Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I've always made it my practice to begin my first speech in every new parliament by giving thanks to the people who have put their trust in me to represent them in this place. Thank you to my constituents in Melbourne's west. Representing you in this place is the greatest honour of my life, and I'll continue to work hard each and every day to try and live up to it, and to build a better future for you and your families.

Thank you, too, to the Labor activists who helped us win the campaign in Gellibrand in this election. I've never taken the support of my constituents for granted, and we campaign hard every election to return a Labor member to this House. Thank you to the Labor activists who gave countless hours to the cause to help re-elect me and the long-awaited Albanese Labor government.

Hundreds of volunteers contributed to our campaign, and I am thankful to each and every one of them. A few special thanks, though. To the indefatigable Alison, thank you for your enormous contribution nearly every day of pre-poll and on polling day and for filling in on all of the roster shifts when someone wasn't available, which in COVID times was not a few times. Bill, thank you for covering the Truganina pre-poll and for making the commute all the way from Altona—past the Altona pre-poll—to get there.

Thank you to Terry, Gary, Matt, Mita, Brenda, Greg, Gavin, Effie, Janet, Trish and Dean for putting in hundreds of hours into the campaign, collectively. Thank you to all of those who joined me in pre-poll: Linelle, Janet, Marcelle, Joan, Eerik, Michael, Catherine, Pritam, William, Paul, Karen, Scott, John, Julie, Clovis, Martine, Louise and Liam—thank you all. Campaigning is hard, and campaigning during Melbourne's winter is even harder still, so thank you for braving the cold and the mud of the Altona Finnish Society, the windswept car parks of Truganina and the bustle of Point Cook town centre.

Thank you to all the polling day booth captains: Kemal, Chris, Caelan, Gary, Matthew, Monica, Jock, Brenda, Cornelius, Trish, Paddy, Ann, Lance, Stan, Bill, Alison, Mat, Effie, Jebesh, Scott, Robin, Nathan, Brett, Kate, Eloise, Cindy, Oliver and Sienna. Thank you to all of the scrutineers, who stayed behind after what was already a long day—though I suspect arriving just in time to hear the election results from Western Australia probably made it worthwhile.

Thank you lastly to my staff: Finn, Sienna, Henry, Steve, Andrew, Walt and Kieran. It's been a hard term. Thank you. I couldn't have survived it without you. Thank you also to all of my staff who've worked with me during nine long years of opposition but weren't working in my office in time to see the promised land. There have been a lot of people, but thank you in particular to the long termers: Raymond, Lara, Heather, Cesar, Diane, Ben and Fiona. You're all true believers who made a big contribution to this government along the way. Finally, thank you to Clara Jordan-Baird. I know how much you would have loved the last couple of months, and I've been missing you particularly as a result. We'll hold your memory close as we begin delivering on the causes that you worked so hard for in your life.

In the Albanese Labor government we aren't wasting a moment. The election came at a critical time in our nation's history, when the challenges facing our nation have been growing more rapidly than ever before. Australia was adrift under the previous government. We saw nine years of economic policy stagnation, nine years of climate change inaction, nine years of neglect bordering on sabotage of the levers of our influence around the world. It was a decade of drift. After nine years those opposite left Australia with $1 trillion in liberal debt and far too little to show for it, and no plan for the future. I am proud to be a member of the Albanese Labor government, that doesn't only have a plan for a better future but hasn't missed a moment in getting to work on it. We've already secured an increase in the minimum wage. We promised it; we delivered it. We've introduced legislation to enshrine our climate change commitments into law, to fix the aged-care crisis and to create universal paid leave for family and domestic violence, a cause that members on this side of the House have been campaigning for for many years.

Unfortunately, the problems left to us by the previous government can't be fixed overnight, but we're getting on with the job. There's been a bit of a dynamic across the government as new ministers settle into their new roles, get behind the desks and look down into the bottom drawer. Again and again, my colleagues are finding that those opposite simply gave up on governing long before the last election. Whether it's visas, share registers or healthcare funding, they were in power but they were checked out, obsessed with their own internal conflicts and culture wars instead of the job that Australians elected them to do.

