Bernie Ripoll (Oxley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister Assisting the Leader for Small Business) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the House for the opportunity to make some remarks in the address-in-reply. It is always an honour to be elected to this parliament. To be re-elected for the sixth time is a huge honour for me. Being elected for the first time in 1998, I recall really well my campaign, all of the volunteers around me, the Labor Party and my supporters, and my clear intention to work really hard to be a good representative for my community and to fairly and honestly represent their views as best as possible in the parliament. I had only one intention, to do the very best job I could, and hoped, if I did that, they, my electorate, might give me a second chance to be re-elected for another term in 2001. Obviously, it now being 2014, having been re-elected in 2013 is a huge privilege.

All election campaigns are hard fought on all sides. Everybody who runs in an election wants to represent their community for a variety of reasons. People have different motivations, different goals, different objectives, different philosophies and different views about what their collective community needs most or prioritises. For me it would be no different. I am very close to my community—I like to think I am anyway—and certainly to all its great variety of cultures and languages. It is an enormously diverse community from Vietnamese people in one area to Pacific people in another, to Indigenous people through my home town of Inala, where I grew up, right through to lots of old European families, to a whole variety in the western corridor where over 100 different languages are spoken. I feel very proud to be a representative for that community.

Election day itself was unusual, to say the least. For all the doom and gloom there were many good things on the day. The opportunity a community gets to cast its judgment not just on the government and who leads the country but also on who leads them in the parliament at a local level is something we should all take note of.

Like all elections, there were national issues, perhaps even international, but certainly many local issues. In my electorate of Oxley in the western corridor of Brisbane and in Ipswich, my constituents were very concerned about what an Abbott government might mean for them—not in a positive way. Having already experienced a Campbell Newman government at a state level they were very concerned. Some were very frightened about where they might end up, what sort of cuts they might get. The mood and the talk were about what they might lose, not about what they might gain.

Locally people told me they knew Labor had worked very hard and yes there was a price to be paid by us—I am the first to acknowledge it—for a range of issues in the previous parliament. But my electorate were very convinced that Labor, under any circumstances, could still deliver for them a better outcome. Whether that revolved around infrastructure delivery—the Ipswich Motorway, local roads, the work we had done in schools in Building the Education Revolution—and not just providing infrastructure but a different sense about the way every child going to school would get a hand-up, not a handout, and a positive change in the way education would be delivered.

I am sure it is the case for all members in this place: I have not yet been to a school where they did not want the school hall, they did not want the classroom, they did not want the science lab or they did not want the extra investment. If someone here in this place could say, 'I've found a school that rejects the investment of cash, that rejects a new school hall or a classroom,' please come forward and let me know. I am yet to come across one anywhere, let alone in my electorate. It was money well spent.

I want to remind people that it was a two-pronged thing we had to do. Coming out of a global financial crisis a good government needs to respond. We wanted not just to protect jobs and the economy to make sure that families still had an ability to pay their mortgage but to invest in schools at the same time. Those legacy infrastructure projects will be with us for the next 30 years. Every time you go to a meeting at a school—whether it is an induction of leaders, which we would have seen in the last few weeks—you turn up in a school hall that Labor built. I have gained enormous pleasure and pride from going to some of my oldest schools, which are a little bit run-down in some parts because no-one had spent any money—state or federal—for 30, 40 or even more years. To see the one shining example of an investment in that school community as something Labor did filled me with a lot of pride. Yes, true, at the same time, we did not quite get all the kudos that we possibly could have, but sometimes you do things because they are right not just because you are going to get thanked for it afterwards.

There were a lot of other projects in the electorate, but there was one thing for me that was very personal and very important. When you do a good thing in your community, when you stick with people and you work with people from different communities regardless of where they line up politically, they do remember that you did something really good for them. Different people in different communities have said to me, 'We don't forget our friends and we won't forget when you stood up for us.' That is probably a lesson that all members in this place could ponder.

I am enormously proud of my office—it is not just me; I am but one person—all of my staff and all of our volunteers—the people who lend a hand, help, do things in the community, turn up to events, make things happen and assist things to happen, all of those things that we do over a long period of time that mean something and are valued. For me, after so many years in parliament, they are the things that I look back on and say: 'They're the things that are worthwhile. They're the things worth doing, regardless of the politics and regardless of the way that people vote.'

My electorate is in a growing and developing part of Queensland in the western corridor. Not only is there a lot of infrastructure to be built; there is a lot of development to go on. People are building lives and families are growing. Not only do they need schools; they need places for recreation, parks and amenity. While traditionally that has been the purview of local government and others, there is a case to be made for the federal government to be involved, and Labor did get involved. In government, we added value to a whole range of communities with a small bit of funding. For example, in Robelle Domain at Springfield Lakes a small bit of funding facilitated a much larger project going ahead. Those are the sorts of things that I am very proud that Labor did. That is the case also with black-spot intersection upgrades. I was the Queensland chair of the committee. By announcing it here today, I am sure I will be removed as chair when somebody discovers that a Labor member still chairs that committee and perhaps I should be replaced by a Liberal member. We will see how long it is before someone twigs—and I am sure that will be in the next two minutes.

There is the work we did on the National Broadband Network. Forget about the claptrap you hear in this place about the politics of it all. Everywhere that actually got it delivered and got connected, you have never seen happier people. They really understand it. Retirees and pensioners I visited who had their home connected had the ability to talk to their family. They can be a part of the bigger world through that giant portal, that huge window, and that gives them the opportunity to communicate with the rest of the world. Some of our older people are the most skilled at getting on the internet. They have a little more spare time in their retirement and they can see what is happening in the world. And there are small businesses, home businesses and micro businesses who can benefit. I have never seen such a rush of people knocking my door down saying, 'When are we getting the NBN?'

It is a big program and you cannot roll out an eight-year program in eight weeks, but it is worthwhile. Again, it is the sort of heavy lifting that Labor governments do and that I am proud that we did as a government. For most governments, that heavy lifting is just too hard and you cannot think that far ahead—eight years and somebody might criticise us for not getting it all done in eight weeks. The reality is we started it and, no matter what this new government does, it will continue. It might look a bit different, but it is the work we did, the heavy lifting, in terms of the National Broadband Network which will guarantee that people around Australia are connected and schools and health and medical services are connected and connected to the rest of the world. It will guarantee small business an opportunity to do the things that they have to do in the modern world. The modern world was last century, by the way, just in case the mob on the other side are not quite sure about where the modern world sits.

There is another piece of work that I am enormously proud of that I think delivered in spades. We committed an amount of funding to the Brisbane Lions of the Australian Football League to relocate their headquarters and field in Brisbane to Springfield Lakes. This was an enormous move for the Lions. It came with a lot of infrastructure and a lot of jobs. We did that a few days, as I understand it, if not a week, before caretaker mode commenced. That funding would have guaranteed that that organisation and football would thrive in the western corridor. My understanding today is that that funding has been withdrawn. I know this will create enormous disappointment across my community and also for all the fans of football. This sort of issue should be above politics. The infrastructure delivery on this project was beyond reproach. It was value for money. What has happened is really disappointing.

I have mentioned a whole range of my communities, but I want to single out the Vietnamese community in my electorate and give special thanks to Phuong and Duc. I will not go into a heap of other names, otherwise I will be here for a long time. But I do make special mention of those two people for being such good, honest, hard workers in their own community let alone in supporting me and my efforts to represent them in this parliament. I also want to thank Tin, who is our Vietnamese-speaking volunteer who comes in to help Vietnamese constituents with their issues and provides for free an invaluable service. I also mention members of the Pacific Islander community who are genuine, hardworking people who have created a new life in Australia, most of whom have New Zealand citizenship and came here over many years by a variety of means. They came here to seek new opportunities not unlike others who come to Australia and not unlike all of us at some point in time. People come here because they want a bigger and better opportunity for their families and I am really proud of the fact that they do that. There are a number of issues that I was working on in the previous parliament and in government to make sure that they get a fair opportunity at educating their kids and that they get the same sorts of benefits that Australians might get, even though there are some conditions around their residency in Australia because they are not full Australian citizens. But I think there is lot that this parliament could look at to make their lives a bit better, particularly for their kids, who aspire to a higher education level and who could contribute so much to our community.

Oxley is smack in the middle of the western corridor, between the two great cities of Brisbane and Ipswich. It is one of the fastest growing corridors in the country. People go there because it is a great place to live. It is where I call home. It is thriving with new opportunities, new jobs and innovators. There is so much potential that it is bubbling to the surface. But you need to support that through assistance from government to do the things that developers cannot do. A developer cannot build a railway line but a state government can, and it can invest in people and in communities. A federal government can invest in massive infrastructure for nationally significant parks, so that in 50 years time people will say, 'The people who thought this up must have been real forward thinkers.'

They are the people of today. Sometimes you have to do that. It is a bit like building the Story Bridge in Brisbane. When it was built back in the twenties, no-one could have imagined in those horse-and-cart days that you would need eight or 10 lanes. They must have been saying, 'You're overcooking it and spending too much.' But we look back at that today and say, 'If only they could have added two lanes it would have been good.'

There is a good argument to be made for supporting and developing infill areas like Richlands or Inala, Goodna and Ipswich right through to Springfield and the centenary suburbs in my electorate, which thrive in western Brisbane. Our schools are booming. We have record achievements at some schools, even those in the most difficult areas. Glenala State High many years ago was probably regarded as one of the worst schools in the country. It had a high number of Pacific Islander and Indigenous communities. Through the persistence of a number of school leaders and principals, it is now an example of a school that has achieved some of the best results I have seen. It now has a 95-plus per cent retention rate for year 12, and 84 per cent of year 12 students get an OP of between one and 15. These incredible results are because people believe in that school, believe in the kids, believe in the community. It is not just about infrastructure and money; it is about leadership. At every opportunity I say a huge thank you and congratulations to Glenala State High for the incredible work done to produce some of the best kids in the region.

But it is not all good news. There is some bad news, unfortunately, particularly for small businesses in my area and right across the country. When Labor was in government—some of you might find this a bit difficult—we were the best friend of business and the best friend of small business. We invested some real money in supporting small businesses not only through the global financial crisis but in aspects of building businesses and starting businesses. National business name registration was a big step into the modern world, taking seven disparate databases across the country—some just on paper—and putting them all on the internet. It used to cost $1,000 to register your business; now it is something like $70, and you can register businesses 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

We also invested a huge amount of money in the instant asset tax write-off, not only in assets but also in direct investment through pooled depreciation. All up, the direct investment that we made in business and small business was close to $5 billion. That is a lot of money, but you would spend a lot of money on small businesses if you believed in them. The first thing the Abbott government did when it came to power was take all of that money away, through a whole variety of measures—the instant asset tax write-off and the direct assistance. There is more to come, but that is a $5 billion hit to small business. Small businesses are not yet feeling this hit, but they are twigging on to the fact that all the assistance is going. The Abbott government has defunded bodies that used to assist—like helplines and websites—and were really well used. Small business uses the facilities we provided including tax incentives and direct cash incentives. Where small businesses invested, we invested with small businesses. We were there for small business. This government says it is the best friend of small business. We will see when the money is on the table who really is the best friend of small business.

