Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, I did. So, again, there's this extraordinary capacity we have that we're not really exploiting yet.

Fashion? Parramatta? What can I say! We really do have an amazing group of designers in Parramatta that, again, don't have a pathway from being a microbusiness to a small business. They don't really have a distribution channel. The most common question I get asked is, 'Where did you get that?' And usually I say, 'At a market.' If you don't know the designer, you won't find her work. This jacket, for example, is made from a blanket from Africa. It is made out of a blanket. I've had some extraordinary—the garage sale is going to be enormous after I retire, by the way. Send me an email if you want to go! It will take me days to remove most of the stuff.

We should be a leader of urban agribiz. There is a bit of research that for every car in a city there are about 13 parking spaces usually vacant, waiting for a car to arrive in a street, undercover, at Woolies—you name it. We know that in 10 to 15 years we will not have that many cars; there will be self-driving vehicles. There will be less. We already know that around the world there are countries trying to figure out what to do with their car spaces. It is the perfect opportunity for urban agribiz. In Parramatta it's a question of whether, when we do start our city agribusinesses—and Western Sydney is doing really good work on this—they're companies that come in from outside or whether it's us, whether it's perilla, tulsi, galangal, curry leaves, methi or sukuma wiki—that's the Kenyans' name for kale. The Kenyans will look at you and say 'You do what with kale?' because they've been eating it for years. They have several varieties. We have African heirloom vegetables. The question is whether, in 10 years time, when agribiz is big in Parramatta, it is ours or it is dumped on us from somewhere else. I'm hoping it's ours. Western Sydney is doing incredibly important work for that.

I will briefly refer to solar panels. Parramatta has one of the lowest uptakes of solar panels in the country because it has strata. And what an opportunity that is. Whether it's business strata or house strata, it doesn't have solar because no-one has worked out how to do it. What an opportunity sitting right there in Western Sydney right now. We are at about 12 per cent take-up, by the way, as opposed to 30 per cent—so it's really, really massive.

I'm going to move on, because I'm running out of time and I'm being a bit naughty! I'm going to ask the question of my community of what the system looks like that creates the networks that allow these opportunities to be exploited. How do you create that community brain, with the centres of shared knowledge, that allows communities to think—information flow, linkages, neurons et cetera—particularly in a world where funding support these days is increasingly based on projects piecemeal? Quite often, we still have governments deciding what the answer is and putting out a grant program. If you all fit in that box, it's fine. But we don't have grant programs that ask the big question: what would it look like if? What can you do? What would you do? We don't have those grant programs, and we don't have the coordinators and the people sitting in rooms with the capacity to think it through and make it happen.

Over the decades we have had people in every community in the country lending their capacity to people in crisis. Capacity is one of those interesting things—at the time you most need it is the time you lose it. When you've got friends, money and security, and you need to change something, you can do it. But if you've just been ill or you've lost a family member or you've been wiped out by grief or loss, your capacity to make a difference disappears. At the time you need it most you don't have it. For years and decades we've had people in our communities loaning their capacity to people who need it to help them change their lives. And that is an extraordinary contribution.

Now we need people to loan their capacity to solve some common good, to solve some social good. As the communities have changed, as our economy has changed, we are not all the same anymore. We don't have the same childcare needs. We have people on split shifts who work 16-hour days because of a split shift that are one hour from home. We have all sorts of people living different lives who work from home and who don't. Their needs are not the same anymore. One-size-fits-all solutions from the government down or grant programs do not necessarily deliver the range of answers that sit within communities like mine right now. We don't have enough parking at the stations; you have to get to the station at seven o'clock in order to get a parking space. The government solution is to spend $60,000 per parking space to take 250 cars and maybe save 15 minutes; I think I could do better with that, by the way! I think my community could do better with that. I think my community could find a range of solutions that don't fix the parking problem but make sure there are fewer cars there. The problem isn't that people can't park; the problem is that too many people are trying. We have so many solutions in us to that. We can do that right now. Get together, guys, and lend your capacity to people who are looking for solutions on a community-wide basis.

Leaders are defined by who they empower, and my one hope is that when I leave this place in my community my legacy is that I have left a level of civility, that we don't play politics in Parramatta very hard at all. It's not wise in a marginal seat anyway, but we essentially don't. State matters—out of respect for the people who voted for that state member, I tend to leave the state issues alone. Not out of respect for the state member, by the way, but out of respect for the people of Parramatta who elected him. So there's a level of civility, and I hope that remains when I leave.

I finally want to finish by thanking three groups. All the people in the electorate who've been in touch, and most have, by the way—every now and then I do a search on who hasn't; yes, it's like a KPI, a key performance indicator on how many still haven't!—thank you. It actually keeps me in touch with the things that matter to you on your ordinary day, and we build our lives in our ordinary day. Thank you also to the branch members and volunteers who have been extraordinary. I thanked them in my first valedictory, and I will be around to thank you all personally. I want to thank the staff in this place. Because of the all the places that I've worked, and I've been a manager of sometimes hundreds of people at a time, this is perhaps one of the best managed and staffed places I have ever encountered—really exceptional, exceptional recruitment, exceptional training and exceptional service. Without fail for me, I have to say that I have never been disappointed or dissatisfied with the service I have received from any level, whether it's the cleaner or the clerks, ever in this place. It's truly amazing, and I congratulate every one of the staff of this place and the people who manage them and do so so well.

That's about all I have to say, but I promised a constituent that I'd end this way, so: 'That'll do, little pig. That'll do.'

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