Bert Van Manen (Forde, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Congratulations to the member for Hawke for his maiden speech.

As we all stand in this place and look forward to the 47th Parliament, I want to thank the people of Forde for giving me the privilege and honour of once again representing them in federal parliament. I look back to when I was first elected, in 2010. It seems so long ago that I was first elected, and to now stand in this place at the start of my fifth term is a real privilege and honour. Many of my colleagues now haven't experienced life on this side of the House, but I find myself returning to the opposition benches, where I served in my first term. Sadly, many of my colleagues from the last parliament won't be returning to this place. I take this opportunity to acknowledge their outstanding contribution to the Liberal-National coalition and to their country.

As most people know, to be successful in a federal election campaign—or any election campaign, for that matter—requires an awful lot of support, help and assistance from a great variety of people. I want to take this opportunity to thank those people. I want to thank my colleagues—former Prime Minister Morrison, former minister Fletcher; former minister Stuart Robert, the member for Fadden; and former minister Colbeck—who came to my electorate during the campaign. And how could I ever forget Senator Cash's visit? In the middle of prepoll, at one of our many prepoll booths, we ended up buying her a set of gumboots because her footwear at that point was not appropriate for the conditions at prepoll! I'd like to thank my FDC executive and all the FDC members for their hard work.

The team in my office, led so ably by Jessica Howard, my chief of staff, include Alanah, Katie, Vanessa, Peter, Zane, Lynette, Bonnie, Nicholas, Roz and Vicki, a tremendous team that did an awful lot of work well over and above the call of duty. To all of the supporters, donors, volunteers who, for two weeks at prepoll, stood in the rain and mud and who helped so ably on polling day, also in the rain, wind and mud, who have supported me over many years over my five campaigns, thank you very much.

In particular, I want to take the opportunity to thank my family. After five successful election campaigns, my loving wife, Judi, and my two sons have been through a lot. With hand on heart I can admit that I could not do it without them, and they have my deep and heartfelt thanks. The six-week campaign for the 2022 election was one of the hardest I have been involved in, and the task was not made any easier by the seemingly constant cold and wet weather. As I said before, to all of the volunteers and those who stood in the mud to hand out how-to-vote cards at prepoll and at polling booths across the electorate, thank you so very much.

But as I look back, I am proud of what we as a government achieved over the last nine years. While it is disappointing to be on this side of the chamber, I look back with pride on what we have been delivering for our local community. At the end of the day, what is most important is that we are delivering results for our local community to make lives of everybody in our electorates better each and every day.

I represent a diverse area and one of the fastest-growing areas in Australia, the northern Gold Coast, which I share with the member for Fadden in the City of Logan, with the member for Rankin, the Treasurer, and also with the member for Wright, Deputy Speaker Buchholz. If I look at the growth in those communities since I first got elected in 2010, it is nothing short of extraordinary. Tens of thousands of people have moved into those communities over the last 12 years, and we see that now each and every day with the growth in the requirements of infrastructure right across the electorate. That is why I am pleased that I can stand here and say that, over the past nine years, the coalition government has delivered its share of the funding and has made those commitments for the upgrade of the M1 to the tune of $1.25 billion, from the Gateway to the Logan motorway. These projects are now well under way.

Deputy Speaker Buchholz has been an advocate for the $16 million upgrade to the Mount Lindesay Highway at North Mclean and now the $75 million duplication of the Mount Lindesay Highway from Stoney Camp Road to Chambers Flat Road. Deputy Speaker Buchholz well knows how important that piece of road is as a lifeline not only to the western part of the City of Logan but also to the Scenic Rim, and equally how important the M1 is as a lifeline and a major artery between Brisbane and the Gold Coast, providing access for those rapidly growing communities. Equally I am proud of the fact that as a coalition government we announced funding for the upgrade between Kuraby and Beenleigh to allow for fast rail, which will also include also upgrades to stations in my electorate at Loganlea, Bethania, Beenleigh and Eden's Landing. All of this will continue to serve these rapidly growing communities and provide alternative transport solutions to hopping in the car and going on the M1, particularly.

But it's not only these big infrastructure projects; it's also the smaller projects across the electorate, like providing funding for upgraded services both through the headspace at Meadowbrook and, importantly, a new headspace service in Upper Coomera, allied with the new Medicare funded MRI service in Upper Coomera, run by Qscan.

As I look at these achievements, I look back with pride at what we achieved over the last nine years in government. I disagree with those opposite—which I'm sure they're not surprised by—and I'm proud of the fact that, despite the level of debt we now have as a nation, over the past two years, through the largest pandemic this country has faced in 100 years, through the measures the former government took, we kept people in jobs, we kept small businesses' doors open and we kept our economy ticking over, to the extent that now we have one of the greatest economic outcomes coming out of COVID—although we're still dealing with COVID to this day—of any nation on the planet. I think we should be extraordinarily proud of that. There is nothing more important, from my perspective, than keeping a roof over somebody's head, helping them keep their business open and helping them keep their employees engaged and working in that business. There is nothing better than somebody having a job to go to each and every day.

I know that there are businesses—because I've met and spoken with them in my electorate—who haven't been successful in surviving the last 2½ years, and that's incredibly disappointing, because that impacts not only those business owners but their families and their friends and gives them a mental strain about what they're going to do for the future. But, by and large, the measures that the former government—the government that I was part of for the last nine years—put in place tremendous support to our economy at a very, very difficult time.