There is a lot to be said about all the things that have changed since this new government came to power five and a bit months ago. I was particularly close to the Future of Financial Advice reforms during a difficult period with the global financial crisis, the Storm collapse, Trio and lots of mums and dads who had worked their whole lives to save for independence in retirement losing it all. Something had to be done, and we stepped up and did it. It took a lot of years, consultation and work, but we came up with a really good model, the FoFA reforms. This government has taken those reforms and said it will make some technical amendments and minor changes. Nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is the changes being made will rip out the guts of FoFA and leave nothing—no best interest, no transparency, no disclosure, the reintroduction of bank commissions and fees. Over a period we will see some clear winners, and those clear winners will not be consumers. Consumer protection will be gone and consumers will be paying enormous fees, having lost all the protections Labor put in place.

In the remaining time, I turn to jobs and the important work that Labor did in supporting jobs, not just through the global financial crisis. We were there when a million jobs were created during the worst global recession. We did better than any other global economy. Although the Abbott government said governments never create jobs, they have promised to create a million jobs in five years. The ticker is ticking, but unfortunately for them it is heading south really quickly. They goaded Toyota and Holden to go. They are not interested in jobs and a plan for saving jobs. In fact, they are doing everything they can to say they will not participate in a jobs plan. They might have some arguments about industry welfare, so let us hear those and have a debate about them. We are asking: where is your plan to create jobs? Do you have a jobs creation plan? What have you planned for communities in Geelong, South Australia, and other places hit by closures? We understand the problem with the high Australian dollar and the difficulties in manufacturing, but it is wrong to shut the door and leave workers, families and communities with no hope.

It always comes down to who you stand up for and how you will be counted. When we were in government, Labor took difficult decisions. We always stood up for communities, people and families, whatever the cost. The government needs to support the country and the national interest. When it comes to a choice, this coalition government is prepared to cut people loose. This means that Australia, for the first time in more than a decade, has an unemployment rate of six per cent. That is not good enough. (Time expired)

Ken Wyatt (Hasluck, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There is no greater privilege than that which is bestowed upon us when we are elected to this place, but it is a greater honour to be returned to this place by the electors of Hasluck. I would like to thank the people of the Hasluck electorate who supported my re-election as their federal representative for another term. It is an honour and a privilege to continue serving them and I look forward to another three years—and, hopefully, a future that is a little bit longer. I remain absolutely committed to working on their behalf both within the electorate and here in Canberra.

I am equally pleased to be joined in the parliament by new members who are outstanding West Australians. It is great to have them join the WA team in the federal parliament, where their contribution will be of immense value to the nation. I would like to acknowledge Mr Christian Porter, the member for Pearce and a former Treasurer in the Barnett government; Ms Melissa Price, the member for Durack; Mr Ian Goodenough, the member for Moore; and Mr Rick Wilson, the member for O'Connor. All have been elected to this place for the first time. The experiences that they went through reminds me of the first day that I walked through the doors into the House of Reps. It was emotional and also a feeling of elation because of the fact that you could contribute to debates in this House that improved the lives and worked for the benefit of the people that we represent as well as the broader community.

You do not win and retain your seat on your own. I would like to acknowledge and pay tribute to the people who assisted me during the campaign. There were many, particularly my staff members, members of the Liberal Party and the many supporters who I have thanked privately. I want to congratulate the Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, on the magnificent campaign that he ran and thank him for visiting my electorate to announce the Swan Valley Bypass, which is better known as the Perth to Darwin highway.

I want to make special mention of the number of people who gave so much of their time during the campaign and on the days of the election. They were there always—long hours, the hard yards. Firstly, there is my family: my wife, Anna; and my two sons, Brendyn and Aaron. There is my staff: Jarrod Lomas, Amanda Templeton, Jill Bonanno, Morgan Ralph, Chloe Lim, Karlia Dillon and David Lovelle. There was my campaign team: Barry MacKinnon, Linda Reynolds, Heather Gilmour, Peter Stewart, Jamie Edwards, Danielle Blain, Graeme Harris, Ray Gianoli, Deirdre Willmott, Terry O'Connor, Wayne McIntosh, Bill Munro, Peter Abetz, Nathan Morton, Joanne Pryce, Liam Staltari, Henk Loohuys and Merle Burn.

I particularly want to acknowledge Damien Cole, Jenny Tanner and Emma Tanner for the work they did on election night when we came together; the Hon. Julie Bishop, MP, for all of her support; Ben Morton from Menzies House; and all the 'sea of blue' volunteers and polling day workers, Young Liberals and Liberal students.

I would like to make a few points on the election in Hasluck in Western Australia and on the election generally. I am proud to have been re-elected and I am also proud to have taken the seat from a margin of 0.58 per cent to one that is now 4.3 per cent, and on being the first member to win the seat back to back. I want to congratulate the six candidates who nominated and contested the election for the seat of Hasluck. That is the beauty of our democracy. Adrian Evans, deputy state secretary of the Maritime Union of Western Australia, was a formidable opponent and he was determined to win the seat of Hasluck. I had immense respect for Adrian not only as an opponent but as a person who was an excellent candidate, a family man and respectful of his opponents. Adrian really hit the trail hard with a well-financed campaign. At times it was alleged that my opponent had a war chest of $1.4 million to fight with. To me it does not matter about the quantum of funding. What is more important are the concerns which are important to the people and families of Hasluck. I will continue to emphasise the importance of building stronger local communities within my electorate.

I also want to reflect on some memorable election moments—from the launch at the Advent Park in Maida Vale in July to Prime Minister Tony Abbott's visit to announce the Swan Valley Bypass funding which we had been fighting for. The Hon. Christopher Pyne assisted in marking the third anniversary of my election to the Australian parliament. Former Prime Minister John Howard came to the Midland Gate shopping centre and was mobbed like a rock star. There were young people wanting 'selfies' and people who turned and said: 'We need you back. We want strong leadership.' They enjoyed his company and they enjoyed the interaction.

There was the Midland markets every Sunday morning at 5 am to set up and Kalamunda markets on Saturday mornings. I also want to acknowledge Margie Abbott for spending a half day in the electorate engaging with constituents and spending the time to meet with people—interacting and seeking their views in the way they were progressing their lives and some of the challenges that they were facing. Bronwyn Bishop, our newly elected Speaker, spent a whole day in the electorate and engaged with seniors at a number of forums in which she answered some of the tough questions. The Hon. Malcolm Turnbull met with constituents about the coalition's vision for the NBN and the commitments that he would undertake if he were elected.

There were a number of people from the electorate who wanted to assist with campaign signs in the front yard, help out on polling day and assist wherever there was a need to help me be re-elected. To Brian on the Helena Valley booth, who had a heart attack a week before polling day and still rocked up to help out against advice, thank you for your dedication.

I want to respond to particular matters acknowledged in the speech of Her Excellency, the Hon. Quentin Bryce, AC, CVO, Governor-General, on the occasion of the opening of the 44th Commonwealth Parliament. I want to turn to Her Excellency's reflections on key matters that are important for the families and constituents of Hasluck. In her opening address she said:

On September 7, history and people voted for a government that said it would repeal the Carbon Tax, establish a Commission of Audit and improve the Budget, strengthen border protection and build the roads of the 21st century.

I am proud to be a member of a government which is committed to developing such a strong, prosperous economy built on prudent economic management—a government which will focus on a more productive and diverse economy and will guarantee Australia's future prosperity by building on our national strengths. It is a government that will work to deliver more jobs and more opportunities so there is less pressure on the families of Hasluck, enabling them and more Australians to get ahead. It is a vision of a dynamic, confident Australia where we can all, individually and collectively, pursue our hopes and dreams.

Businesses within Hasluck will ultimately benefit through growing a strong economy and creating the best conditions for more jobs, and families will benefit from the growth in all parts of the economy—in manufacturing, agriculture, education, research, services and mining. As the economies of Asia continue to expand, demand for Australian resources and other exports will remain strong and there will be a new demand for Australian education and research, expertise in advanced services, manufacturing and agricultural products. There are already businesses within my electorate that are benefiting from that focus and they are creating the opportunities that build their companies for a strong position within the economy of Western Australia. This creates opportunities for the medium and small businesses within Hasluck and, indeed, for all Australian companies.

I will remain a strong advocate for the people of Hasluck and will work to ensure that the National Disability Insurance Scheme becomes a reality for Australians with disability and their carers, particularly those who live within the electorate. I also welcome the Prime Minister's commitment to provide $200 million to help Australian scientists find a cure for dementia and $35 million to help find a cure for type 1 diabetes. Within the electorate of Hasluck there are 8,070 Australians who experience diabetes, and this research will help assist their quality of life. Equally, I welcome the commitments to provide fairness in superannuation pensions to our veterans and the Defence Force Retirement Benefit and the Defence Force Retirement and Death Benefit superannuation pensions being more generously indexed from 1 July next year. This will be welcome news to those who live within my electorate.

I want to ensure that businesses, families and individuals who live and work in the seat of Hasluck are an integral part of a more productive and diverse economy that will guarantee Australia's future prosperity. I am pleased that the following election commitments are secured: $500,000 for CCTV in the city of Swan; Green Army commitments throughout the electorate, for the Friends of Mary Carroll wetland, the Tom Bateman reserve, the Brixton Street Wetlands, Blackadder Creek, Wattle Grove open space and Kings Meadow Reserve; trees for Men of the Trees and the Shire of Kalamunda; $615 million for the Swan Valley bypass, affectionately known as the Perth-Darwin highway stage 1; and commitment to the completion of the Gateway WA project around Perth Airport.

I have now been on this journey for 3½ years and I thank those who have been on the journey the entire way, and that includes all those that I associate with. The local agenda of issues are matters that are close to my heart and it is my intention to act on the priorities for my electorate. One is building a stronger local community that brings together families and people to value, to contribute, to protect and to look after each other. Another priority is education, and in the gallery today I have two young people who are part of the Hasluck Leadership Award. So far we have had six recipients who have shown the quality of their leadership and we will continue building young people's capacity to become leaders of the future. I have worked with a school in which they have established a minerals and energy academy and I am currently working with industry and a number of schools to look at a transport academy and a plumbing academy as two separate entities in which students who want to pursue a career in that area will be able to engage and begin an educational pathway.

For the environment, I will build on Hasluck's green map and work with all the environmental groups to nurture those parts of the electorate that are bushlands forever, the corridors and those regions that are important. Mental health and the work that is yet to be done will become a focus of my activity in this term and I will work again with state and federal governments to look at the way in which we can provide the services to the people who need them.

I want to develop within my electorate a 'lean on me' strategy. In doorknocking, which I do regularly, I meet people who are lonely, who do not have people in their lives and who rely on the local bank or post office or the occasional interaction with somebody to overcome that loneliness. I have often thought that the degree of loneliness was not across the age continuum, but I am finding that there are young people who are lonely. I find people who have lost a partner after death who for the first nine months are visited by family members but then the visits drop off and they are on their own. Everyone needs compassion and needs to be connected to others within their community, so I am working with a number of organisations to bring a 'lean on me' strategy to a reality.

