Andrew Broad (Mallee, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is with a great sense of honour that I now present to this House of Representatives and to the Australian people my maiden speech. I will endeavour at all times to speak common sense and to say words that build up and not tear down. On the very first day I took a seat in the 44th Parliament I wrote a note to myself. It read: 'We must lift our eyes in this place, for the people and the children of Australia are watching.'

On 7 October 1788, the HMAS Sirius left the Port Jackson colony with the hopes and prayers of a fledgling nation. White Australia was just 249 days old. Tragically, many Australian Aboriginal tribes were dying from European diseases, the crops had failed and the new colony was experiencing its first Australian style drought. The Sirius travelled down to the 40th parallel with the roaring forties winds in her sails. She circumnavigated the globe, stopping at Cape Town to get food and supplies for the journey, taking seven months. If that ship had sunk, Australia as we know it would have starved to death. Two hundred and twenty-five years later, our abundance is truly amazing. Australia has a population of over 21 million people, yet we produce and export enough food for 75 million people. We have one of the highest standards of living in the world and some of the longest life expectancy rates. This nation that we call Australia has prospered.

I stand here today proud to represent the people who live in the federal seat of Mallee. I am here because the people who live in the Wimmera, the Mallee and the Mildura regions want a strong voice. The major political parties ran a tough campaign against me, but it was the people of Mallee who put me here and it is them I will serve. I am a member of the Nationals because I am a patriot. The Nationals are a true democratic party: the only people who choose a candidate are the people who live in the electorate. If you can indulge me a little bit, my other parliamentary colleagues. In the short time I have been in this place I have become prouder of our team. They have got an immense intellect, a great deal of integrity and will endeavour to stand up for good policy.

The electorate of Mallee is 32 per cent of the land mass of Victoria. It has the Grampians in the south and the mighty Murray River in the north. It encompasses the Wimmera, the Mallee and the Mildura regions. All the food you could ever want and everything for your daily needs is grown in Mallee. Cereal, milk, toast, orange juice for breakfast—grown in Mallee. Fresh table grapes, almonds for morning tea—grown in Mallee. Mallee lamb, vegetables with a glass of red wine for lunch—grown in Mallee. If you are lucky, you might catch a murray cod—technically on the New South Wales border—and have some salad and white wine for dinner also grown in Mallee. In fact, the only food that is not grown in Mallee—and I have found is essential to this parliament—is coffee!

The federal seat of Mallee is a regional electorate. We are proud of our agriculture. We are proud of our small business, proud of our tourism, proud of our retail, our mining and our service industries. The people who live in the seat of Mallee are tolerant, fair minded Australians. They will tolerate floods; they will tolerate droughts; but they will not tolerate bulldust. And frankly they have heard enough at times coming out of this place. I, like them, do not think it is too much to ask for decent roads and telecommunications. It is not too much to ask for better health and educational opportunities for our kids. It is not too much to ask for a government that has a vision outside the capital cities and the coast. The people who live in my electorate do more for the Australian economy than most. Our wealth is built on their efforts, and a little of that wealth making its way back as infrastructure and services is fair. I want to remind other members of the parliament that, when our regions are strong, our whole country is strong.

I am here today because even my kelpie sheepdog, Duke, was getting sick of me complaining about the direction of our country. I had worked, after finishing high school, in shearing sheds and on farms and had saved some money towards a deposit for a farm. At the age of 22 I bought my first farm and, to my horror, every cent that I had saved was paid to the government as stamp duty. The government had taken four years of my labour as stamp duty, and I didn't even get to see the stamp!

I hear commentators talk about food security. The first imperative of food security is that we must get young people involved in agriculture. The second is that the person who grows the food must make a fair living doing so. I continued to farm and, at 26, after purchasing some more farm land, was hit by the drought of 2002. No income. My wife's total earnings would not even cover the interest payments. I have got to say I had some sleepless nights. I want to acknowledge my wife, who is in the gallery here today. My beautiful wife. She can give us a wave. I did pretty well for myself, didn't I? But she stuck through me through this unfolding journey.

I was encouraged to apply for drought support and I still remember I was working in a shearing shed the day I received a letter telling me I was not eligible for assistance, because I was considered unviable. What do you do? I got the old grinder spanner and an old rusty nail and I nailed that letter to the shearing shed and swore, 'I'll show you who is unviable.' I have now run a successful business for 15 years through drought, flood, hail, frost—and I am viable. Australia can throw a lot at you, but it has an amazing way of getting under your skin, and I have grown a deep love for this tough, great country. This is a great country.