In my own position, I'm deeply grateful that the Prime Minister has chosen to appoint me as the Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs. After I was sworn in, I looked in my in-tray and saw for myself the mess left behind by the previous government in the Australian Passport Office—an issue that will be familiar to every member in this House. A massive backlog of passport applications exists, many delayed by weeks. Phones are jammed with Australian seeking an update. Queues are wrapped around whole city blocks, full of Australians anxious about their family reunions and long-awaited international holidays being wrecked by the previous government's mismanagement.

Two million Australians allowed their passports to expire during the pandemic without renewing them. Yet the Morrison government made no attempt to smooth the entirely predictable surge in demand for renewal applications that was to come when international travel resumed, or to prepare the resources in the Public Service that would be needed to deal with them when they came.

They weren't doing the basics of government, and Australian travellers were left to pay the price. They paid the price in that terrible anxiety, worrying about family holidays being cancelled when one member of the family is still waiting on a passport application to be approved. And countless hours were wasted in frustration in overlong telephone queues, and in queues running around the block from passport offices.

I'm pleased to have been able to take quick action with the foreign minister to begin addressing this problem. Since the election, we have doubled the number of staff in the Australian Passport Office from roughly 730 to around 1,400. The queues at passport offices have all but vanished, and the call waiting times are down to just a couple of minutes now. We're still dealing with the backlog, but by the end of next month we hope to have returned to normal passport processing times, and to have restored the high-quality passport services Australians appreciate.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the staff from the Australian Passport Office and the wider Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade who have pitched in across the organisation to help fix this mess, including—I noted some commentary on Twitter—the 2022 DFAT graduate class. These public servants, in the passport office in particular, went above and beyond, working very long hours and staying hours after the end of their shift to meet this surging demand amidst enormous public frustration and media scrutiny. Thank you to all of you for going above and beyond in doing your job.

The challenges that we faced in the Australian Passport Office struck me particularly acutely in the foreign affairs portfolio because the ability to travel, to connect and to engage overseas is part of who we are as Australians. The Australian people are deeply connected with the world around us, and this matters to our broader foreign policy. As Minister Wong has underlined: 'Our foreign policy is an expression of our values, our interests and our identity. It starts with who we are.'

Our foreign policy objective in this term of government, as it should be for every government, is to grow Australia's power and influence around the world. As the ferocious travel schedule of our new foreign minister, our defence minister and our Prime Minister has already demonstrated, we intend to do this with new energy and increased resources.

But we're also taking a new approach. One of the ways that we'll maximise our influence is by highlighting the common ground of modern Australia with the world around us. We're a nation where more than half of our population was born overseas or has a parent born overseas. We're a nation of more than 300 ethnic heritages. My electorate in Melbourne's west is representative of this. Two-thirds of my constituents were born overseas or have a parent born overseas. That's true of my family as well, where two-thirds of my immediate family were either born overseas or have a parent born overseas. In fact, it might be 75 per cent. There isn't a country on earth that isn't connected to modern multicultural Australia, and we intend to leverage this to maximise our influence. There's not a country in the world that we can't reach out to and draw on commonality, on a shared interest.

We're also a nation who proudly celebrates our First Nations peoples, the oldest continuing culture in the world. You saw some of that celebration in the very moving condolence motions for Archie Roach that the chamber has just heard today. We'll draw on this heritage to develop an Indigenous foreign policy, weaving First Nations voices and practices into the way that we talk to the world and into the work of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. This new approach is already creating new bonds and common interests around the world, particularly with our Pacific family, from whom we have a lot to learn on this front.

We saw modern Australia this week in this place. I've often commented that Australia is one of the most successful multicultural nations in the world, but we have monocultural institutions of power. This week has seen a slight break—progress made in changing that unacceptable reality. Half of the new members of the Albanese Labor government have either a multicultural heritage or are Indigenous Australians. This parliament welcomes new members and senators with cultural heritages from Laos, India, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Malaysia and Vietnam, along with more Indigenous representatives than ever before. As I've sat and listened to their first speeches, it's made me proud to be Australian, proud to be Labor and proud to represent this country internationally.