I also want to focus on senior and aged-care needs and those of self-funded retirees and be an advocate in many areas that are important to them in their lives. And I want to focus on aircraft noise, which will span the political horizon for the next three years and remains a priority in the focus of the work that I will undertake with my local parliamentary colleagues. I will continue to doorknock—I doorknock two days a month—and go out to meet people, hear what the issues are and connect at park meetings, coffee shop programs and in many other ways so I can hear their concerns and then represent them to various ministers or within the forums that are available.

I enjoy the opportunity of being a member of a number of parliamentary committees—the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Health, where I can bring into play my experience within the bureaucracy of health, and the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights—and I have the privilege of chairing the Joint Select Committee on Constitutional Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples.

Something I want to focus on for the future is changing our planning mindset. Often, all of us think of today, tomorrow, the next event, but we never push beyond into the future, to 2015, 2020, 2030. The world has changed in many ways, and we can see that from what has occurred within the last two decades. I enjoyed reading the works of James Canton, who is the CEO and Chairman of the Institute for Global Futures; of Patrick Dixon, author of Futurewise: The Six Faces of Global Change; and of Bernard Salt. They challenge the way in which we should consider the future of our society. How are we planning for a world that continues to change at a more rapid pace in all aspects of our culture, business, technology, medicine, security, terrorism, population and environment? It is happening: today, tomorrow and into the future. The world continues to change in every way. It changes at a rapid pace and increases the challenges for legislators.

I want us to think about being future wise, planning to change future thinking at every level to adapt to the global change which is fast, urban, tribal, universal, radical and ethical. We saw that with the work that the Treasurer, the honourable Joe Hockey, undertook in leading the discussions and debates at the G20. A global economy impacts on all of us—we are not isolated. The whole concept of globalisation, global corporatisation and the flat-earth model in which sovereign boundaries are no longer barriers to global companies are bringing about great changes.

Similar practices applied by commercial companies which develop a strong business case that has an embedded futuristic projection of the benefits and the potential to have a return for investment should be the focus of this parliament into the future. Our legacy should not be political and personal gains, but a legacy that positions Australia for our children and future generations. We need to look to the future not for the term of a parliament or to pursue policies of expedience based on political philosophies but on what is best for the future. We position ourselves through our free trade agreements to optimise our balance of payments, our trade, but also our interactions with other nations that are within the region. I want to see the future for those who live within my electorate to be given the opportunity to become part of the global society and not be restricted or constrained by the lack of educational opportunity or training opportunities. It is about creating pathways through engagement and through informing. I will continue always to focus on those that need levels of intervention. But in policy directions it is my intention over the next terms of my time here to use the opportunities to generate debates and thinking about how we move into a dynamic future role. I would also compliment the Minister for Foreign Affairs on the way in which she has certainly engaged Australia in the global forums that are an integral part of our economy, our wealth and our opportunities to create jobs for those within our country.

One of the pleasures I had—and it was a nice touch—was when one of my staff, Jill Bonanno, came and saw me and said, 'You have to swear on a Bible.' She said she had been given a Bible when she was baptised at the age of 19 and she asked me if I would—as a personal gesture and to help reflect her value of that—use it when I was sworn in this time. It gave me great pleasure to be able to say to Jill that I would do that for her. It is the little things that we as members do in this House not only for our staff but also within our electorates that make the difference. I reflected on a couple of comments made by the member for Oxley, who talked about the need for us to engage locally within each of our electorates. It is the little things that become the big memories for people who acknowledge the way in which we reach out, listen with respect, and then engage them and act on their behalf.

To conclude, I look forward to this term in parliament. It is easier being on the government benches because you are able to do some things you cannot do from opposition. It is always hard to convince a minister to invest in your electorate when you are in opposition. Often people view us as members in this House as being in conflict, but I have made some tremendous friendships across all spheres of the House. I value the colleagues who make a contribution on behalf of their electorates in the way that they advocate and work in committees and on the way that we deliver what is required for the decisions that occur.

Justine Elliot (Richmond, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to be speaking in this address-in-reply. I would like of course to start by thanking the people of Richmond for re-electing me for a fourth term. It is indeed a great honour and a privilege to represent what is in fact the most beautiful part of Australia, the electorate of Richmond, with its diversity and its people, its communities and its landscape. It is truly unique. From the pristine beaches to the beautiful hinterland, it is one of the most beautiful parts of Australia. I would like to thank all of those who supported me throughout the election campaign and to all those people who volunteered their time because they had such a strong commitment to Labor values and the Labor policies we took to the election. I thank them and acknowledge all their hard work.

I also acknowledge the many people in the community that I spoke to and continue to speak to over the years on the issues they have raised, particularly the concerns they have about the impact of a Liberal-National government. I can assure the people of the North Coast that I will be holding this government to account on a whole range of issues, all those issues that impact the people of the North Coast. We are already seeing that some of those impacts are hurting the people on the North Coast. We are seeing cuts by the government particularly to areas around regional development funding—around five cuts. We are seeing cuts to the schoolkids bonus as well. There is a lot of concern about plans for a $6 GP tax, which will be devastating for an area like Richmond, particularly with the large number of pensioners we have in my area. Just today in question time we saw the Prime Minister refuse to rule out cuts to the age pension, which also would be devastating for many people as there is a very high proportion of old age pensioners living on the North Coast of New South Wales.

We also saw from the government last year the threat to impose GST on the rents of mobile home residents and, indeed, a strong community campaign forced a backdown on this unfair tax grab. We are also seeing a strong community campaign against the government's plans for that doctor tax and their plans to dismantle Medicare. Right throughout the country we are seeing people mobilising because of their concerns about our universal health system, and I certainly stand with them in making sure that people can access the healthcare services that they need when they require them. It is only been a number of months and we are already seeing some very harsh impacts being felt particularly in regional areas and, as I say, I continue to highlight those concerns.

During the campaign there was also a very positive response to the record funding the Labor government delivered to the area. A major issue in my electorate was opposition to harmful coal seam gas mining, which I will detail a bit later on. I would like to say that I am very proud to have worked closely with many people on the North Coast to deliver this record funding whilst I have been the local MP. More than $1.5 billion was delivered for local improvements and many of those came from the economic stimulus projects that are so vital in protecting local jobs and also in providing very, very important infrastructure.

I would like to outline some of those that have made a very big difference on the North Coast of New South Wales particularly the Pacific Highway upgrade. More than $350 million was allocated for the Sextons Hill upgrade and more than $550 million for the Tintenbar to Ewingsdale upgrade, which is, in fact, the single biggest ever infrastructure investment on the North Coast. It is being constructed as we speak, and we look forward to that being finalised and having all those Pacific Highway upgrades finished up there.

I was also very proud to deliver the GP superclinic to South Tweed. It has been open for a long period of time now and is providing exceptionally great service to many people within the area. All of the funding to local schools has made a huge difference as well.

What was also really important was the investment in community infrastructure, like the Murwillumbah Community Centre, or the Byron Regional Sport and Cultural Complex or the Lennox Head Community Centre. Indeed, there was other sports infrastructure, like the $5 million in funding for the new Arkinstall Park upgrades for netball and tennis facilities in South Tweed. This also is under construction and we very much look forward to that being finalised. It is a great resource for locals. We are hoping that it will be a bit of a central point for a lot of training, as well, particularly on the netball front.

There was also more than $2 million for the world's first surfing centre of excellence at Casuarina Beach. It is great to have that open and providing some really important mentoring for many people who come there from right across country. And it is great to have a world first surfing centre of excellence at beautiful Casuarina Beach.

So, as I have said, it has been a real honour to be given the opportunity to continue to represent the people of the North Coast and to work with them to keep on achieving those best results for locals and to improve our infrastructure and surrounds on the North Coast.

Richmond is indeed a very diverse electorate, and that is what makes us incredibly special. It stretches from Skennars Head in the south to Tweed Heads in the north, and from Byron Bay in the east to Nimbin in the west. Richmond has significant agricultural areas and urban areas as well, like Tweed Heads. It has very vibrant and active coastal areas, like Byron Bay, and really strong, rural based communities, like Murwillumbah and Mullumbimby. They are very diverse areas.

During the election and over the past year I have continued to have many discussions with the people of the North Coast, and the message is very clear and consistent—locals have a very clear idea about the sort of community they want. They want one where they are able to access the services they require, whether those are health, aged care, education or community services. They want to see investment in regional infrastructure. Very importantly, they want to have jobs in their local regional area and they want their children to be able to have quality jobs in their regional area. And they want to see an emphasis on making sure that we have strong local economies.

In areas like mine, importantly, they also want to see that we have a sustainable environment, and they want to see effective action on climate change. That was a very big issue during the election campaign. All of these issues featured very prominently during the campaign but, indeed, the single issue that was raised with me time and time again was the very real fear shared by many locals about the impact of harmful coal seam gas mining on the North Coast. Indeed, this continues to be the single largest issue across all levels of government, all community groups and all individuals no matter where you go. This is the issue that people talk about; it is the issue of concern to them. They have real and genuine concerns as to what could happen to our environment, to our water and to our communities if this industry were allowed to expand on the New South Wales North Coast.

In a very real way, the 2013 federal election in Richmond was a referendum on whether the community wanted coal seam gas mining. In fact, the people have now spoken clearly. It was clear by the result in the Richmond electorate that the voters have rejected coal seam gas mining. They believe it is unsafe and environmentally destructive. As I said, the electorate has made it very clear how they feel about it. They are very worried about the ramifications of coal seam gas mining, the effect it will have on current and future generations and the impact on our area.

Nearly all the villages and towns, along with the local councils of Tweed, Byron and Lismore on the North Coast, have made declarations to be coal seam gas mining free. In fact, the movement against coal seam gas mining has been growing for a considerable period of time. In the past few years, it has grown more and more. This movement is now directed specifically against many in the National Party in our area and their very strong pro-CSG agenda. It particularly refers to our state members of parliament. In fact, as we know, it is the state government that regulates and licences coal seam gas mining. What concerns me and concerns the community is that all of our state National Party MPs on the North Coast actively and publicly endorse coal seam gas mining in our area. In doing so they have ignored the people of the North Coast. They have chosen to support the interests of big coal seam gas mining companies and completely ignore the will of the people who they have been elected to represent.

To understand how big an issue this is, and the impact of it, it is important to examine the magnitude of public support against coal seam gas mining and to look at the history of this community activism. I will run through some of the major events. There are many more, but here are some of the community's major concerns.

On 9 April 2012, the Lismore City Council voted 6-5 in support of the motion to have a specific poll to gauge views on coal seam gas mining. The poll was then held in conjunction with the September 2012 local government election. The result of this poll was overwhelmingly against coal seam gas mining, with 87 per cent voting against it—a huge number. Also, on 25 October 2012, Tweed shire councillors voted 6-1 for a moratorium on coal seam gas mining.

