Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to acknowledge that contribution. I was actually also here when Greg Wilton took his own life, and it was a sad day. It's good that those lessons and the words that were said at that time are remembered.

I want to just have a little chat and share a few thoughts about the Australian Honours and Awards system. The Whitlam government, of course, replaced the British imperial honours system with the Order of Australia back in the 1970s. We had that brief weird foray when Tony Abbott brought back knights and dames, and the country was treated to 'Sir Prince Phillip', which of course was a very sad day for all the comedians in the country, because nothing could ever be funnier! It was, indeed, the death of comedy, some of them said.

Some years ago I met with a terrific organisation, Honour a Woman. They do incredible work promoting gender equality in the Australian honours. That movement began in 2017, after 43 years of men consistently receiving over 70 per cent of Orders of Australia. This year, 2024, saw for the first time 50.5 per cent—so half—of Orders of Australia given to women, which was a terrific milestone and a momentous achievement, and testament to their perseverance. Progress is welcome, but there's more to do. They're back this week campaigning to see women recognised in the higher grades, where they're still underrepresented.

I've also opened a discourse about what I see as the gross underrepresentation of multicultural communities and socioeconomically disadvantaged areas such as my electorate. They're dramatically underrepresented. All MPs get a breakdown by electorate of who received Australia's most prestigious awards each time. There were almost a thousand recipients across Australia in the recent list. My electorate got just one: an Australian fire service medal to Ross Sullivan—a terrific contribution. But one was received—no ACs, no AOs, no AMs, no OAMs. In fact, in the last five lists, residents of Bruce got 10 medals in total, all of them very low grades—one OAM in five lists, less than one-third of the Victorian average.

This is not an isolated example, though. Areas of socioeconomic disadvantage are massively underrepresented among honours recipients, and areas of the highest wealth are massively overrepresented. It raises concerns about elitism and about the process. If you look at Victoria alone, in the 2023 honours list, the electorate of Kooyong—largely a 10 in socioeconomic disadvantage—got 19 awards; Higgins, 24 awards; Goldstein, 16 awards; and areas like mine, 2. The electorate of Lawler got zero. The electorate of Gorton got zero. The most disadvantaged electorates get two-fifths of nothing, if anything, and the wealthiest electorates consistently get a massive share of the awards. That's not to diss those contributions, but there's something wrong when people from multicultural suburbs and, frankly, poorer people doing amazing work in communities are not getting recognised.

See this speech in context