I can pinch a line from the Prime Minister for a moment. This great country deserves a great government, and the first role of a great government is the security of its people. Threats to security come quickly and often unexpectedly, and history is there for us to learn from. Please take a note of these dates. On 7 December 1941, Japan entered the Second World War by bombing the American navy fleet in Pearl Harbor. On 15 February 1942, Singapore fell with the capture of 80,000 British and Australian troops—a tragic day for Australia. On 19 February 1942, Darwin was bombed for the first time. Do you know: from the entry of Japan in the Second World War to the bombing of Darwin and the defence of Australia was a period of only 10 weeks. The first role of a government is the security of its people, and a standing defence system, whilst expensive, is essential.

The second role of a great government is to set the economic framework for the country. Governments do not create wealth; governments take wealth and distribute it. We must always remember that it is the pursuits and endeavours of individual Australians that build the prosperity that Australia enjoys. If there is no incentive for people to work harder or take risks then they will not. Our economic settings must reward hard work and enterprise. If a person can work, they should work. Providing incentives to catch the first rung of the employment ladder is important in a developed economy. The best thing we can do is provide a person with an opportunity, but after that it is a matter of personal responsibility.

Our mining resources need to assist and diversify the Australian economy. The mineral resources belong to the Commonwealth—that is, the wealth of the common man. I believe preferential rather than world pricing for gas and other energy sources needs to be looked at so Australians can compete with other countries in producing goods, for we will never be competitive on the wage market alone.

I fear the costs of constructing major infrastructure are too high. Australians once built the railroads, roads, ports and bridges that we needed to develop the country. If we could build them once we can build them again. These are the pathways that were used to shift our product to the world and to help make our economy strong. Australia needs a proactive drought policy. If there is one thing I have learnt about Australia it is that, when it is dry, it will be wet again and, as sure as it is wet, it will be dry. Even after many seasonal cycles, we have still not learnt to fully prepare for the seasons ahead in this country.

Australian governments have paid lip service to Northern Australia, which absolutely should be developed, yet have progressively shut down the Murray-Darling Basin. Our governments developed a Murray-Darling Basin Plan but did not have the political stomach to build a dam or put engineering works in the Lower Lakes. The price of ownership of irrigation water became expensive, it robbed irrigators of confidence and then commentators called those irrigators willing sellers, bought their water and took it out of production. What I observed in the Murray-Darling Basin Plan meetings across the region were articulate bureaucrats who knew little about water management clash with farmers who, whilst not having fancy words, knew more about the environment and effective water management than most. But eventually those irrigators went home and kept farming because they had businesses to run, and this is what governments call consultation.

We have a standard of living that I fear is now based on the flogging off of natural resources and the purchasing of goods produced with cheap wages from the Asia-Pacific region. The biggest export out of the Port of Melbourne is empty shipping containers. I know we can do better. As an Australian Nuffield scholar, I have been blessed to study policy and trade in every continent in the world. I have met with policymakers and leaders in many places, such as Europe, South Africa, the United States of America, the Russian Federation, China, Indonesia, Argentina and Brazil, just to name a few. I thank Nuffield for the many opportunities I have had to travel and experience global trade. I do not hold to the idea that the free market is always right. When it comes to trade, there is no level playing field. I believe in pragmatic policies that suit Australia's national interest. This is one of the reasons I admire Australia's 14th Prime Minister, John Joseph Curtin, the former member for Freemantle. As Prime Minister he broke convention and recalled Australia's troops from North Africa because it was in Australia's national interest. John Curtin put Australia's national interest first, and we as members of parliament but walk in the shadow of giants such as he.

Pat Conroy (Charlton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Hear, hear!

Andrew Broad (Mallee, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

One 'hear, hear' from the Labor Party! We must always remember that we live in the real world, not the ideal world. My conclusions from global observations are this: every country acts in its own self-interest first; the closer you are to the customer the more you control the price; in a true globalised world, the lowest cost producer has the competitive advantage; at times there is value in an interventionist currency policy; the world places more value on Australia's agricultural assets than we do ourselves; and Australian based boardrooms are more responsive to Australian social, environmental and political pressure than boardrooms based in other parts of the world.