On 31 October 2013, Byron shire councillors—off the back of a survey which showed that some 98 per cent of residents wanted the shire declared, and to remain, CSG free—restated their support for a gas-field-free shire that incorporates a coal seam gas mining exclusion zone. Also, the North Coast peak council for local councils, NOROC, considered this coal seam gas mining issue so significant that they funded research on the effect of CSG on the environment. This means we now have a situation where the councils and nearly all the villages and towns along the North Coast have themselves made declarations to be CSG-mining free. This is a strong declaration of the people's will. In fact, when you drive through those smaller villages—and we are lucky to have many vibrant and wonderful villages on the North Coast—you will see many 'lock the gate' signs and you will see signs declaring that they are coal seam gas mining free. We have had dozens of small villages continue to make those declarations, and they go from street to street to make sure that their concerns are heard about how worried they are about the impact of this industry possibly expanding in our area.

Across the North Coast we have had many groups that have come together to support this anti-coal-seam-gas-mining movement. This list is not limited to but includes groups such as: the North Coast Environment Council; Gasfield Free Northern Rivers; the Tweed Lock the Gate Alliance, led by Michael McNamara; the Nimbin Environment Centre; the 100% renewable energy campaign; the Caldera Environment Centre; Transition Byron Shire; the wonderful Knitting Nannas Against Coal Seam Gas Mining, who continue to do such a great job in highlighting their concerns; and the Byron Environment Centre. There are many other community groups and individuals who have been part of this ongoing campaign to make sure that their concerns are always heard in relation to this.

I think there has been possibly no greater demonstration of those determined to stop coal seam gas mining than the display of strength at various protests and rallies. On 14 May 2011 in Murwillumbah some 8,000 people marched through the town to demand a stop to coal seam gas mining. This is very impressive, particularly when you consider the town's population is far less than that. People came from far and wide to be part of this protest. Also in May 2012 around 7,000 people marched against CSG in Lismore. Again that was a major number for a regional town. On 15 October 2012 around 4,000 people marched against CSG in Murwillumbah in a day of action against the industry, and that day was known as Rock the Gate.

As recently as December 2013 we saw the Tweed Shire Council reaffirming its call for a moratorium on CSG operations. I was pleased to see that they reaffirmed that. I point out to the House that that motion was carried five votes to two. The two people who voted against it were—yes, you guessed it—the National Party councillors. At all levels of government—whether it is at the council level, the state level or the federal level—we see the National Party's pro-CSG agenda. That was confirmed for us as recently as December in the vote at council where we saw the two National Party members vote against it.

Also, in outlining the history of the communities' concerns about coal seam gas, on 14 February 2013 the former member for Page, Janelle Saffin, and I launched a petition calling on the New South Wales government to declare an immediate moratorium on all CSG activities and licences within the boundaries of the state parliamentary seats of Lismore, Ballina, Clarence and Tweed on the New South Wales North Coast and further declaring them to be CSG-free and thereafter off limits to the CSG industry. The petition happened because the people of the North Coast were ignored by their state National Party MPs, who failed to represent their concerns.

In a very short period of time the petition got more than 12,000 signatures and was presented to the Speaker of the New South Wales parliament for subsequent debate on 30 October 2013. When the debate occurred it was disappointing for a number of reasons. Firstly, the only North Coast members who spoke were the members for Ballina and Lismore. I assume the member for Tweed was hiding and remaining silent on the debate, as he often does on many issues. I note that the member for Clarence did not bother to speak either. When the members for Ballina and Lismore spoke in the debate neither supported the proposal to have the North Coast declared coal seam gas mining free; neither supported the wishes of the majority of residents. So we had this petition which in a sense forced them to speak about the issue and they refused to back the wishes of the people of the North Coast. They completely ignored them and completely abandoned them. This is not what people want from their state MPs. They want MPs to listen and act on their concerns. They want action. They certainly did not see that.

I think it is also important to note that whilst in government we took action under the EPBC Act in relation to coal seam gas mining. It is important to have that on the record. Federal Labor in government passed an amendment to expand national environmental laws under the EPBC Act. We had water as a trigger in relation to CSG activities to cover the impacts of coal seam gas mining projects on water resources.

Locals know that the biggest threat to their way of life is the ongoing National Party's pro-CSG drilling, fracking and expansion agenda. They know it is the National Party who are the environmental vandals when it comes to this and other issues. We know that the coalition government have a very strong history of supporting coal seam gas mining. We see reports constantly of just how committed both the Liberal and National parties are to the growth of the CSG industry.

It was quite disturbing when we saw last November the new industry minister telling an energy summit in New South Wales that he wanted uniform regulations for the exploration and the production of coal seam gas across state borders whilst warning opponents of coal seam gas to respect the law and labelling some of them as anarchists. That caused a great deal of offence for many people opposed to coal seam gas mining. We are not anarchists. People of all ages and backgrounds have put forward their views in a very democratic way about the concerns they have for the environment. Women from the CWA, which I am proudly a member of, marched in some of the rallies I spoke about. It is offensive that the resources minister called outstanding women like that anarchists. In fact, it is insulting, and it is insulting that he continues to not listen to the wishes of people who are so concerned about this when they are from all different backgrounds.

We are also concerned when we see of late the resource minister talking about setting up a task force. We are not quite sure what this task force will be. We have seen some reports that he is working on the make-up and role of the task force to speed up coal seam gas mining development projects in New South Wales. The new resources minister is very much involved. He is very committed to coordinating and getting coal seam gas mining on the agenda. I would like to know who he intends having on the task force, what he intends them doing and which areas they intend going to. In saying this I am reflecting the views of many people on the North Coast who have said to me that they are very keen to find out the details they can about this task force, because this minister in the first few days he was in power made it very clear that, despite the things he said prior to the election, he is 100 per cent behind coal seam gas mining.

I talk to people all the time about what we can do as a community to keep the issue of stopping coal seam gas mining on the agenda. People are very much aware that it is only Labor on the North Coast who will stop it. They see at all other levels of government this massive push to have mining—whether it is council having the National Party vote, whether it is state MPs pushing it all the time or whether it is the federal minister pushing it. They see that constantly. They know it is Labor who stand with the community. They understand that. We will continue to do that because this has united people unlike any issue I have seen before.

It is important to keep in mind the reason why many people have moved to the North Coast of New South Wales. They made a conscious choice about the area they wanted to live in. They wanted to live in an area that has a pristine hinterland, beaches, beautiful ranges and all of that. They love the area. It is a great place to raise a family and a great place to live. Because they are so attuned to and respectful of their environment, many people of all ages and backgrounds have become involved in this campaign. So, whilst there are many issues I will be fighting for for the people on the North Coast and continue to advocate here or locally at home, this is one issue that as a community we are united on and will be fighting at all levels of government to make sure we get an outcome on. I say this to the National Party: you have underestimated the resolve of people in our area and how far we intend fighting to make sure we have this area coal seam gas mining free.

In conclusion, I would like to make it clear that it is only the Labor Party that will stand with those people; the National Party has walked away. I know that it will pay the price for that in upcoming state and council elections. The fact is people are not going to vote for a party or for candidates who continue to push forward an industry that will be so destructive to our area—not only to our environment but also to our water resources and our water supplies. That is something that troubles so many people. We currently have a licence that goes over one of the major water resources for the Tweed area. The impact will be absolutely huge in our area.

Finally, I say again what an honour it is to have been re-elected and to have been re-elected on a range of issues. One in particular is that I and the Labor Party are committed to fighting to make sure that together we can ensure that the North Coast of New South Wales is coal seam gas mining free.

Ewen Jones (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to start by stating the obvious: I am over the moon about being back here for a second term and representing my seat of Herbert and my city of Townsville in this nation's 44th Parliament. I feel a great debt of gratitude to the electors of Herbert, and I assure them I will be here and in my electorate doing my best for our city and our region.

No-one wins an election by themselves. The team behind me last year was massive. I would like to acknowledge my immediate and extended family, but especially my wife, Linda, and my three children—Emma, Abbie and Andrew—for their continued and determined support of me and my role. To my staff, ably led by Sheree Lineham, I say thank you. For any sales team to be effective, the back office must be strong. I have a back office of Sheree, Karen Ruffle, Calum Kippin and Kurt Fong. There are none better in this country. That they were able to marshal their families, friends, contacts, casual acquaintances and strangers from the street to help get me re-elected says a lot about their genuine enthusiasm for their roles. To all the team who worked so hard from the leadership group of Tony Abbott, Julie Bishop and Warren Truss, to the party organisations, to the party members in Townsville, to our friends and supporters, I say thank you very much. I want to especially thank a few others who went above and beyond the call of duty: to Michelle, Stephanie, Julie, Andrew, and Lenny, I thank you all; I would not be here without you. To the Jones collective and the Young LNP, I say thank you. I want to thank Molly, Dan, Brendan, Dale, Kelsey, Sam, Drew Boy, Emma, Thaddeus, Jessica, Scott, Dr Michael, Crystal, Chelsea, Ryan, Stathie and the hundreds of volunteers who these people were able to drag up to the front line in the name of getting me re-elected.

When Senator Ian Macdonald was first elected to the Senate in 1990 he was the only Liberal representative north of the south-east corner. That the LNP now boasts the members for Leichardt, Herbert, Dawson, Capricornia and, if you crib a little bit, Flynn, is full testament to the commitment Ian has to the role of being a senator for Queensland. His work in supporting our candidate for the seat of Kennedy, Noeline Ikin, where a swing of over 15 per cent was recorded to her, should go down as one of the great campaigns. His recognition of a truly great candidate to give proper representation to the people of north-west Queensland, and his willingness to back her all the way, should never be underestimated or undervalued. Noeline will come to this place and she will be a great member. I would like to also pass on my personal congratulations to the coalition's class of 2010. We have all been returned and will become a great force in this parliament. I especially want to congratulate the members for Aston, Kooyong and Riverina for their elevation to parliamentary secretary roles.

I do not propose to spend my time here pointing out the weaknesses and errors of the previous government—for a start I only have 20 minutes. The Abbott government will be a government for all Australians. It will be a government that sets tasks and gets them done. It will be a government that builds infrastructure and will facilitate growth and trade. Locally, we will finish the Townsville Ring Road, finally fix Dalrymple Road, replace the Haughton River Bridge, build a community centre and a cyclone evacuation centre in the northern beaches, fix the Bowden Road intersection, install lights for walkers on Castle Hill and River Way Drive, and upgrade facilities at the Townsville Showgrounds. Additionally, we will finish the Vantassel road extension, which should have been done in 2010. Additional to this will be the establishment of the Australian Institute of Tropical Health and Medicine at James Cook University.

It will be a government that will reduce waste and remove the constraints of red tape. Small business has been especially hurt by new and costly regulations and red tape. It has strangled enterprise and it must stop. We will do this because it is not government that creates wealth, nor does it create jobs. What government does is set the parameters around which business can do things and then gets out of the way. That is what we will do.

Our Treasurer, JB Hockey, stated in a speech to the Centre for Independent Studies that the coalition has a plan in three parts:

Firstly we must be honest about the challenges we face.

Secondly we must lay down a road map that helps us to deal with those challenges.

And thirdly we must harness the support of the nation as we follow the road map notwithstanding the obstacles that will be put in our way.

