Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Speaker, and thank your for very warm welcome to this place. It is a great honour to address you today as the new member for Kooyong. Firstly, let me acknowledge that I do so on Ngunnawal and Ngambri land, and that the traditional owners and original custodians of Kooyong are the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation. I pay my respects to them and to all the First Nations people of this wide and beautiful land. I honour their wisdom and their culture. I look forward to working towards them having a voice to this parliament. We have an extraordinary opportunity to join in a makarrata—a coming together after a struggle—and an opportunity to walk on this country with its traditional owners in trust, strength and truth.

To the people of Kooyong: thank you for entrusting me with this great responsibility to be your elected representative. I do so with humility and I am honoured to serve you. The electorate of Kooyong sits in eastern Melbourne. Its 59 square kilometres include Balwyn, Kew, Hawthorn, Camberwell, Deepdene, Canterbury, Surrey Hills, Mont Albert and Glen Iris. The seat is believed to have derived its name from the Wurundjeri name for resting place or camp.

In its 122 years, the federal seat of Kooyong has had only seven previous members, including Sir Robert Menzies, Andrew Peacock and Petro Georgiou. Those men were all true liberals. They recognised that open markets are the best way to boost prosperity. They were committed to protecting individuals' rights. Even before Federation, Alfred Deakin spoke in Hawthorn on the virtues of equality of opportunity and of generosity to the less fortunate in society. My predecessor, Josh Frydenberg, a well-respected member of this place, spoke in his first speech of the honourable legacy of previous members for Kooyong. I hope to honour that legacy by representing the electorate with dedication, integrity and effect.

I am the first woman and the first Independent to represent this electorate. I will not be the last. I've spent much of my life in Kooyong, as a child, as a student and now as a parent and a member of my community. My grandparents were first- or second-generation migrants from Wales, Ireland, Germany and Mauritius. For two of my grandparents, a bus trip to Sydney was the furthest they ever went in their lives. With all respect to my crossbench colleagues, they didn't like Sydney much, so they soon came home.

The Australian story is one of opportunity, of evolution, of adaptation to our circumstances. My paternal grandfather, George Alan Davis, was born in 1900—the year the seat of Kooyong was founded. When he was six months old his family tried to move from Bathurst to Melbourne in a two-horse covered wagon. One horse dropped dead as they tried to get through the Blue Mountains, so they turned around and ended up in Sydney. He had to leave school at 15 to support his family, joining the New South Wales Public Service. He admired Jack Lang—'the Big Fella'—and was moved sideways in the Public Service for agitating for an increase in junior clerks' pay, then 60 pounds a year. At age 21, he doorknocked and electioneered for Joe Cahill, a close friend who later became the Labor Premier of New South Wales. My grandfather rose through the Public Service and by 1940 was head of the federal Directorate of Defence Foodstuffs in the Ministry of Supply, an important job in a time of war. When my grandparents lost their elder son in 1943—drowned in Port Phillip Bay—Ben Chifley, the then Prime Minister and a friend of my grandfather, made the trip to Melbourne to commiserate on that loss. But, when my grandfather wrote his autobiography in 1978, he was very clear on who he believed to be our greatest ever Australian: my predecessor in Kooyong, Robert Gordon Menzies, who he described as a brilliant man, superb in wit and dialogue. In a true democracy, one votes on one's values, for a person, not for a party.

My parents were of the first generation in their families to attend university, to travel and work overseas and to dream of bigger lives. My father worked as a senior business executive, but his great love was his lifelong commitment to the nation's service in the Army Reserve; he rose to a senior rank in that force. My mum raised her family. Then she established a charity in Kenya which has in 18 years sent more than 3,500 primary and secondary school children to school and has assisted hundreds of women in the Kibera slums with literacy and skills training. My parents raised their seven children to work hard and to give back to those less fortunate. They gave us unconditional love and an understanding of the paramount importance of family. They gave me a twin sister, Anny, who has always been my best and most loyal friend. My brothers and sisters and I have all made homes in this country. We've been a very fortunate family but for the loss of a gifted boy, my nephew Hector, in a car accident in 2017. Together, my siblings and I have raised 18 members of the next generation, the generation which will deal with the legacy of the world that we in this place make for them.

I received an excellent education at a convent school. The nuns who ran that school were feminists who cared about social justice. Some volunteered in my campaign in Kooyong in 2022. The founder of the Loreto order of nuns, Mary Ward, said in 1612:

There is no such difference between men and women that women, may they not do great things? And I hope in God that it may be seen in time to come that women will do much.

I will be forever grateful to my parents for an education in which it was made clear that I could and should try to do much in my own life. We have in this place an opportunity to support education and to ensure gender equality in all facets of Australian life, which should never be taken for granted.

