Kirsten Livermore (Capricornia, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I wish to bring to the attention of the House the events of Friday, 6 October this year in my home town of Rockhampton. Our local paper’s headline on Monday the 9th read ‘Massive street fight erupts’. The paper went on to say:

Up to 50 people are believed to have been involved in the disturbance on Johns Street on Friday night with Police alleging some were fighting with metal bars, bottles and fence palings.

On the face of it this could be said to be a law and order matter, and indeed the Queensland police are to be congratulated not just for their quick response but for the work they are doing to defuse the situation.

Last year all of Australia watched in horror as the riots in Sydney’s western suburbs were flashed around the nation, and here we are now with the quiet streets of Rockhampton being turned into virtual battlegrounds. The question is whether there are any similarities between the riots in Macquarie Fields and the events in Johns Street, Rockhampton. Sadly, the answer is yes. The riots in Sydney were sparked by the death of a young man, while the events in Rockhampton last week were triggered by the tragic suicide death of a young woman. I ask myself: how many other towns and cities around Australia are seeing these human tragedies played out on their streets?

I believe that we in this place need to consider these frightening disturbances not as law and order issues but for what they really are. They are an expression of the hopelessness felt by some sections of our community. We had a government minister tell the House yesterday that we are living in a glorious age and that we have never had it so good. This may be true for the Howard and Costello families and it may also be true for the families of the CEOs of Telstra, of Qantas or of our major banks; but hidden just under the surface of our society are pockets of overwhelming misery and a sense of frustration and hopelessness that we never thought we would see in the land of the fair go.

We have to ask ourselves: how did we get to this sad point? The Howard government has abandoned a basic maxim of all Australian governments since Federation. Whether you talk about Deakin, Lyons, Chifley or Menzies, all of our previous governments believed that we must set a standard below which we would not allow Australians to live or to work. I have to say that the Howard government is guilty of abandoning this sacred principle, and the result is social alienation and even the violence that we are seeing in some of our towns and cities.

John Howard’s mindset and rhetoric are stuck in the 1950s, but he does not seem to understand that the policies of his government have destroyed much of the fabric of society that existed to help and support people in that earlier time. In Mr Howard’s world of the 1950s, there was a safety net for people of church, community and government. In the world of 2006 that John Howard has created, you are on your own and good luck to you.

I know that, had the families involved in the tragic events in Rockhampton last week been given support in their time of need, there would not have been the battle that we saw in Rockhampton on 6 October. We now hear the completely out of touch Minister for Human Services, Joe Hockey, referring to a class of people out there who need to get off their backsides and go to work. I say to Mr Hockey: as I move around my electorate I cannot find these people who do not want to work. Indeed, Mr Hockey is welcome to come to Rockhampton and I will introduce him to young men in their 20s who have no drivers licence, who have no Medicare card, who are at odds with Centrelink and whose teeth are in such bad shape that they cannot eat an apple or any proper food. Mr Hockey wants these men to work, but the Howard government, thanks to its policies of neglect, has abandoned them and consigned them to life on the margins of our society.

I would say to Mr Hockey and to all members of the government that it is the Howard government that needs to get to work to address the results of its failed policies of the last 10 years and help bring these people back from the margins of society into the mainstream, where they can do what this government requires them to do. In short, the task which is obviously going to be left to the next Labor government is for us once again to set standards below which we will not allow people to live or work. The sooner we have a Labor government which will set about this task, the sooner we will all be safer on our streets.