No matter the sector, no matter the industry, no matter the cause or campaign, these basic tenets are true and we need to heed these words.

If we do not include the people of Australia in our vision, we are doomed to fail. I will challenge our side of politics to look further than the political wedge or the news grab for our discourse with the Australian people. We all deserve better than we have had. We have to be able to articulate that vision for the future. We have to get the people of Australia to understand and know that vision. And we have to deliver on that vision, keeping Australians informed along the way. That is the mission we have undertaken, and it is a mission in which I am proud to play a part.

The Abbott government took a series of commitments to the 7 September election, and we will honour our commitments. Central to this is the repeal of the carbon tax. No issue could be clearer to the people of Australia during the election: if you want the carbon tax removed, you vote for a coalition candidate. Nothing could be clearer. That we won 90 seats in a very clear majority should tell all those in this House what people want. They want this toxic tax gone. I urge the Labor Party to respect this mandate, as we respected its mandate to remove Work Choices. To do otherwise is to thumb its nose at the people of this great nation.

Townsville is a hub for our region and the north of our country. It will continue to be so and grow with responsibility and with the reputation for being able to get things done. Whether it is the west to north-west minerals province and its renewable energy corridor possibilities, or further north and east to PNG and Fiji and the Melanesian world, we will grow to become an educational trade hub for that dynamic arc of the Pacific. Townsville will be part of the future.

The future is indeed bright, but only if we grab it with both hands. Tony Abbott's backing of the white paper on the development of northern Australia is an act of pure leadership. Clearly, this is an incredibly important part of my future in this place. That there are only eight House of Representatives seats north of the Tropic of Capricorn in the entire country means that there are 142 south of that line. The politically expedient thing to do, if he was just about winning elections, would be to concentrate on other parts of the country. That he and Andrew Robb can see that the development of the north is imperative for the future of our country is a credit to them both.

The white paper is an opportunity to really grab our part of the Asian century, but we must be tenacious in our approach to this. We must remember to keep the paper looking to the future. I want the paper to be framed by the question: 'If we were having this conversation in 2050 or 2100, what would have to have happened for the development of northern Australia to be a success?' We must, first and foremost, look at what our customers want. We must then decide what can be built, maintained and delivered. We must approach the development of northern Australia at a macro level. Above all, we must get the baseline science right. You do not build a house starting with the roof—you get the foundations right. Everything we do impacts on our environment. It is how we manage those impacts which should drive our decisions. It is pointless to grow a $20 million crop of mung beans if it wipes out the billion-dollar prawn industry in the Gulf of Carpentaria. James Cook University, the only university to be established with its purpose in education directed toward life in the tropical world, is perfectly placed to lead this venture. We can lead the world on many fronts—from tropical medicine to clean energy generation to technology—if we seize the opportunity. This should not be a science versus development project; this should be development guided by science.

The white paper should look not only at what private enterprise will invest in but also at what private capital will not invest in. Some suggest the use of the $1.4 trillion of superannuation savings of Australians should be targeted as a driver here. I am certainly not against that, in principle, but for them to invest they must either be guaranteed a return or the enterprise must first be established and proving itself, through its returns, to be an attractive investment. We cannot speculate with the life savings of other Australians. To throw superannuation savings at speculative investments, the way a Labor-Greens government wanted to with the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, would be folly of the highest order. Venture capital has its place but it must be supported by taxation reform. That is a discussion in which all Australians must play a part; I am willing to be part of that.

When Andrew Robb addressed a luncheon in Townsville on his plan to develop the north, he used this description: presently, there are roughly 500 million people in the tropical world—that is, people living between the tropics of Capricorn and Cancer—who could be described as middle class. That number is expected to grow rapidly to 3.2 billion people by the year 2035. These people will want many things, including energy, quality education, quality food, cutting-edge health outcomes, holiday destinations and investment opportunities. If we miss this chance, if we sit back and do not plan, if we wait for them to come and throw money and infrastructure at us, we will be, as Lee Kuan Yew once famously suggested, the 'white trash of Asia'.

We have an opening and we must grab it and fight for it. This is too important an opportunity to miss. As a country, we need to ensure our own people are offered opportunities for personal growth and success. From our first Australians to the newest members of our society, the chance to prosper is what makes Australia great. That means that our education, industrial relations and social security systems need to be working correctly and engaged at every level.

Education is the key to everything, I believe. From health outcomes to work and pay, the better your education and attitude the better, statistically at least, you will cope. I do not have a university degree; I am an auctioneer by trade. But my life was given the best possible start by parents who loved me and believed in me and by quality teachers at Texas State School and Toowoomba Grammar School who drilled the basics into me until I knew them by heart and instinct. Under the guidance of Christopher Pyne, the coalition will allow more autonomy at the local educational level. We will empower principals and school communities to make the decisions. We need to get more decision-making capability closer to the students so that we get the best possible outcome for our future leaders. There is a lot we can do from this place to assist the states to deliver quality education. We must work together and be constructive, through COAG, to achieve better results for all Australians.

From education we go to work. We must be a country which competes on quality and service. We are a high-wage country. We can have high wages into the future if we have low input costs. Over the last two terms of government, we have seen a build-up of regulation and constraints around doing business in Australia. Cleaning these up does not mean a drop in working conditions; it means that if we want jobs we have to service the customer, not the other way around. If we do not, the customer leaves and does not come back. More than that: he tells his friends and they do not come back, either. We have needed foreign investment in Australia since 1788, and the world's capital is very mobile. We must provide the level of service and productivity we need to present a compelling case for investment. It is that simple.

I reaffirm the coalition's commitment to fair indexation for DFRDB and DFRB military superannuants from 1 July this year. The use of the CPI as the only lever for increase has diminished their pension's capacity to keep up. The inability of previous governments, going all the way back to Whitlam's, to apply the male total average weekly earnings and the pensioners and beneficiaries cost of living index measures to their pensions has gone on far too long. I am proud to be part of a government which will, from 1 July 2014, finally right this wrong.

Coming from Townsville, I am acutely aware of the service given to our community by the men and women of our ADF. We need to honour our past, and the centenary of ANZAC will be a great moment in time for all Australians. We do, however, need to be vigilant with our care of our most recent veterans. Additionally, we are also closing in on the 50th anniversary of the battle of Long Tan—surely a great moment for Australia to look back and right some more wrongs. As other members have noted in this place, this must be commemorated with respect and dignity.

I am heartened to hear that the Abbott government will work towards formal recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians in our Constitution. This, along with former Prime Minister Rudd's apology to the stolen generation, is a symbolic gesture whose time has come. It will not, however, get one more person a job, stop one more person going to jail or stop one more student disengaging from the education system.

Those are things which must be corrected in conjunction with our First Australians. It must be driven by them and for them. We in this place must offer every assistance and incentive, but there must be an outcome. In many cases, we are talking about changing generational disengagement. That is not easy; it never has been. But nothing worthwhile comes with no effort. There will be mistakes and errors, and there will be people hurt along the way.

For too long, good intentioned people have sat back and made excuses or looked the other way. For too long, the answer has been to simply throw more money at the problem. It is my firm belief that money is not the answer. It has created industries where people have profited from others' misery. It has, in some cases, meant that corruption has occurred. I will make it my business to uncover corruption where the victims are the most vulnerable in our society. There must be a way to hold the individuals to account. It has to happen, and it must start now. On the weekend there was a meeting of local Aboriginal and Islander elders aimed at engaging kids at risk, not just kids in the system but kids at risk of getting into the system. That is where our focus has to be. We have to spend money, but it costs over $100,000 a year to keep someone in jail, and we have to keep that in perspective.

The answer to getting people out of poverty is worthwhile and meaningful work. Minister Andrews is always saying that the best social security you can ever give someone is a job. Senator Nigel Scullion has always made the observation that this is not a black problem; this is not a problem purely for Aboriginal and Islander people. This is a poverty problem. This problem exists everywhere in the world where poverty exists. This is a problem everywhere in the world where people cannot engage properly in education and health systems or get meaningful work. We, as a country and as a society, must stand up and be counted. There are many steps and many debates, discussions, disagreements, and knock-down, drag-out arguments that have to take place along the way. We should have these debates, but meaningful work should be the goal for every Australian.

I said in my maiden speech that no-one would be left behind. I meant it then and I mean it now. Australia is a great country and I represent the best part of that great country. North Queensland is an absolutely magnificent place, and Townsville is obviously the greatest place in North Queensland. As the Treasurer said, there are challenges, and we must produce the road map to better times, which will include bringing everyone together and allowing them to play their part. I will be doing my best to represent my city and region for the next three years. Townsville and its people are a forward-looking group. They are a group that see the glass half-full. They are the fox terrier that is always chasing after something. They are the blue cattle dog that is always looking to work. We are optimists. We are workers who get things done, and we will continue to do so. I thank the House.

Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I begin this speech by acknowledging the traditional owners and thanking them for their continuing stewardship. It has been just over six years since we had the very first welcome to country in this parliament, under Prime Minister Rudd. It occurred before parliament started, out in the foyer, under the flag. It was a long time coming, but I am proud to say that that practice has continued. It happens every day in this parliament under a range of speakers.

Soon after that welcome to country was the apology to the stolen generations. When I look back on my six years here, I see that as my best day in parliament. There have been many good days since then, obviously. Today, welcoming into the parliament the new member for Griffith, Terri Butler—following in the footsteps of former Prime Minister Rudd—has been a good day. I welcome and look forward to working with the new member for Griffith. While acknowledging former friends, I also acknowledge the former member for Petrie, Yvette D'Ath, on her win on the weekend.

I would also like to acknowledge one of my constituents who is up in the gallery, Laurie Woods DFC, from Sunnybank. I know Laurie well. I will talk a little bit about Laurie in acknowledging him. He joined the Royal Australian Air Force in June 1942, at the tender age of 19. He only looks like he is in his late fifties; he is a little bit older. Laurie has some great books out. He is here on a book-selling tour at the moment. His books are great yarns about his time as a bomb aimer with No. 460 Squadron at RAAF Binbrook in Lincolnshire. He recalls that, by October 1944, only eight of the 49 air crew—who made up seven crews—posted to No. 460 Squadron were left alive. He tells the tale of a raid on Wanne-Eickel. When an aircraft was damaged and the pilot was wounded, Laurie had to fly the plane.

It is good to have a constituent here, Laurie. He is here having a bit of a look around Parliament House. I know him from the Sunnybank RSL. I know you were not the navigator, Laurie, but I will give you some orientation for Parliament House. We are on the eastern side. We have green carpet over here. Think of it like the military. There are 150 members of the House of Representatives, on this side of the flagpole. Think of them like the Army. The 150 House of Reps people do all the grunt work. Then, on the other side of the flagpole, on the western side, you have red carpet. It should really be white carpet, because they are like the Navy, the white ensign. We do not really know what they do over there, on the other side of the flagpole, but they are a bit like the Navy—they are important; they serve a role. But we all know, Laurie, that the most important part of Parliament House is not the front, where the public is and where you came in, but the blue-carpeted part out the back. That is just like the military; it is like the RAAF: everyone, whether they are on the green carpet or the red carpet—in the Reps or in the Senate—all want to be on the blue carpet. It is just like the ADF: everyone wants to be in the air force. Isn't that right, Laurie? I will take that interjection: 'The air force is the best!'