This government, of which I am proud to be a part, has challenges ahead. We must walk the balance between living within our means and spending to invest. It will be the collective views of every member in this House, and of all political persuasions, that must steer Australia through the turbulent years that lie before us. A strong economy is the engine room. We must build a strong economy so we can build a great society, for it is only when we have the financial resources that we as a country can action the dreams and hopes we have for this great society. What is it that makes a great society? A great society values and supports those who cannot look after themselves: the unwell, the people living with severe disability, our senior Australians who require care. A great society invests in our children to expand their world view and give them an appetite to learn, to make great citizens instead of just graduates—citizens who know the difference between right and wrong and choose right. After all, it was Theodore Roosevelt who said, 'Educate a man in his mind and not in his morals and you create a monster.' And a great society invests in other countries through aid and agricultural information exchange to lift life expectancy and improve the standard of living for others.

The only thing that may stop Australia from being that great society is our level of indifference. Individual aspirations build community only if the individual is not indifferent to the needs and sufferings of others. Our pursuits of material wealth must be tempered by our generosity, for it is when we align the hearts of mankind with the compassionate heart of God that we truly build a great society.

The HMS Sirius returned to Port Jackson, saving the colony from starvation, and eventually that colony became part of the Commonwealth of Australia. In the history of the Australian Commonwealth, only 1,133 people have ever taken a seat in the House of Representatives. That is an immense responsibility for people in this chamber. I assume this role with humility and gravity, and want to assure the people of the Wimmera, the Mallee and the Mildura region that I will always do my best. We have now before us the responsibility and privilege to build on the 225 years of Australian history and the thousands of years of Aboriginal history. With hard work, God's blessing and good government; I believe our best years are ahead.

Joel Fitzgibbon (Hunter, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I very sincerely congratulate the member for Mallee and those who are here to support him. That was a very fine contribution. I listened carefully. He was a leading light in the Victorian Farmers Federation, a former farmer himself, and, as he indicated, a Nuffield scholar, and he comes to this place very well credentialed. I look forward to working with him on a bipartisan basis with respect to some of the issues, particularly in rural and regional Australia, that he raised. I was a little bit frightened for a while; I found myself agreeing with the member for Mallee most of the time. I can only come to the conclusion that he is a new breed of National with strong faith in the market, although qualified—I do not want to misrepresent him. It will be very interesting to see how he sets himself apart from some of the more senior members of the Nationals, such as Minister Joyce, as well as Senators McKenzie, Williams and Nash, who are up the back there. It is good to see them in the House. This will be the big test for the member for Mallee. I hope he will come with the opposition on some more sensible approaches to the market and do some things to give a real lift to rural and regional Australia, something that has been missing in this place—except of course for the last six years—for too long.

There is applause in the chamber. I am assuming that it is not necessarily for me, but I do—

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I will just interrupt you for a moment, Member for Hunter. It is acceptable that we waive the rules of the House to allow applause for a new member's speech—but not after that.

Joel Fitzgibbon (Hunter, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I appreciate that you have given them some latitude, Madam Speaker. I am, I think, well qualified to say these things, because I have been in this place for almost 18 years, so I have been around to see a few maiden speeches. I have enjoyed the maiden speeches of all the new members—from both sides of the House. In a similar vein, I want to say that it is a great honour and privilege to have been elected to the House, representing the Hunter electorate, for the seventh time. I extend once again my sincere thanks to my electorate for giving me that ongoing opportunity and I recommit myself to using all of my energy and ability to do the best I can for my electorate.

There has been much said about the big difference between the 43rd Parliament and the 44th. Certainly it is and will be a different place. Hung parliaments tend, by their very nature, to be unruly, untidy and, on occasion—if not often—very chaotic. The 43rd Parliament was all of those things. No-one is better placed than I, having been Chief Government Whip for most of those three years, to fully appreciate that.

But it is going to be more than the strong majority of the government which will set apart this 44th Parliament from the 43rd. What will really set them apart is the transition from a can-do government, a government intent on reform, to a new government which is simply intent on keeping things just the way they are—or, more particularly, winding the clock back to the way they were prior to the 2007 election. This of course is the very essence of conservatism. Conservatives dislike change. In fact, in some cases, they hate change. Prime Minister Abbott—and I say this with the greatest respect—is conservative with a capital 'C'. The problem for conservatives is that, while they can do their best to hold back change in their own nation-state, they cannot do much to change progress and movement beyond our national borders. They cannot do much to control what is happening around the rest of the world.