I grew up in Hawthorn. My husband, Peter, a generous and loyal man, a wonderful father and a steadfast husband, grew up in Balwyn. We have together forged a family with three kind, compassionate and trusting children: Annabel, Campbell and Patrick. I would not be here without their love and support, for which I will be forever grateful. We have a blended family, like many Australian families, which has its benefits and its challenges. The age of the traditional family unit has passed. In Kooyong, as in the rest of Australia, people who love each other live together in all sorts of units. All are to be celebrated.

We love our home: the wide streets; the parks with their big sky; the Yarra, Melbourne's beautiful upside-down river; and Kooyong's sporting fields, shopping strips, libraries and restaurants. At the start and at the end of every day, more than 35,000 children fill the streets of Kooyong, going back and forth from school. Most of them seem to catch the Glenferrie Road tram. The electorate is fortunate to have its own university, Swinburne, established in 1908, ranked in the top one per cent of universities worldwide and recognised for its research in the space industry, medical technology and the first National Centre for Reconciliation Practice. In these last challenging years during the long months of COVID lockdowns, we have realised more than ever how lucky we are to live in Kooyong.

I studied medicine at Melbourne university before undertaking training in paediatrics and paediatric neurology in Melbourne, Sydney and Boston. For 30 years, I have worked in the Australian public health system. Until recently, I was head of the department of neurology at the Royal Children's Hospital. The Royal Children's Hospital is a much-loved institution in Victoria. To be a neurologist for children and head of a department at that hospital was for me, for a long, long time, the best job I could possibly imagine. My area of specialty was nerve and muscle disorders of childhood, conditions which are generally uncommon and severe, the diagnosis of which is complex and treatment of which was, until recently, rarely curative. I was fortunate to finish my training at a time when new therapies for these disorders were just coming into clinical trials and to make a research career from studies into the causes and treatments of those conditions. During that career I led more than 30 clinical trials in Sydney and in Melbourne and at the end of last year my team gave the first dose of gene therapy ever given in Victoria for a previously fatal neurological condition of infancy: spinal muscular atrophy. That treatment was developed in international clinical trials. The children's hospitals in Melbourne and Sydney played an important role in that research. We helped transform the lives of those children and their families, and the lives of those who are to come.

We have in this country a wonderful health system. Our medical professionals are as good as any in the world. The NDIS has the potential to be a world-leading program for disability support. Our medical research is similarly competitive at a global level, but it has been underfunded and ill supported in recent years. The last few years have been terribly difficult for our doctors, nurses, allied health and other healthcare professionals. We have to ensure that health care in this country remains fit for purpose, accessible and resilient. There are many challenges to that, including not just an ongoing pandemic and an exhausted workforce but economic challenges of staffing and technology, new diagnostics and therapies, rehabilitation and disability support. These are challenges both of equity and of ethics. This 47th Parliament contains a number of doctors. I look forward to working with them for better health for all Australians.

But the greatest challenge of our generation is climate change. We have lived through a wasted decade of ineffective action on climate change. As a doctor, researcher and scientist my job has always been to care for children and protect their futures. I stood for election for the seat of Kooyong because I felt, and the people of Kooyong felt, that our previous government was not doing that. In recent years the effects of the climate emergency have been apparent to us all. Science has shown us that we need increased ambition and urgent action in our rapid transition to a net zero emissions world. We stand on the precipice of a great opportunity: a transformation to a new clean energy economy—an economy which will not need to rely on volatile markets and international security for a secure energy supply, an economy that is moving away from polluting fuels and combusting vehicles to quiet electric vehicles and clean air for our children. Our renewable energy resources are the envy of the world. We can use these natural advantages to bring down the cost of electricity for households; to protect our elderly neighbours from heatwaves; to ensure Australian families don't have to decide between heating and food; to support our small and large businesses; and to help position our country as the natural home of energy-intensive industries in the Asia-Pacific.

Taking effective action on climate change also means restoring and protecting our water supplies, sustaining the nation's food bowls and helping farmers put fresh food on our tables. Our systems are all interconnected. We can't have a resilient agricultural industry if we continue to drag our feet on climate change. Strong government leadership is crucial to manage a just transition, facilitate investment in low-cost clean energy and turbocharge economic activity and job creation across Australia.

In recent years the people of Australia have lost faith in our political system. We have been ashamed by the lack of integrity and transparency that it has shown. We have lost trust in its processes and have become disaffected and disappointed. We can restore confidence in our democracy by establishing a national integrity commission, improving whistleblower protections, restoring freedom of the media and legislating for transparency in political donations and truth in political advertising.

In 1949 Ben Chifley spoke of working for the betterment of humankind. He called it the 'light on the hill'. In his first speech the member for Melbourne expressed hope that that light would now be powered by renewable energy.

In these last years many Australians have perceived a dimming of the light of Australian democracy. Many of us felt that our elected representatives no longer reflected our values and that our government was not listening to our voices.