On a more serious note, I would like to thank you, Laurie, and the generation you represent, because not all of your flying comrades are here and not all of your military comrades are here with us today, but I do thank you and your generation for the bravery that you showed. Laurie is here with his and my publisher, Dan Kelly, who runs a printing business in my electorate. It is good to see you as well, Dan Kelly.

It really is a privilege to be able to speak in this 44th Parliament, and I am here today because of the incredible support I received from people like Laurie and the good people of Moreton, and from many volunteers, including people from the Australian Labor Party. So, to all of my friends and comrades from the union movement, to the community groups, to the organisations, to the branch members, and to my family: I thank you for the great work that you have done. I am going to mention some of those in particular: Julieanne Campbell from the AMWU, who was the volunteer coordinator, skilfully organised people to tell that Labor story. We did not have money for billboards like my opponent did; we did not have a lot of fundraising money coming our way, but we were able to go out and tell that Labor story of the things that we believe in: justice, equity and opportunity—three principles laid down on a base of dignity, employment and education. These are the things that we bring to the Australian story. I also thank Trent Abberfield from the CPSU who helped coordinate the ability to tell those stories to the people of Moreton.

I thank the community leaders. I know it is dangerous when you start mentioning some, and I will not cover all of them; I know I will not. But I would particularly like to mention Lewis Lee, who worked tirelessly throughout the campaign and has done so over the last decade or so for the people of the south side, irrespective of what political party they are connected with. I thank Melody Chen, Peter Kao, Professor Choui, Wayne Ko, Anthony Lin, Danny Yo, Peter Low, Stanley Hsu, Janeth Deen and Mustafa Ally, to name but a few.

I would also like to mention three of the hardest working Brisbane City councillors: my local councillor Steve Griffiths; Milton Dick, from the Richlands Ward; and also Nicole Johnston, who is actually not a member of the Labor Party—she is not from my tribe—but who is a great, fantastic local advocate who is always prepared to tell people what the truth is in her electorate, irrespective of the consequences. To all three of you: your support and advice on council issues was critical for the campaign we ran in Moreton.

I say so because one of the important issues was the 'Sardine City' plan which is being imposed on the people of the south side of Brisbane. I know that there is more work to be done and I am committed to carrying out more information and education campaigns about Lord Mayor Graham Quirk's 'Sardine City' plan. Also, the person who will actually be signing off on that plan when it goes to the state government will be the former lord mayor, the now premier of Queensland, Campbell Newman. He will be signing off on the 'Sardine City' plan and the incredible consequences it will have for people all over Brisbane, with much smaller backyards on much smaller lots. People will not even be consulted about what is taking place next door: you will not know that a set of units is going up until you see a tradesman's ute turn up. That is not the way that you consult with the community.

So there is more to be done. I know that we have to contact the state members connected with the south side of Brisbane—all over Brisbane, really—to make sure they understand that people are unhappy with this proposed Brisbane City plan, a plan that would forever change the character of the suburbs on the south side of Brisbane. If you have driven around that area, you know the old Queenslanders—the tin and timber that makes Queensland homes special. We will instead have no more verandahs or backyards to speak of.

I know that you need development—I am not one of those who is just focused on the 1950s—and I know that climate change is real, so we just cannot keep building further and further away from our community facilities, particularly when we have a federal government that has made a commitment not to fund public transport. That means that we cannot go further and further away. We have to have appropriate development. But it must be appropriate and it must be done in consultation with our communities. Do not hide from people like you are doing; you must have fair dinkum consultation—fair dinkum community meetings—to give people a chance to speak up, otherwise their communities will be changed forever, and we would not want it to happen in places like Moorooka or Chelmer or Graceville or Sherwood, or anywhere, basically, in Brisbane. We need to keep consulting and engaging with the community. It should not be something that people are scared of, even when it is an unpalatable discussion you are going to have. So we cannot let Campbell Newman and his white-shoe-brigade mates change our suburbs without any consultation or input from people on the south side.

I also thank the many wonderful activists from the 10 Labor Party branches that touch on Moreton. I am in the Walter Taylor branch, and I know that they are the best branch, but I also thank all of the other branches and the people who stepped up to do work: Sally from the Annerley branch was indefatigable, was seen everywhere, and really made sure that the Annerley branch continued that tradition of covering a much broader area than they actually represent. I will also mention some other activists: Cam Crowther; Rod Beisel; Sandeep Sarathy; Ricky Lee; Joan McGrath; Alice Orwat; Phil Day; Norm Bullen; Joanne Phillips; Jesse Thompson; Ines Almeida; Felix Gibson, who was the school captain of Nyanda State High School, the school that was closed down under the Newman government; Craig Wood; Jennifer and Dallas Elvery; Brendan Crotty; Sam Pigeon and all of the education people associated with those guys; Michael Oliver; Ken Boyne; Annamarie Newton; and former councillor Mark Bailey, who was also a great help with the 'Sardine City' campaign that I mentioned earlier. There are hundreds of other volunteers whose names I do not have time to go through—people who spent months and, in some cases, years going out and knocking on doors, telephoning people, and going out and doing street stalls. I was starting to think that Sally only lived on street stalls and did not have a home to go to, I saw her out so often!

I know that is a hard slog when you have policies that people have questions about, but obviously the Labor Party will only thrive when we have the ability to sit down and talk to people—to look into their eyes and say, 'This is the reasoning behind the policy; this is what we believe in; this is what we bring to the Southside.' The story in Moreton was tough. On election night 13 seats that had a bigger margin than mine fell, so it was a tough night for Labor with nearly 18 seats falling. I was fortunate enough to have a swing to me, and a lot of it goes back to the work of those volunteers in my electorate on a night when not many Labor people did have a swing to them.

I will mention my wonderful office staff: Kate, who comes to Canberra with me; Norma, who organises basically my entire life; Isaac, who, sadly, has gone back to university via Europe to become a schoolteacher and will not be in the office anymore; Peter, who always has time for individual complaints; Andrew, Melanie and Lee. I thank them and their families, because so many of their children and loved ones missed them during the election campaign because they were working above and beyond for Moreton. I make special mention of Lee Lunney, who is on maternity leave and actually delivered her baby the day before the election, probably one of the last babies in Queensland born under Prime Minister Rudd. Sid Coggins, I say hi to you. I hope you will not be too old before you get to experience another Labor Prime Minister—maybe before your third birthday even. I thank Terry Wood and Matt Jutsum especially, but the person with her hand firmly on the rudder of the good ship Moreton is my great friend and former union comrade Ros McLennan. Ros, your management of the campaign with Jules and Terry and the leadership team ensured that it ran precisely like a fine quality Swiss watch.

Finally, to my own family, to my boys Leo and Stanley and my wife Lea: thank you for the sacrifice that you have made because of my political career. I believe that every politician who is a parent is selfish. You have to be to be a politician who is connected with your electorate. Obviously our families make the sacrifice because of our commitment to our electorates, and I know the people of Moreton appreciate the fact that you were able to let me spend so much time with them rather than with you. I know that that is a sad part of being a politician. Not a day goes by in this chamber and in my office when I do not remember the sacrifices made by the hundreds of hard-working volunteers, and I will never forget those who gave so much. I say that because when I walk down the hall going to my office I have an entire wall of photographs of all the volunteers, so I know you are watching me making sure that I do my job well. I promise that I won't let you down.

I won't let you down, because I believe in striving for a brighter future—I believe in that light on the hill. It is what the Labor Party is about. We look to the future, not behind us with rose-coloured glasses dreaming about a past that never existed. I believe in tomorrow and what it can bring for all, not just looking at the past. When I first rose in this House six years ago, I promised to deliver for the people of Moreton. The best way to check on whether a politician has met their KPIs is to look at their first speech. I had a look at my first speech, and in that I made a commitment to rolling out sound barriers on Riawena Road, and that was delivered in 2008. I talked about the Toohey Road bike path, and that was delivered on 3 June 2009. The Acacia Ridge Elizabeth Street rail overpass, something that I had been campaigning on since 2003, was delivered on 5 June 2009. I also made mention of the Chinese war memorial, which Laurie would know all about because it is at the Sunnybank RSL, in consultation with the Chinese diaspora. The first sod was turned by Ralph Seeto, representing the Chinese community, and Phil Lep, representing Sunnybank RSL, on 16 July 2010. It is still a wonderful part of the community and the legacy continues every year where there is a student from local schools who also tells the story of those Chinese Australians, who were not citizens but were able to die in the service of their country. A big commitment I made going way back to 2003 was the Kessels and Mains Road upgrade. If you are in Moreton today you can actually drive under that overpass. It has taken forever and it still has a long way to go, but you can drive under the overpass today. The first sod was turned in January 2012 with the member for Grayndler after it was announced in the 2011 May budget. It should even finish early. The Southside community centre has been purchased and opened and is now being renovated in Marooka.

Six years ago I also spoke in my first speech about the importance of organ donation, because a friend of mine had just died. The Rudd government's reform of the organ donor system is one of the most significant yet one of the least-talked-about achievements of the previous government. When we assumed the government benches, organ donation was sitting at around 10 donors per million of the population, which I think everyone would agree is disgraceful. Since then, the rate has steadily risen to 15.6 and it is heading north. There is more to be done and it is bipartisan; there is a joint ticket on that one. Despite this outstanding achievement, Australia still has one of the lowest levels of organ donation in the developed world. Organ donation saves lives, and I remain committed to ensuring that this trend continues.

Another topic I mentioned in my speech was racism and the Racial Discrimination Act. I think I was elected by the people of Moreton, which is a very multicultural electorate, because I represent their values. In 2007, I ran in an election against a sitting member who had said in a radio interview: 'My community is being exhausted by African refugees.' Surely this was an opportunity to appeal to the lesser angels in Australian society. In my first speech, I made my position on racism and hate very clear:

Contrary to earlier misguided statements, I do not see an exhausted community. Instead, I see suburbs full of people who are committed to getting on with and helping their neighbours.

I think that we need to be eternally vigilant to make sure that the people of Moreton and the people of Australia understand racism.

I am concerned about the Attorney-General's intention to repeal section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. I think that is misguided. I think that bigoted and vitriolic abuse can seriously damage one's mental health, break down community cohesion and sometimes lead to acts of physical violence. That can start with that sort of behaviour. We too often see people fanning the flames, like Alan Jones did back around the time of the Cronulla riots when he called those young men 'vermin' and 'mongrels'. That sort of stuff should never be tolerated. I am disappointed with the Attorney-General for taking this approach.

I also made a commitment to the people in my electorate that I would take steps to introduce religion as a ground of discrimination so that you can make a complaint. You can do it in Queensland under the anti-discrimination laws, and the world has not ended in Queensland because of the people's capacity to do that. So I reassert my commitment to the constituents who approached me about that, and I will work with my community to make sure that we advance that.

