Russell Broadbent (Monash, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2022-2023 and the associated bills. I cannot stand today without identifying very closely with those who are suffering down the east coast of Australia, through the enormous floods they are facing in their communities and the damage being done not only to their homes and businesses but to their farms, properties, roads and infrastructure. I am speaking to them now: I want you to know that your local members are drawing to the attention of this parliament your plight and your needs. I see the worry in their faces and I know they're working on your behalf today. I identify with you. I know you've got some struggles ahead of you in the clean-up that you will face once this flood threat has ended, and I know it will be quite a way into the future before you'll be out of trouble, but the sun will shine again, the sun will rise again and you will prosper again into the future.

Having said that, I also want to say this place can be a cruel, harsh place. I've said many times it's hard to get into, it's hard to stay here and it's easy to be thrown out. I want to mention the members who were defeated—the former members for Kooyong, Mackellar, Goldstein, Higgins, Hasluck, Curtin, Wentworth and Tangney, all of them good people and good friends of mine. The to-ing and fro-ing, the ups and downs of politics in Australia, throws up some unexpected events. That's what's happened in this case. So I wish every one of those members well and I thank them for their service. It can be difficult. I hope they do what I've done in the past and come back again.

I've listed the elections I've been in: 1984, 1987, 1990, 1993, 1996, 1998, 2004, 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019 and 2022. The last one was probably equally one of the hardest election campaigns I've ever been through. But I do sincerely thank the people who have helped me get through all of those years from 1984 to here, representative of my staff and my family, but particularly in this last election Karlee, Alyce, Stephanie, Alex, Ash, Vanessa and Tanya. My grateful thanks to all of you for carrying me through the last election campaign, when the Russ bus was on the road again. I didn't want to put the Russ bus on the road again, but that was the expectation of the electorate—that the Russ bus would be on the road—and it was. And we were successful, so thank you. You've only known success. Others that have gone before you have known defeat on many occasions—too many occasions. Adding to that of course was Gary Blackwood, Matt, Kaye and Millie McLean. To all of you, thank you for your support during that election campaign. And my family, of course—Bron, Emily, Paul and Evan, who have been there through the 1984 election campaign and every election campaign since. I think the last one exhausted them greatly.

Through those times we've had not only the floods that we are experiencing now; we've had fires, drought and COVID. They've all had huge impacts on my electorate. Times of drought have probably been some of the hardest times we've had. We haven't had one drought; we've had a number of droughts. Fires, of course, have torn my electorate to pieces over those years. We've had a number of serious fires in that time. We've had our own floods at different times in our area. The last one, being COVID, was an absolute destroyer and destructor of businesses because of the way it was handled by our state government. I think we had the longest lockdowns of any state in the world. That destroyed and damaged a lot of businesses—people and their operations. And, of course, all those who refused to be vaccinated lost their jobs. That was a tragedy for a lot of people—such discrimination.

In that process, political parties play a very important role, and that is my team that carries me through, again. I say 'carries me through' because I mean it! These are the people that do the work in the background for you—the Mary Aldreds, the Wayne Farnharms and the Andrew Ronalds, who chaired my electorate committee through all those times. These are the people that raise the money while we're doing our political jobs. They're the people that pull the volunteers together, the people that man the booths, the people that get out and talk on your behalf. Without them, I wouldn't be here. So I thank them all. I'm sure I've missed people that I should have mentioned in that process, but I thank every one of them.

I particularly thank Gary Blackwood, MLA, member for Narracan. I should mention at this point that there has been a tragedy in the electorate of Narracan, where one of the candidates has sadly died. So I just want to tell the people of Narracan that my understanding is that you will still be going to vote on Saturday, but it will be for the upper house only, not the lower house, and a new writ will be issued for an election to be held at a date to be announced. These are the twists and turns of politics. Gary Blackwood, the MLA for Narracan, has just resigned after his tenure as the member for Narracan. Gary has been a very strong and consistent advocate for the industry that he grew up in, the logging industry. He's a fourth-generation logger that went into the parliament to support native logging in our area. It was such an important engine room of economic activity and so important to Victoria. I go all the way back to our regional forest agreements. We came to those agreements, but there are those these days who want to ignore those agreements that took an enormous amount of courage by the Howard government at the time, working with the unions, to come to a place where we could all accept reasonable logging of our native forests, which are a great resource for us. We get some criticism for that today, but I think I will stand the criticism, knowing how important it is that we have our own forest product resources and we're not relying on those resources coming from countries that do not have the oversight and environmental conditions that we have in this country.

