Kym Richardson (Kingston, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am very disappointed today to be rising to talk about this issue, but, given the importance of good representation to the people of my federal electorate of Kingston, I feel it imperative that I voice my concerns. It certainly did not take long for two recently elected state Labor members to show their true union official and Labor staffer colours. I thought they would both be above it for the benefit of their constituents.

In the South Australian election held in March this year a colleague and friend of mine, Robert Brokenshire, was defeated as the member of parliament representing the state seat of Mawson and was replaced by the Labor candidate Leon Bignell. Despite my disappointment at losing a hardworking member in Robert, I had hoped that a new member would have high standards to serve his community as a ‘first timer’ and I set about forging a good working relationship with him for the benefit of my constituents. Unfortunately, not only is the new member for Mawson not interested in forming a working relationship with me so we can better serve the people of the southern suburbs but he is clearly not interested in representing the people of the southern suburbs and his electorate of Mawson at all.

In the short time he has been in parliament he has appeared in the Adelaide Advertiser boasting about spending his time in parliament drawing pictures of other members rather than listening and working on behalf of his constituents. But that is not the worst of it. In his maiden speech to parliament he joked and laughed about a suggestion made by his young son that they participate in hoon driving during the election campaign. Most recently he was quoted in Adelaide’s Sunday Mail talking about his former boss, South Australian Labor Minister Patrick Conlon, and not only repeating but joking about the fact that his mentor would joke that being a minister was the best job in the world because you got to travel the world going to the best sporting events. The constituents of Mawson tell me that Mr Bignell is known around his electorate as ‘the ghost who walks’ because of his refusal to talk to, deal with or represent his constituents. I wonder if his former boss’s words of wisdom may have been his motivation for entering politics.

Then there was Mr Bignell’s suggestion that oil company ExxonMobil paint in camouflage colours the disused storage tanks at an abandoned oil refinery it owns in my electorate. Leaving aside the hypocrisy of the fact that it was his Labor government that allowed the site to be abandoned in the first place and the fact that his government promised to force the clean-up of the site before breaking that promise, the thing I find most odd is that the refinery is not even in his electorate; it is in the nearby electorate of Bright, currently held by his fiancee, Chloe Fox. I am sure the residents of Mawson were particularly pleased that, while they cannot seem to get any representation from the ‘ghost who walks’, he was willing to represent his fiancee’s constituents. I would have thought he would have been lobbying his own Premier, who promised before the election to extend the railway line further south or provide better transport in his electorate between Willunga and Aldinga.

The discussion of Mr Bignell’s fiancee brings me to another incident I am exceptionally disappointed about. I recently organised a broadband information night for residents in a suburb in my federal electorate of Kingston who have long suffered from being in a broadband black spot. I have been working with Telstra since my election and, believing they may have an alternative for the people of Hallett Cove, I asked Telstra to hold a public meeting with me to discuss the issues with local residents. Over 100 local homeowners attended the evening and the feedback was very positive.

Ms Fox, the member for Bright, clearly annoyed that she had not achieved any results in relation to this issue—if she had even bothered to work on it or asked Telstra herself to hold a similar information session, as Bob Such had done in Aberfoyle Park—decided to stand up in state parliament and deliver a speech under the protection of parliamentary privilege. The speech, amongst other things, accused Telstra of a ‘gross dereliction of duty’ and of corruption. Parliamentary privilege is something introduced with the best of intentions and is integral to the proper workings of the parliament, but to have a member slander and defame an organisation such as Telstra and hide behind parliamentary privilege is nothing short of spineless and pathetic.

If that were not enough, the state Labor member for Bright, Ms Fox, then sent her staff members along to my public information night to hand out flyers covered in blatant lies about the services offered by Telstra. I do not know if Ms Fox does her own homework or relies on union official staffers to write her media releases, but her naivety and lack of knowledge and the false facts provided to local residents is certainly not what I would have expected from a member of parliament. Obviously, though, the true Labor union colours are starting to show.

I have been in politics a short time longer than Ms Fox, but I offer her a word of advice: there is no place in this profession for temper tantrums and hissy fits. Politicians—whether Liberal, Labor or Independent—should represent their constituents to the best of their ability. The residents of Ms Fox’s electorate of Bright deserve much better than a member acting in a young, inexperienced manner just because she did not get invited to the party, as she described it.