Obviously, what we are as the Labor Party always takes a bit of a recalibration after an election. We need to be the party of vision. We need to do the heavy lifting when it comes to making sure that Australia has a way forward. Recognising Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in the Constitution is a good start. Signs and symbols represent the real world beyond. I know that we can appeal to the better angels—we have done it with refugees in the past—and not to the lesser angels, which occurs when racism and riots break out. (Time expired)

Warren Entsch (Leichhardt, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise this afternoon to take the opportunity of speaking on this address-in-reply in the breadth in which I am able to cover issues in my electorate. Over the past seven-odd years, I have been very much saddened by what I have seen as a decline in the Cairns region. This has very much been as a direct result of poor policy decisions by the two previous Labor governments.

Initially, going back to 2007, we saw the loss of NQEA and the majority of our shipbuilding and maintenance industry as a result of the government at that time cancelling a $300 million contract to build a section of the air warfare destroyers. What was particularly galling about that was that they had allocated the contract. They then cancelled it and reissued it to a southern based firm, but, after a couple of years of not being able to deliver what was necessary and a whole lot of stuff-ups, they actually came back to the original contractor and asked if they were in a position to, in effect, re-establish their firm again to do the contract because it was not being delivered where they had sent it. Of course, unfortunately, after a couple of years, the company were no longer able to do that.

We then had the pink batts scheme, which not only caused the death of a young local electrician, 22-year-old Mitchell Sweeney, but affected many small businesses. A lot of these businesses were insulation businesses in my electorate. I remember talking to businesses which had been long established and had actually bought in stock to carry out the requirements of the scheme. Unfortunately, there were a lot of what I call carpetbaggers that came into the business and basically took all the low-hanging fruit. When the decision was made, without any consultation with the legitimate businesses in the area, they had leasing arrangements on vehicles; they had staff; and they had a whole lot of other stock, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of stock, which they could not give away, let alone sell. We saw some very long established businesses in our area close down as a direct result of that.

Of course, we saw the school halls debacle, where it seemed that the only businesses that won the contracts were the large multinationals. I recall talking to one of our bigger local businesses up there which had survived over a very difficult period in business in construction. I asked him what the secret of his longevity was. He said to me that one of the greatest blessings he had was that he had never, ever got a contract for the school halls, because he said they were subcontracted out to the multinationals and in many cases they were having to provide goods and services well under the actual cost of provision. Unfortunately, in that particular case, he did not survive. He eventually succumbed to a lot of these bad policies, and that business, along with hundreds of employees, was basically shut down.

We then had the live cattle debacle and the Labor Party's knee-jerk reaction, which certainly affected graziers in my electorate around the Cape York area and into the western gulf. The sad part about it, these years later, is that that impact is still being seen quite profoundly. As we go into a drought situation now, there are many cattle out on those areas that should have gone out on those boats a few years ago, but unfortunately, because they had to be retained because of that decision, they became too heavy and could not be shipped. Of course, that had flow-on effects in too much overgrazing. They could not sell them locally, and we are still seeing those flow-on effects now.

The closure of the Coral Sea was a direct result of the Labor Party promoting the lock-up mentality being pushed by the American gas company called the Pew foundation. Instead of promoting sustainable multiple use, this has pushed long-term, long-suffering family owned businesses to the edge. At the moment, while we have made a decision to reverse that decision, there is still a family there, the Lamasons, of Great Barrier Reef Tuna, who have basically been pushed over that edge and desperately need some support. Even though we have reversed it, that is still not going to save that family business, and we need to do something to make sure that they are able to retire from their industry with a level of dignity.

The proposal for the blanket World Heritage listing of Cape York was another one of those initiatives that was pushed by the Labor-Greens agenda. It has created a huge amount of uncertainty for Cape York residents and for businesses, who feared the locking up of any future economic potential. The larger landholders in the area are, of course, Indigenous people, who have campaigned for decades to recover a lot of their land and who were faced with the prospect of having no say in their future direction.

Thankfully, with the support of the state government, we are now starting to move away from that mentality and looking at conservation based on merit, accepting that landholders have a legitimate role in working on their landholdings. But the results of all these decisions that I have just explained, and many more, are very sobering. Small businesses have for years been struggling to stay afloat. Four hundred small businesses in the Far North have closed their doors in the previous two-year period. We have record unemployment levels and, at one point, they were the highest in Australia. Even today, I note, we have the second highest youth unemployment rates in the country. You have to be worried about that. Those numbers have doubled since 2007. As I say, all of these issues have had a profound impact on our region.

However, it is not all doom and gloom at this point, because Far Northerners are an optimistic bunch. We are starting to see some serious signs of recovery. A number of big-ticket projects are sitting in the wings, waiting for a start. They just need a little support. The major one that was announced was the $4.2 billion Aquis integrated resort-casino proposal for Yorkeys Knob. I congratulate Tony Fung, the proponent, for all the public information and consultation that has so far taken place. It is an unprecedented project for Far North Queensland; in fact, it is unprecedented for Australia. It is one of the largest of its kind in the world. I certainly look forward to the outcome of the EIS.

The same goes for the Mount Emerald Wind Farm project, which has been stalled for over five years. The latest storm over the delay was due to a $1 million study in relation to the 60-odd towers that they are going to put on this site and the impacts they would have on the breeding habits of the northern quoll. That delayed the project last year. This $500 million project will provide power for 75,000 homes a year. It is great to see that they are now starting to gain some momentum.

We also have the $1 billion Etheridge Integrated Agricultural Project, the 20-year $1 billion Cairns Airport redevelopment and the $1.4 billion Ella Bay resort, near Innisfail. If projects like these stack up, they will be absolute game-changers for our economy. So, rather than making excuses as to why they cannot be done, let us find a way to make them happen. Let us start looking at building infrastructure and other complementary initiatives that will have a flow-on effect. The $42 million investment in the Australian Institute of Tropical Health and Medicine at JCU is a case in point.

I am very passionate about the establishment of a tropical campus for the Australian Institute of Sport. Within that $42 million investment for the tropical health and medicine faculty, there is a faculty for tropical sports medicine. So it provides an opportunity for us to grab that and go with it.

Mossman Botanical Gardens is a great project. It will cost a couple of million dollars in total to establish it, but all the prehistoric flowering trees of the Daintree rainforests of that area will be showcased. It will provide quite a unique opportunity for people to see them. The Mossman Botanical Gardens Committee have done an outstanding job in bringing this together. They have now identified a parcel of land, which they will be working on. I am hoping that they can start to turn the first sod on that sooner rather than later.

The government have also announced funding of $700 million for an essential piece of road infrastructure: the Bruce Highway from Gordonvale to Cairns. We certainly need to ensure that we keep doing that. We will not be locking up the cape with a blanket World Heritage listing. Areas such as the Quinkan Reserve, near Laura, certainly need that listing and they should be judged on their merits. I have no doubt that they will proceed once all the consultation and consents go ahead. But we need to open that area for opportunities for landholders there. The government recently found the cash for a $10 million infrastructure project in Cape York which will include a very significant amount for the Peninsula Development Road. That is the way we can start to open up opportunities for Cape York.

What the current government have done and what the previous government did not do was: firstly, speak to the state government; secondly, actually put money with the promise; and, thirdly, actually gone through a consultation process, talking to the elected leaders in the area so that we can prioritise it according to their needs. At this point I congratulate David Kempton, who is the state member for Cook. Only the other day he announced a $10 million addition to this project, for the ongoing sealing of the Peninsula Development Road.

In Cape York we also have the Scherger Air Force base, near Weipa, which I can assure will serve our community much better as an operational air base than as a 'prison farm'—which is how I refer to it. It has been used temporarily as a detention centre. Now that it is being closed down, I think we need to seriously look at the opportunities provided in the further recommendations of the defence white paper, to build its capacity as an operational base. At the same time I think we should be also looking at the expansion of HMAS Cairns, which, in my view, as we are looking at moving our defence assets north, is an absolute no-brainer. Again, we have to find ways to make these things happen and to encourage projects that will have flow-on effects in education, tropical health, tropical agriculture, tropical aquaculture and of course tropical medicine. These tie in perfectly with the coalition's Northern Australia plan.

This policy is the first I have seen in my lifetime that actually prioritises the opportunities for Northern Australia, and it will have ramifications that will last for generations. I was a member of the Northern Australia Water and Land Taskforce in 2005. We have been developing our policy since that time. The coalition government are already talking to communities. We have an extensive consultation process. We will be moving around most Northern Australia centres and talking to people about agriculture, about alternative energy opportunities, about water security and about a range of other initiatives.

We will also be looking at how to increase tourism, given that tourism is the largest industry in Cairns, my home town. We are looking to increase tourism to two million international visitors a year, and a key market for us is China. Chinese visitors to Australia grew nearly 16 per cent in 2012, to more than 626,000, and they spent $4.2 billion. The Tourism 2020 Strategy estimates that China has the potential to grow to between $7.4 billion and $9 billion in real expenditure by 2020. Northern Australia will get a significant slice of that pie.

I applaud the coalition initiative in dealing with the root of problems in obtaining visas for Chinese tourists. It is all about a collaborative effort, and we have identified electronic visas, multi entry visas and urgent-processing visas as the things the Chinese market is looking for. There are many other countries competing for that market; many have already seen their opportunities and grabbed them. It is important that we do the same. That is the sort of initiative that will encourage Chinese airlines to commit to Australia. We also need to raise awareness about the value of pre-clearance in Cairns for PNG travel and goods. That is something else we need to organise, and I have been in discussions with the minister on that issue.

There is also a range of social issues I intend to keep focusing on. Mental Health is one that I have been raising for many years. Local organisations such as the Declan Crouch Foundation face an ongoing battle raising money for suicide prevention. They are trying to raise money for adolescent facilities in Cairns. They do an incredible job raising awareness. Ruth Crouch, whose family suffered the tragedy of losing her young son Declan through suicide, has been absolutely focused on getting adolescent beds at Cairns Hospital, but we have to expand it more than that. We have to make sure our existing mental health services, particularly in juvenile mental health, are not only safe but also adequately funded. I have been working with organisations including the Cairns Mental Health Carers' Hub and the Time Out House. They play an integral role for people with mental health issues, and it is vital that we do not lose these services. In fact, it is critical that we expand them.

In aged care the Mossman District Nursing Home project is extremely worthwhile but, under the current quota system, cannot get the bed allocations and funding grants it needs to get up and running. It has been going now for as long as I have been a member—that is, since 1996. I am told that the minister is currently working through issues with the department and the Prime Minister regarding an ACAR system, and I welcome any developments that arise.

Meanwhile, the Department of Health and Ageing owns the Star of the Sea facility on Thursday Island, which is an appalling facility. Over the past few years I have been raising this with the previous government to no avail. Fortunately I have been able to get Minister Fifield to affirm the commitment to better aged care in the Torres Strait. The coalition will develop a Torres Strait aged-care master plan, which will be produced in consultation with the state and local governments, the Torres Strait Regional Authority and the local community. The community itself will have the opportunity to have a say on the future of aged care in their region.

I also had the opportunity to get the funding for the sea walls—another of my long-time chestnuts. I managed to get the $12 million that was committed by former minister Simon Crean about 18 months ago. We have that money now and they can now start work. It is great to see that we were able to find those funds.