Further, it is all right for conservatives to be satisfied with the world as it is. More specifically, I suggest it is all right for wealthier conservatives to be happy with the status quo. The problem with that is that not everyone is in a position to enjoy the status quo. The underprivileged in our society, working-class people, people who work excessively hard to make ends meet, are not always happy with the status quo. Certainly on the matter we discussed during question time today, people are not satisfied with the status quo in education. We are falling behind the rest of the world. The status quo is not good enough for those who aspire to a better life for their children—and that is the sort of Australia I want to see, a place of greater opportunity. As great a country as we are now and always have been, we still have too many underprivileged people, too much inequality and too big a gap between the haves and the have-nots. So we really should be about change, constantly working to make Australia a better place.

I am particularly grateful to the Statistician, who did some very detailed work, some time ago now, on how the government can best reduce that gap between the haves and the have-nots in our society. He identified the obvious mechanisms available to government. We have a progressive tax system which in itself redistributes wealth from the wealthy back to those who need it most. We have the transfer payment system, including pensions, unemployment benefits, childcare benefits and other things that give families a lift up. A less obvious mechanism is the use of what the Statistician described as non-cash benefits. What are non-cash benefits? Non-cash benefits include the provision of services to local communities—child care, for example. Hospitals are another good example, particularly as Australia has a public health system. These are the things the Statistician, albeit back in 1997, said were the mechanisms which did most in our economy to reduce that gap between the haves and have-nots. That is why I have always had a very strong interest as a member of this place in the inequality of services and the lack of provision of infrastructure in regional and rural Australia. That has always been a passion for me.

If we go back to the fine contribution of the member for Mallee, I agree with him absolutely on this point: more of the wealth that is generated in rural and regional Australia should be returned to rural and regional Australia. That was the whole principle behind the now hotly debated mining tax. I am happy for people to argue about the design of the tax and whether it should have raised more revenue or should not have raised any revenue, but if the government were really serious they would reshape the tax using their own formula. I invite them to put up the argument that the principle behind the mining tax was not sound. The principle was that when companies are making superprofits by extracting and exploiting natural resources owned by the people who live in rural and regional Australia, at least a fair share—I would argue even a greater share than that—should be returned to rural and regional Australia. That is exactly what the mining tax sought to do. So, again, fiddle with the design of the tax all you like, Prime Minister, but do not stand here and tell us that the principle underpinning that tax was one worthy of being challenged. It simply was not.

This is very important in electorates like mine. Mining has brought great wealth to the Hunter Valley, and we welcome it. People have enjoyed living standards they could not have dreamed of without mining, although I point out that it has been cyclical and many villages in my electorate have suffered from the arrival and then departure of coalmining. The benefits need to be spread over considerable periods. Also with mining come adverse impacts. There are environmental issues—water and air quality, for example; supermarket prices rise as they are faced with the higher wages that come with coalmining; roads become excessively congested; and child care and housing become more difficult to secure as demand outstrips supply. So mining is welcomed and fantastic for mining regions, but it does bring challenges and those challenges need to be recognised when people are thinking about how to fairly distribute the government royalties and taxes that come from the industry. I appeal to the Prime Minister to rethink his position—he can redesign the tax in his own name, but can he please give more thought to rural and regional Australia?

This is a theme that has been with us for all of the almost 18 years I have been here. The conservative parties in this country have never really been serious about regional development and intervening in regional communities. Prime Minister Chifley had a deep-seated interest in this area of policy; Robert Menzies came along and did nothing over 18 years or more. It took the Whitlam years for a government to become serious for the first time in decades about intervening in regional Australia, including decentralisation. Malcolm Fraser showed no interest whatsoever, and then of course the Hawke and Keating governments picked up the ball and ran with various programs. One which stands out in my mind, shepherded by then Deputy Prime Minister Brian Howe, was in the area of housing. The current Prime Minister has a chance to break that record of conservative governments and for the first time get really serious about rural and regional Australia. I have to say that abolishing the House regional affairs committee is not a very good start at all. It sends all the wrong signals to regional Australia, as does the decision to drop the ball on making sure that, when mining profits are high, those profits are returned to their source.