Another important aspect of our communities is our sporting clubs and community organisations. I have, like many of us in this place, many of those types of organisations across the community of Forde. I'm pleased to say that, again, the former government was successful in providing funding to those organisations to upgrade their facilities. As Deputy Speaker Buchholz would know—because it is the same with many of the sporting facilities in his part of the world—many of the sporting facilities in the city of Logan are well past their use by date and require upgrades. I'm pleased we were able to provide funding to Logan Lightning Football Club for the upgrade of Chris Green Park. It is a football club that I played for for a number of years. In its former life, as Beenleigh soccer club, it was where I started my senior footballing career. I played over 100 games for the club before I went on to play at a higher level. They have been successful this year in reaching the round of 32 for the Australia Cup, which is our version of the FA Cup. It's the first time in their history they've succeeded in that. That $600,000 investment built on another $350,000 investment a couple of years ago for their Cornubia Park facility.

I look at a club like Mustang Brothers Rugby League Football Club, a small club at Chambers Flat who do extraordinary work in their local community. We were successful in providing $150,000 in funding for them to upgrade their lights and upgrade their fields in conjunction with Logan City Council and also some state government funds. We invested $92,000 in refurbishing the tennis courts at Beenleigh Tennis Centre. The result of that is that now Tennis Queensland has put a proposal together to turn the Beenleigh Tennis Centre into a regional tennis centre. And, had we been successful at the last election, there was a $5 million commitment from us to bring that to fruition. These commitments have had a significant and positive impact on many of the residents and sporting communities across the electorate. I'll continue to advocate for those key projects across our community in this term of parliament.

In particular, I'd like to bring to the attention of the House the work that needs to be done on Exit 38 at Yatala. This is an exit that services one of the largest employment centres on the northern Gold Coast. That is still rapidly growing. Some mornings we will have a tailback of traffic from that exit of more than a kilometre on the M1 in an 110 kilometre an hour zone. I'm pleased to say that during the election campaign we made a commitment, if we got re-elected, of $55 million towards upgrading that exit, as we are doing already with Exit 41; the smaller project on Exit 45; and Exit 49, which will commence later this year. That builds on the successful upgrade that we achieved several years ago to Exit 54 at Upper Coomera.

I call on the government—and I've already written to the Prime Minister in this context—to match that $55 million of funding that we committed to get this project off the ground. It is critical to the safety of motorists on the M1, it is critical to allowing people to get to work safely and get home safely, and it is critical to the freight task that is now the major component of the Yatala Enterprise Area, which straddles both sides of the M1 on the northern Gold Coast. It is also important because—I had a meeting with a company earlier this week who are building a new factory out at Yatala, relocating from Hemmant in Brisbane. I'm also aware that Visy is talking about building a new glass bottling plant. So the call on this infrastructure is not going to get any less; it's only going to get greater, and that's before we start talking about the residential development that's going on on the northern Gold Coast.

In addition to that, there is still plenty of capacity for upgrades to our sporting and community facilities. As I've touched on already, Tennis Queensland has proposed a regional tennis hub in Beenleigh. But we also have upgrades to facilities like Beenleigh's Hammel Park, the home of our local netball clubs—well, the home of one of our local netball clubs—baseball and rugby league. We look at projects such as the upgrade to the clubhouse for a Ormeau FC, a rapidly growing small football club in the northern part of the Gold Coast. These are projects—and there are many others—that I will continue to fight for, for my community, over this coming term of government.

As we go into this new term of government, I hear much said and made about the issue of a changing climate. Now, I have no issue with the argument that our climate is changing and that we need to take responsibility for looking after our environment, to leave a better environment for future generations of this country. I will say, however, that I disagree with some of the methods of going about it and some of the commentary that's been made. I want to take issue with some of the commentary about the flooding that has occurred in my patch over the last little while. Can I say that worse floods have occurred in my area historically. One that I remember particularly well was in 1974, given how close to getting flooded our house was at that time. But what I find immensely frustrating and immensely disappointing is that, despite the relatively recent nature of that flood, within the living memory of many people in my community in the city of Logan, we have seen successive councils continue to allow houses to be built on flood plains.

If we are serious about dealing with the impacts of a change in climate in a practical sense, we have to seriously look at our planning schemes and our approval processes to ensure that we don't continue to build houses in the path of potential floodwaters. The same happened in Townsville with the floods in 2017. Areas that were flooded when I lived in Townsville in 1998 have had brand new housing estates built on them. It is the height of irresponsibility for us to be building properties in those areas.

The second part of that is to ensure that our infrastructure is properly designed to ensure we minimise the impact of flooding events to upstream communities. Part of that is the design of our bridges. In many instances, we build our bridges from riverbank to riverbank. We don't build them across the flood plain, and the consequence of that is that, in a flood, they act as a dam and push water back upstream. You end up getting flooding further upstream in houses that maybe didn't flood in the past when you had different infrastructure.

They are simple, practical measures that we can start to undertake now to reduce the impact of flood events. Will we reduce it entirely? No, we won't, but it is a good and positive start. I'm pleased to say that the previous government started to look at this stuff.

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