Scott Buchholz (Wright, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

For the Hansard, the Deputy Prime Minister said I was a good assistant minister—clearly not too good because I'm sitting on the backbench now! Regardless, his advocacy in that place was exceptional. The way he moved was at the speed of a thousand gazelles, and the member for Blair was a lone voice in the Labor ranks supporting that. There weren't even costings done. The former Deputy Prime Minister rang the state government and asked them how much it was. He said, 'Here is 50 per cent of the money; let's get on and build this project. This is a project the community is wanting and one the community is advocating for, start work.' I have never seen more state Labor ministers jump over couches and run out the back to try and hide so they did not have to commit their 50 per cent to it. For the record, the member for Blair did and he was steadfast, and I look forward to that project being committed under his stewardship.

The address-in-reply speech is an opportunity to acknowledge those magnificent people who helped put us here for my fifth term. More recently, to put it into perspective, I don't want to get into the trap of naming names but more recently we had a volunteer thank you function. We do it a little bit differently in the bush. We have live bands and Santa Claus comes and the parcels are handed out. We put on a complimentary barbecue and drinks. When we added the amount of membership we had in the electorate of Wright, the LNP membership, to the number of volunteers who lent a hand at some 80 booths across the electorate and then added on a handful of people who helped fund our campaign from the region, because a lot of the money that comes from our campaign comes from interstate, we had an invitation list to that function north of 900 people. It was humbling to have so many people committed to a cause that they believe in—that generations of families have believed in. To be able to serve as their federal member in this place is a privilege that keeps me humbled every day.

Occasionally, I have the opportunity to walk up to the parliament, when the weather is fine. I'll be on the phone to Christine and I'll say to her, 'I never fail to be moved by the significance of this building, Australian Parliament House, the most visited place in Australia.' Particularly when the flags are flying, the sense of patriotism and privilege I feel at being able to work in this place causes the hairs on my forearm to stand up. I say to Christine, 'It's bizarre, because I feel this every day I walk up,' and she says, 'The day you stop feeling that is the day that you should offer your resignation.' I think I have a lot more to contribute to our electorate. I have a lot more to contribute to the LNP in Queensland and a lot more to contribute to the Liberal Party of Australia.

In doing so, I want to share with the House the difficulties my electorate has gone through, during my terms, from weather events. We had extreme drought. I was very proud during the last term to secure many millions of dollars to co-fund our growers when they believed they were being incorrectly charged for water because of their water meters. The capital equipment was corroded, so the process was to estimate their water usage charges. The growers were complaining that water charges were out of control. A group of growers got together and had the great idea to change those water meters to modern-day telematic water meters that could be read via satellite, with the reading being sent back to a central location. We did that, and it has made an incredible difference in charges to those growers.

In my area the largest contributor to GDP is agriculture, and horticulture is the largest component of that. Madam Deputy Speaker, I'll give you a sense as to why some vegetables are so expensive at the moment. It's an accumulation of cost as a result of adverse weather events. I want to run you through what the last decade has looked like for some growers.

In the last 12 years we've had drought and six significant floods. In some, lives have been lost, and we've never found the bodies. Growers all grow their product on the flood plain, and the reason it's called a flood plain is that it floods. A grower will put in a number of acres of a product. Depending on what seed material they use, they outsource to a company and put an order in for seedlings. The seedlings take six weeks to germinate and arrive on a truck, on average, so they've got to plan it out that far in advance. The seedlings arrive and the growers have got that cost, but they don't have any capacity to pay for those seedlings until they sell them. They put the seedlings into the ground and they incur the cost of the labour component. They water and fertilise them, and both things have a cost element. They tend to the paddock. And it just seems that every time they get within two seconds of harvesting, a rain event comes. The paddock is destroyed to the point where laser levelling needs to be done to return soil that's many kilometres down the road back to the paddock. Once that process happens and they rehabilitate the soil, they're back on the phone to the seedling operator saying, 'Can I have another paddock of seedlings?' The operator comes again, and, once you have repeated that process some four or five times, you have the mental stress, the financial hardship and the pain of these communities trying to manage. On top of that are the labour shortages that we've had.

I saw the new Minister for Immigration, Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs in the House earlier on. One of the beauties of when we were in government was the establishment of the Pacific Islanders work scheme. Whilst all and sundry say it's a great scheme, there are some failings with it. We found that those communities in the horticultural sector were limited because, when they flew workers into their community, they were unable to transfer that workforce to anywhere other than to their own farm. That meant that when a farm was in the period of hiatus that I spoke of earlier because their farm had been washed away and the farm down the road needed labour, we had Pacific Islanders that we couldn't outsource to reduce the farmer's cost. That's an area for government to look at, and I will contact the minister to pursue that on behalf of my growers.