This is not the only bad sign we have seen from this government in the short time it has been in office. The other bad sign is the decision to dishonour Regional Development Australia grants announced by the former Labor government. These grants came not from election promises or announcements but from decisions of government, decisions of cabinet, made by the cabinet prior to the calling of the election. There were serious processes. Councils, typically, but also other organisations, would put submissions to the local chapter of Regional Development Australia—in my case, the Hunter chapter—and they would prioritise the projects based on their merits. People with expertise in the region, serious business people, took a bipartisan approach to which projects would proceed and then made recommendations to a second committee, in Canberra, which would again vet these projects and prioritise them on their merits before making a recommendation to the minister of the day.

That was not pork barrelling or part of an election campaign; it was a serious and credible process producing outcomes of great merit. As a result of this decision I have lost a number of seriously important local projects, and I am going to read some into the Hansard. There is the levee project in Maitland, which is a redevelopment of the Heritage Mall and an opening up of that mall to the beautiful Hunter River. That is a very important project which should have been receiving $7 million from the Commonwealth. Then we have Mid-Western Regional Council, Kandos Loft improvements; Mid-Western Regional Council, Rylstone disabled access footpath; Muswellbrook Shire Council, Denman Recreational Area facilities; Muswellbrook council again, Olympic Park car park; Singleton Shire Council, the Singleton Regional Livestock Market upgrade; and Upper Hunter Shire Council, a project known as the White Park development. These are projects the councils have been struggling to fund for some time. They are much-needed projects in these local areas. They are projects that were going to be funded under a very robust and credible process, and the funding should be honoured by this government. It is not too late for the government to honour the funding for these projects.

It does not stop there. I am bordering on devastated by the decision not to honour the money allocated under the National Crime Prevention Fund. Many towns in my electorate—like most communities—have a great need for new facilities and new technologies to deal with antisocial behaviour, vandalism and the like, and we did very well under this program. There were very important projects like $99,000 to Maitland City Council for CCTV cameras in the Maitland CBD, another $86,000 to Maitland City Council for CCTV cameras in the Rutherford area of Maitland, and new fencing for Singleton Council at a local park called Howe Park. All are very, very meritorious projects put forward by local councils that have gone through a rigorous and robust process, but for some reason they have not been honoured by this government.

We have heard a lot pre-election about the budget emergency and the level of Australian government debt. Now that they are in office there does not appear to be any budget emergency, and they are raising the debt limit so that they can borrow more and spend more. I think people out there in the community are starting to wake up to the fact that, despite what they were told by the coalition throughout the election campaign, there is no government debt problem in Australia at all. In fact, compared with the rest of the world, we have one of the best positions in the world, and we have a AAA credit rating from each of the ratings agencies, something other countries around the globe would kill for.

Let's not say that debt or budget deficit inherited from the Labor government, given the proportionality of that debt and deficit when you look at countries around the world, is justification for abolishing CCTV cameras in Maitland. In a government budget approaching half a trillion dollars, did we really need to deny these local communities these important infrastructure projects? I go back to where I began and to what the Australian Statistician said about the tools available to government to reduce the gap between the haves and the have-nots in this country. Even more particularly in this case, I go back to the gap between services and infrastructure enjoyed by those living, working and playing in the cities and the dearth of availability for those of us who live in rural and regional Australia.

This takes me back to a theme I was talking about on an agricultural bill in this place earlier today. We need huge amounts of investment in the agricultural sector—huge amounts. The so-called dining boom, as I like to call it, can do for the Hunter Valley and other places what mining has done to the Hunter Valley. But we will need, on one estimate, $600 billion of investment by 2050 to achieve those aims. Obviously, given the population and the nature of our country, much of that investment will, by necessity, have to come from foreign sources. The GrainCorp decision is a poor one—not just the decision itself but the failure to explain the decision and the signal that sends to potential investors in Australian agriculture all around the world. I challenge the Treasurer, if he does nothing else, to explain fully to international investors the basis on which he made that decision so they can fully understand what the rules are when they are looking to invest in Australia. At the moment global capital is very competitive. They are looking around and I suspect they are saying that it is all too hard, we are not worth the investment, and it is not worth the effort.

Debate adjourned.