the project. This piece of infrastructure is desperately needed in the community.

When Labor was in government, over the six-year period we funded the $1.7 billion Hunter Expressway, delivering the coalmining traffic to Singleton from the south more quickly and in a safer and more orderly way, making sure those coalminers and other workers not only get to work on time but get home safely. We funded the $1.2 billion third rail track, which allowed our coal to get to port more efficiently, therefore lifting productivity and our competitiveness on international markets. There were many others. I don't have time to go through in this speech, but since this conservative government in Canberra was elected in 2013, the funds are pretty much dried up. You can imagine how frustrated my constituents were to see so many stories in recent weeks about the way this government in Canberra has been spending money on infrastructure projects, projects like the swimming pool in North Sydney, the recipient of a regional sporting grant of $10 million, when we have so many projects, including the Cessnock public swimming pool in my home town. We've been chasing money for that for a long time. It's an iconic facility with great heritage value, pristine water quality, a central location right in the CBD; but of course it needs an upgrade. It is historical, which indicates it's old and needs some money. The Labor Party promised some money for the Cessnock swimming pool in the lead-up to the election but alas, we lost the election and we've been unable to secure any money out of the Morrison government. You can imagine how my residents in Cessnock felt, particularly the pool users, who are many given the number of children who compete in that pool. You imagine their anger when they saw that regional sports money was being used to fund the poor old people in North Sydney and the magnificent pool that sits just under the Sydney Harbour Bridge. These are the points that Deputy Mayor Tony Jarrett was making at Country Conference on Saturday. This government has ignored rural and regional Australia. It continues to ignore rural and regional Australia. It talks a lot about rural and regional Australia, but does not act on behalf of rural and regional Australia.

That takes me to the bushfires. It's almost a consensus in this place now. I don't think anyone sitting on the other side would try to claim that the Prime Minister's response to the bushfires was sufficiently quick. Certainly it wasn't sufficiently robust. That was the initial response, but it's also true that the ongoing response has been inadequate. I heard the Leader of the Opposition—and the member for Gorton was with him—at a press conference earlier today, talking about all those people they and others have visited, small businesses in particular, that haven't been able to get the assistance they need because, they weren't directly affected by the bushfires. The fire didn't go through their business house, vineyard or cropping territory, but of course their business has collapsed because of the impact the bushfires have had on local communities.

I've used in this place before my own example in the beautiful Hunter wine country, where vignerons have lost their vintage—100 per cent in some cases. Now, if they lost it because of the flames, they would be eligible for assistance. Because they've lost it due to the smoke from the same flames, they aren't able to secure assistance. I understand why a program might be developed and these things not realised until after the program is developed and put into place, but we've been telling this government for many weeks now about the problems and the short-comings of these various schemes, and I don't understand why the government hasn't been able to or been prepared to act.

In closing, I said it last week, but I'm going to say it again: I'm so disappointed by the way people continue to try to politically weaponise the issue of our changing climate. They are on the left, where they see political opportunity—the Greens and other activists—to suggest that we are doing nowhere near enough. They are on the right, with the National Party, One Nation and others, who claim that you can't take meaningful action on climate change without destroying our local economy and jobs, particularly in rural and regional Australia like those in the coalmining industry. Both of these propositions are patently false. I've been dealing with these climate wars in this place for much more than a decade now. It's time they came to an end, it's time that we found a political settlement on this issue and it's time that people on both the left and the right got out of the way and let the sensible people not just in this place but across our community, industry and elsewhere progress sensible policy that will make a real difference in terms of our natural environment and will also protect local—including regional—jobs. We can do this.

We're now being led by a whole range of companies—Santos, BHP, BP, Qantas, the Business Council of Australia, Meat and Livestock Australia and the National Farmers Federation—who all say we can meet net zero emissions by 2050 without harm to the economy. Indeed, we can reach that target while bolstering our economy. The lunatics should get out of the way and let us get on with the job.

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