As the member for Reid, a new member of Chinese-Laotian heritage, noted in her first speech, the House of Representatives 'is starting to live up to its name,' because 'representatives that embody all of the Australian story make our parliament better and our democracy stronger.' Senator Stewart took this further in her first speech, welcoming this new diversity but emphasising, 'Now we need to move beyond just looking like the country we're here to represent and add some colour to our words and our actions.' Just today, the new member for Higgins further explored this theme, noting that one of the great unaccounted for strengths of this country, one of our great assets, is our social cohesion in the context of this diversity, which is an enormous source of social capital that can be drawn on by governments, by business and by community members as a whole. And I am particularly proud that while these speeches celebrated the emerging modern Australia they didn't deny the difficult path that we have travelled as a nation to get here. The member for Swan, a new MP of Goan Indian heritage by way of Kenya and Kalgoorlie—find me a more Australian than that—told the House in her first speech about her family story of an initial rejection from the Australian Embassy in Kenya when they applied to migrate to this country, first being told, 'You have the right skills but you are the wrong colour,' only to be subsequently welcomed after Gough Whitlam dismantled the White Australia policy.

In their presence here and in their words, these MPs tell the true story of the greatness of our country. A failure to own who we once were opens a space to our adversaries to sow false narratives about who we are today. And those who seek to deny Australia's difficult history on race don't just lack credibility, they also deny our greatest strength as a nation, our greatest strength as a democratic nation, our ability to change and to grow as a people and as a nation. Who would deny in this chamber today that we are a not far greater nation today than we were when Edmund Barton was our first Prime Minister? We've outgrown them. We have transcended them. We have seen the error in our ways with the White Australia policy and we have built something so much better here today. We should tell this story and we should celebrate it. We can all be proud of the journey we have gone on.

Hearing these individual stories by these new members in this parliament, listening and reflecting in important venues like this chamber makes us stronger as a country and more influential overseas. Modern Australia is not an ethno-nationalist state. We need to actively build the bonds that tie us together as Australians, to bring together what Noel Pearson has called the three stories of modern Australia, the three stories that together make the one story of Australia: tens of thousands of years of continuing Indigenous heritage, our Westminster institutions and our thriving multicultural migration. You can't tell the story of Australia without telling those three stories. It is essential for nation building and vital for our international relations. We need to own our history, to celebrate our ability to change and grow, to be proud of our diversity and to use it all as a source of national strength. It is doubly important that we do so as we have some change and growth still to do. On this front, underlined by the task in front of this parliament to get on with the implementation of the Uluru Statement from the Heart and the First Nations Voice to parliament.

Finally, I want to take this opportunity to pay tribute to someone who embodied the best of the Australian spirit. Associate Professor Joseph Epstein AM was a remarkable physician who made a contribution to my community in the western suburbs of Melbourne. Joe passed away on 20 June. Joe started working in Footscray in 1963 as a medical student and went on to spend 50 years as a surgeon at Footscray Hospital where he founded the emergency department—an emergency department frequented by my family and children quite regularly. Joe loved Melbourne's west, the people, the stories and their attitude to life, and Melbourne's west loved Joe, his compassion, his advocacy and his sheer determination to push for better health outcomes for all of us, including our community in Melbourne's west. His loss will be felt not only in our community but right across Australia, where his leadership in emergency management and public health will have an enduring legacy. He was a mentor to generations of doctors and nurses, advised ministers and bureaucrats, was a champion for equality and access to health care for all, particularly for First Australians. A 50-page 2016 tribute book to Joseph described him well, as 'a physician, surgeon, mentor, agent provocateur, philosopher, politician, photographic historian and raconteur', truly a life well lived. I offer my deepest condolences to Joe's family and friends, and to the emergency medical community in Australia, who continue to live out his legacy in my community on a daily basis. In particular I want to acknowledge Joe's wife, Jan, who was a constant source of love and support for him and who made all of his achievements possible. On that note, I have the great honour in preceding the first speech of my good friend the newly elected member for Hawke.

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