I now want to speak about the state of the economy, particularly over the past decade with the strength of our economy when we left government. I gave a speech about this some weeks ago. When we left office, the unemployment rate started with a three, our economy was strong and we were the envy of the OECD nations. That was not in dispute. Female participation in the workforce was as high as it had ever been in history. We remember the footage of the unemployment queues during COVID—they were outside the Centrelink offices, down the road, around the corner. People were sitting on milk crates waiting to be processed. We introduced JobKeeper, which saved many hundreds of thousands of businesses. When I walk through my electorate, I'm still reminded by businesses that without our government those businesses would not have got through COVID.

I thank the architects of our government's policy for preparing those packages. Our country got through COVID on the back of some of those policy positions. Each time we needed more money to support those businesses, we brought it back to the parliament and we put it to a vote. On every occasion those on the other side supported the funding package. I think it's ironic when they stand up and say they've inherited $1 trillion worth of debt. The irony is that when we said we needed to pull it up and start weaning people off JobKeeper, there was an outcry from those on the other side. The comments were that the economy would fall of a cliff if we didn't continue with those payments. You can't say we've left you $1 trillion in debt, but each time we brought the provisions in the House you supported them and wanted them to go further. It insults the intelligence of the Australian public when those on the other side of the House try to have a bet each way.

They talk about $1 trillion worth of debt. I remember when I was in opposition when I was first elected, and the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments were in power. They introduced a thing called the mining tax to raise $270 million. Labor went off and spent their $270 million on the expectation that this was going to be a great windfall. They borrowed the money, put the $270 million on the ticket, and do you remember what the mining tax actually raised? It raised next to nothing, but we still carried the debt. We inherited debt from Labor, which was about half a trillion dollars, and we stacked the other one up to save the economy. We make no apology for saving the nation.

Today in question time we heard a list from the Treasurer about things that are going to be free as a result of Labor's office. That's wonderful for the people who are going to be receiving the free stuff. But, as a Prime Minister once said, 'When it's free, that just means that somebody else is paying for it.' Somebody else is going to be paying for that and it's going to be the Australian public.

I take this opportunity to thank my family for the work that they have done. When I started this journey, I was married. I'm not going to say that the reason for that marriage failure was my place here, but I acknowledge Lynn—she started the journey with me, and I wish her well. My partner now, Christine, is an amazing strength, with her children a part of our life. It is something beautiful to have a support team around you that is dexterous and attends functions. It is noteworthy. I thank Christine so much for her unquestionable support. I shared the story earlier in my speech about walking up to the house, and her commenting that when I no longer feel moved in this place I should give it away.

I think an address-in-reply speech is one that is best delivered for the benefit of our membership and those people who helped us get here. I don't want to mention names, but if I can close off my contribution tonight by thanking our SECs, or state electoral councils, and FDCs in our party world. Each of those has executives. Because of the size of my electorate I have about seven of those. They are the branches that sit under those 900 volunteers that I have in membership and the volunteers who may not be a member of the party. Without them it would be an impossible task, particularly if we had to remunerate members. They stand in the rain and they stand in the sun—they stand there for many hours during the course of the day because they believe in a coalition, they believe in the fundamentals of conservatism, and they believe in the values that we have as a party. They will stand there and give their time to try to prevent us losing government. To everyone who did that, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

I take the opportunity to thank you in advance for the work that you will do at the next election and, hopefully, the election after that. Without you our community is poorer. Know that I will work every day as hard as I can to provide the funding for my electorate—which I have. I will provide the administrative support to our service organisations in assisting with printing. I will provide the moral support and support that we give with our RSLs and supporting organisations. I will support our state members—from the Gold Coast, Ros Bates, from Scenic Rim, Jon Krause, from Lockyer Valley, Jim McDonald, and the others surrounding. They are the LNP members who are fully elected within my boundaries.

Local government representatives who go about their day and give their time freely—I thank them for the relationships I have with each of them. It makes it so much easier when we go into a community and we can tap into that long-term corporate knowledge that exists in those communities. Flanked by state and local government representatives, my job is made so much easier. My job here in Canberra is to represent those communities and those people to ensure that they are as effective as they possibly can be in representing the best interests of Wright. Even if those in my community have not supported me, my task is to give you as much support as I can as well.

I think my chief of staff, Josh Christian, Drew Creighton, Alice Warby—who has been with me since day one, as has Jo Dempsey, my PA. I think that's evidence of the way that we operate in the electorate, to have staff with me for that period. To Rochelle Maloney, who has just finished up, and a series of other staff that have served in our office: I thank you for the many hours over and above what the provisions would have paid you for, and for the exemplary way that you've gone about your business. I'd encourage you in your new chapters of life, after working in our office, and I hope it has prepared you well for the commercial world.

It is an absolute privilege to be able to stand and deliver an address in reply in this parliament.

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