But then in 2012 a candle was lit in the seat of Indi, where the McGowan sisters, their nieces and their nephews and Helen Haines harnessed the power of a community and demonstrated the possibility of a new political paradigm in this country—independent representatives chosen by their community. Australia has had independent members since Federation, but this was something different. That first candle inspired more, individual but with collective effect, first in Warringah and now in Mackellar, North Sydney, Wentworth, Curtin, Fowler and Goldstein.

When I think of the people of Kooyong, I see that same spirit of community burning brightly. It started with Oliver Yates in 2019. By 2021 a people powered coalition of the willing and the passionate had come together and listened to the voices of our electorate, the Voices of Kooyong. We had a core team. I would not be here were it not for the members of that team: Robert Baillieu, Hayden O'Connor, Tamar Simons, Julia Cutts, Carolyn Ingvarson, Helen Sawczuk, Campbell Cooney, Rosemary Wilmot, Jedediah Clark, Brent Hodgson, Nancy Huang, Qingze Han, Peter Garnick, Jennifer Henry, Liza Miller and Elle McKinna. The support of the Climate 200 crowdfunding platform gave us the ability to kickstart a campaign that faced all the power, influence and money of an entrenched incumbent. Most of all, we had that inimitable, tireless, fearless, brilliant gem of a campaign manager, Ann Capling. If you build it, they will come. We built it and the people came. I would not be here were it not for the more than 2,000 volunteers—the Grahams, the Jennys, the Jos, the Kates, the Robs, the Davids, all the Peters; there were a lot of Peters—who brought energy and excitement, optimism and active hope, who gave us their time and their trust, who chopped wood and carried water and together built something.

I'm a child of the 1980s. During that time Steven Morrissey told us that there is a light that never goes out, but perhaps Albus Dumbledore put it better when he said, 'Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times if one only remembers to turn on the light.'

Kooyong has always been a seat held by conservative politicians. Since it was formed in 1944, the Liberal Party has always held Kooyong. The last time an incumbent lost his seat in Kooyong was 1922, proof positive that not all once-in-a-century events are bad things. But the Kooyong of 2022 is not the Kooyong of 1922. Nineteen per cent of voters in Kooyong in 2022 identified as Chinese Australian. Thirty-three per cent spoke a language other than English at home. Kooyong has more voters aged between 18 and 25 than any other electorate in Victoria. And it has an above-average proportion of women, all of whom are above-average women. In some ways, Kooyong is a quintessential urban seat and a microcosm of the housing affordability crisis in Australia, with young constituents in the area stretching themselves financially to remain close to their parents and the community in which they grew up. Forty-five per cent of the voters in the Hawthorn end of the electorate are renters, most living in a flat or an apartment. A third of them are in acute rental stress.

The people of Kooyong, like all Australians, value fairness, integrity and respect. They sought change not for their individual interests but for decency and democracy and, above all, for the next generation to be safe and prosperous in a hospitable world. To the rural communities of western New South Wales and Queensland, with farms and towns hit by drought: the people of Kooyong voted for you. To the people of Cobargo and Mallacoota and Kangaroo Island, whose homes burnt during that black summer: Kooyong voted for you. To the people of Lismore and Woodburn, whose houses have been inundated again and again this year by flood: Kooyong voted for you. To those who have dedicated their lives to education, to science, to the arts and to the caring professions, who have felt ill supported by a government which gave pandemic job subsidies to casinos but not to universities: Kooyong voted for you. For those women of Australia who are underpaid, undervalued and unsafe in their homes and in their workplaces: Kooyong voted for you. For immigrants subjected to fear and suspicion, and for the First Nations Australians still struggling for recognition: Kooyong voted for you. For those subjected to detention for trying to come to this country, for those who have been punished for speaking truth to power: Kooyong voted for you. I'm honoured to have been elected by such a community.

I'm committed to supporting responsible economic policy with foresight and long-term planning. That policy has to be predicated on effective and immediate action on climate change. I'm committed to integrity and honesty in politics and to supporting safeguards of transparency and fairness. I commit to working for world-standard health, disability and aged care. I commit to working for true equality and safety for women and to fostering respect for Australians of all ancestries regardless of when and how they came here, their gender, their sexuality, their religion or their beliefs.

To the people of Kooyong, know this: my vote will always be independent. It will always be informed by evidence and it will always be guided by you. As the first independent elected for Kooyong, every one of my votes will be a conscience vote. I'm honoured to serve as your representative, and I will never take that responsibility for granted. To the people of Kooyong, the community of Kooyong: when our children ask us what we did for our country, we will be proud to answer that we were the change that we wanted to see, and that in doing so we changed Australian history.

My final words are to the next generation, to the future of our country. My children. The children for whom I provided medical care. Those schoolkids on the Glenferrie Road tram. The young adults of Kooyong wondering how to pay for their tertiary education and their own homes: Yours is the light that has guided me to this place. Keep shining brightly. Your voices are being heard.

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