Over that time, I've seen lots of members come and go in this House—some long-serving members, some very short serving members. I was a 'oncer' twice in this place; that's very hard to do. The other thing I've found very hard in my time in this place is that I've been offside with every leader that I've had, except this last one. We're going quite well at the moment; we haven't spoken yet! I expect to be very supportive of Mr Dutton in his role and of the other members of the opposition. The opposition have a very important role to play. It's to call governments to account. I hope that we will be a diligent opposition in calling the government to account on every occasion, like with these new IR laws. I'm sorry, but they're going to damage small businesses.

I live small business. I'm at a small business, a microbusiness. I think at my peak I had 23 to 27 employees. It could have been a few more—part-timers. But we didn't have a big HR department. We just had to work through it ourselves and work with our employees—with our employees—because employees in your business are the gold of your business. You can have the right product, you can have the right display—you can have the best window display you've ever done; you can be an artiste—but unless you've got the staff that can carry you, and I say 'carry you' again, because I couldn't be in every shop that I owned, so I had to rely on good people to communicate with their customers to increase the volume of our sales.

That's how we did it—with really good people, working their flexible hours. They were nearly all women, except for a few over the years. But we were entirely flexible. We always paid over the award. And, if someone wanted to start work after the children went to school and leave the workplace before they got home, we accommodated that because they were employees that were worth having. When you have employees that are worth having, you cherish those employees. I think that's what's missing in this whole debate—how important the employees are. To pay good wages, you've got to have a good business. You've got to have a good turnover. You've got to make things happen. You've got to grow all the time. And, to increase your number of employees, you've got to grow your business. That's the only way it works. In this country, small and medium-sized businesses are the driver of the economy. Everybody else can talk about what they do, but, in this country, small businesses are crucial to our health and wellbeing as a nation.

Having said that, today is an important time in the parliament because these are the last two weeks of the year that the parliament is sitting. There are a number of issues across the nation that people are considering. I've always said to my own party, and I'll say it again: no matter what political pressure is placed on you, if it's bad legislation you don't vote for it. Even if you're going to suffer political consequences from the two-second grab they're going to attack you with, if you think about the long-term consequences of legislation in this place and you see that it's bad legislation, you should walk away from that bad legislation or at least voice your opinion so the public knows where you stand on any given legislation—even integrity legislation. What? You can't criticise it, you can't touch it, because it's about integrity? Well, this place and the things we do in everyday life are far more complicated, like getting gender pay quality in the workplace. It's not just about saying, 'We'll just make it happen,' because you can't just make it happen, because every family, every woman and every operation is different. People make choices. Women make choices. One of our members mentioned in the other chamber today that she decided to give up her legal practice to look after her twin boys and raise them, and that's what she did. That was her choice.

But it does have an effect, a rather large effect, on women as they go through the years. In Australia, one of the largest cohorts of disadvantage is women over 55 becoming homeless, and it's growing. In a nation as wealthy as we are, we have a responsibility as parliamentarians to change that around and have the graph going the other way. So we've got to find a way to make sure that that cohort, because of what's happened in their lives, because of their access to superannuation, because there may have been changes in their lives, because they don't have the access to work—there is age discrimination in this country. You try and get a job when you're over 55 or when you're 60 or 65. You don't even get on the list. And people say, 'Oh, no, we don't discriminate on age.' Of course they do. I've been there. It's hard to get a job when you're in that age bracket and you're not up to pension age.

So we have to find new, innovative ways to make sure that that cohort that is dear to us, women over 55—they're part of the generation that has grown this country. They've had the children. They've made things happen. They've volunteered. They've taken their kids to sport. They've done all of those things, and their children are up and running, but then they find themselves, quite often through no fault of their own, in difficult circumstances. So we've got to find new and innovative ways to address that issue. That's one of my passions, and it has been all the way through.

I'd love to talk about disability and the NDIS, but I'm not going to have time today. This nation, through its parliamentary representatives, has to grapple with the issues that are important to everyday Australians who are out there in families today, because they're important to us. There's nothing wrong with talking about a nuclear family. There's nothing wrong with talking about mum and dad and the kids. And, if I'm out of order, I'll take the stand: I'm out of order, because I don't care how you describe your family. Whether you're a single mum bringing up a child or you're in a large family with 14 children, we need to focus on those family groups, because they are the basis of our economy. They hold it together.

These are some of the cohesive parts of the nation that I've seen since 1984, which I mentioned before, and they have not had the prominence, I believe, since the early Howard years, that they should have had. Thank you.

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