Insurance, affordability and lack of insurance availability, is another major issue in my region. Senator Arthur Sinodinos is absolutely on board and doing some fabulous work. He is keenly aware that insurance affordability continues to cause financial and emotional strain, and he is also concerned about the impact of high insurance prices on the region's economic growth. I am hoping that over the next couple of months there will be some significant announcements made in relation to dealing with some of these problems. There are a lot of initiatives that we will be announcing shortly.

We are on the cusp of a prosperous and brilliant future for the first time in many years. You can feel it. There is confidence in the air, our tail is up and there is even a bit of a wag in it. But it will not happen unless we want it to. We need to be looking at ways that we can facilitate these initiatives in economically, socially and environmentally sustainable ways. We cannot revert to what has happened in the past. We cannot allow the naysayers to squander these opportunities by continuing to search for reasons that they should not be realised.

I am excited at the prospect of being able to work with my home community to make this a reality. This is our chance; let us grasp it.

Gai Brodtmann (Canberra, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Defence) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am absolutely delighted tonight to be able to speak on the address-in-reply and to use this opportunity to spend some time talking about my much-loved electorate of Canberra. It has often occurred to me that I might be the only member of parliament who can guarantee that every other member of parliament has visited their electorate. Of course, I am not just talking about a flying visit; Canberra is your home for around 20 weeks a year. If your parliamentary career is long, that might be 20 weeks a year for as many as 20 years.

One might assume therefore that Canberra is everyone's home away from home; that you all have strong connections with my electorate and know it well. Unfortunately, I do not think this is the case. I think that, for most MPs and senators, almost all of the time spent here in Canberra is spent within the confines of this very building. Understandably, you want to get home to your electorates as soon as possible; however, I believe that as a result you are missing out on a great opportunity to get to know this wonderful city.

In my first speech in this place I said that I hope that in my time here I might convince more Australians to be proud of our national capital. I stand by this statement. However, I would also like to add that, in particular, I would like to improve the relationship between our federal parliamentarians and Canberra. Today I would like to issue an open invitation to all members of parliament on all sides to spend some time outside of this building while you are here—and not just driving to and from your apartment and a few restaurants around the inner south. If you did, what you would find is an incredibly diverse city—something far from the dull, boring, monotonous, concrete jungle which is so often depicted.

You can visit the very south of my electorate—suburbs like Gordon, Banks and Condor—and you could come with me to the Lanyon Youth Centre, where the YWCA runs a wonderful range of services for the youth of the south of Tuggeranong. While Canberra has a reputation for being full of highly paid, highly educated public servants, there is enormous social isolation in the very south of Canberra. The Lanyon Youth Centre regularly takes teenagers on trips into Civic. For many of these teenagers—and I know this is an extraordinary story—this trip is the first time they have ever seen Lake Burley Griffin.

You could travel a little further up the electorate to the Tuggeranong Town Centre, where my electorate office is based. Like so many Canberra town centres, Tuggeranong is perched on a beautiful lake. I have often heard it called the 'Venice of the south'. Tuggeranong is home to several government agencies, including the Department of Human Services and the department formerly known as FaCHSIA, now the Department of Social Services. The small businesses of Tuggeranong, predominantly in the hospitality, retail and automotive sectors, rely on the patronage of these public servants to support their business. Every time public service jobs are lost from Tuggeranong, these businesses suffer. Right now there are reports that IT jobs at the Department of Human Services will be moved out of Canberra, and Tuggeranong businesses are bracing themselves for this.

Like Tuggeranong, Woden is a town centre that is home to Commonwealth public service agencies. The Department of Health, among others, is based here. The staff of the Department of Health work hard in vital areas such as preventative health, mental health reform, vaccinations and immunisations. However, Prime Minister Abbott has questioned the value of these staff because they do not—according to him—run a single hospital or nursing home, dispense a single prescription or provide a single medical service. But I know that those Australians who have benefitted from programs such as national mental health reform value these staff immensely.

To the west of my electorate is the beautiful Weston Creek, one of the original districts of the ACT. Many suburbs in Weston Creek were devastated by the bushfires in 2003. All four lives that were lost on that terrible day were from this area. Today, the suburbs of Weston Creek have been rebuilt and they are thriving. New suburbs, too, are being built just north of Weston Creek, in the Molonglo Valley. These new suburbs are at the foot of Mount Stromlo, on top of which is perched the beautiful Mount Stromlo Observatory. Also devastated by the 2003 fires, the observatory has been rebuilt and is now, once again, a thriving and world-leading hub of space and spatial innovation.

To the east of my electorate you will find the industrial suburbs of Hume and Fyshwick—both of which are home to a range of small businesses and local industries and defence industries as well. These are the suburbs where the innovation that is required to diversify the ACT's economy is occurring.

The suburbs that surround this building, the inner south, are probably more familiar to my colleagues. This is where many of you live for 20 weeks a year. Some of your neighbours here in the inner south include the Winnunga Nimmityjah Aboriginal Health Service—an Aboriginal community running primary healthcare that services not just the ACT but also much of New South Wales. Just down the road is the Narrabundah Ball Park—home to the Canberra Cavalry, the Canberra baseball team made up of part-timers and amateurs that recently beat the multimillion dollar teams of Japan and Korea to be crowned Asian Baseball Champions.

The diversity of Canberra—geographic, economic and social—was a part of Canberra's design. For the most part we have Sir Robert Menzies to thank for that. Menzies did not like Canberra very much at first, and who can blame him? At the time he moved here Canberra was referred to as 'a cemetery with lights', 'the ruin of a good sheep station' and 'six suburbs in search of a city'. Menzies said:

I cannot honestly say that I liked Canberra very much; it was to me a place of exile; but I soon began to realise that the decision had been taken, that Canberra was and would continue to be the capital of the nation, and that it was therefore imperative to make it a worthy capital; something that the Australian people would come to admire and respect; something that would be a focal point for national pride and sentiment. Once I had converted myself to this faith, I became an apostle.

And an apostle he was, as Prime Minister Menzies put his government to the task of creating a capital worthy of the nation and a city that was truly the seat of government. Menzies declared his intention to 'build up Canberra as a capital in the eyes and minds of the Australian people'.

The establishment by Menzies of the National Capital Development Commission in 1958 was key to this vision. The National Capital Development Commission identified four principal tasks in its first annual report. These were to: complete the establishment of Canberra as the seat of government; to further its development as the administrative centre by providing facilities to permit further transfer of public servants from Melbourne—and those final public servants were not transferred from Melbourne to Canberra until 1990; to give Canberra an atmosphere and individuality worthy of the national capital; and to further the growth of the city as a place in which to live in comfort and dignity.

The commission adopted what was known a 'Y-plan' for decentralised development, or what we now call the satellite city concept, and built four new towns called Woden-Weston Creek, Belconnen, Tuggeranong and Gungahlin. Each of these parts of Canberra is as important as the next. Each of these town centres must prosper in order for Canberra as a whole to prosper. They must be properly supported through investment, through infrastructure, through population and—most importantly—through jobs.

Over the last year, most times that I have stood in this chamber to speak about my electorate, I have spoken about my fears for Canberra, my concern about Canberra's future. Today is no exception. The prosperity of Canberra, the ACT and the capital region is inextricably linked with the Commonwealth Public Service. While the proportion of Canberrans directly employed by the Commonwealth Public Service has decreased over time, it is still our largest employer. We must also remember that many Canberra small businesses, sole traders, microbusinesses, and even large businesses, rely on the federal government as a major client. So, when a government comes to power with a promise to substantially cut the Public Service, as the Abbott government has done, it must be aware that it is jeopardising the economy of the entire ACT and surrounding New South Wales.

Here we can learn an important lesson from our past. In 1996 John Howard was elected promising to cut 2½ thousand Public Service jobs. That ended up being over 30,000 Public Service jobs nationally and more than 15,000 here in Canberra. The impact on the Canberra economy was devastating. Fifteen thousand people out of work meant 15,000 people no longer patronising Canberra's small businesses, buying their products and using their services. Business bankruptcies in Canberra increased by 38.4 per cent in the 1996-97 financial year. Non-business bankruptcies also jumped sharply in 1995-96, by 38 per cent, and again in 1996-97, by 17 per cent.

The flow-on effects for Canberra's housing market were equally devastating. Between March 1995 and March 1998 the median house price in Australian capital cities grew by $22,950, or 17 per cent, and the median across the whole of Australia by $19,240, or 15 per cent. However, in Canberra the median house price fell by $5,750, or four per cent. In terms of the price index for established homes, over the same period Canberra's index fell by 3.7 points, in comparison to an increase of 11 points in the weighted average of Australian capital cities. Effectively $25,000 was slashed from the average Canberra house price. On 31 May last year the member for North Sydney made a joke on morning TV. He said, 'There is a golden rule for real estate in Canberra: you buy Liberal and you sell Labor.' He then proceeded to laugh wholeheartedly. I for one do not think the financial hardship of Canberrans is a laughing matter.

The reason I remember the coalition government job cuts of 1996 so clearly is that I was one of the 30,000 public servants to lose my job. In 1996 I was working at the Australian High Commission in New Delhi. Three months into a three-year posting I was called in to the high commissioner's office. The then high commissioner, Darren Gribble, is a friend and a man who always gets straight to the point. 'You've been sacked,' he said. I was shattered, and I was not the only one. It was a message that was being delivered around the world that day to 50 of my colleagues, as the entire public affairs division of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade was given its marching orders.

At the turn of 1997 I returned to a city that was devastated. In 1996 Canberrans learnt what can happen to this city when there is a government with no regard for our national capital, no understanding of the relationship between the Commonwealth Public Service and the economy of the ACT and region, and no appreciation for what public servants do. These are servants of democracy. They perform incredibly important jobs for the benefit of the nation. Every single public servant I have ever met is incredibly altruistic. They joined because they wanted to serve their country, and this government has little or no regard for that service and the job of a public servant.

The Abbott government was elected promising to cut at least 14,000 Commonwealth Public Service jobs 'as a starting point', to quote the Treasurer. It also promised to move thousands more Public Service jobs out of Canberra. At various points in the lead-up to the election, the then opposition promised to move government agencies out of Canberra to places including Tasmania, Geelong, the Central Coast and various northern Australian cities, like Karratha, Darwin and Cairns.

As I have already stated, it was the vision of none other than Sir Robert Menzies to 'build up Canberra as a capital in the eyes and minds of the Australian people'—and so he did. Menzies created a capital worthy of this nation, and now the party he led is seeking to destroy that vision. The truth is that over 60 per cent of the Commonwealth Public Service is already located outside of Canberra, and moving more Public Service jobs out of this town will only destroy it. Canberrans young and old are now waiting with bated breath and a large degree of fear. We are waiting for the Commission of Audit to report. We are waiting for the May budget. We are waiting to see how our city will fare.

There is so much to value about this city. I wish those opposite could see that. Last year, as you will be aware, Mr Deputy Speaker, Canberra celebrated its centenary—100 years since Lady Denman, wife of the then Governor-General, Lord Denman, announced that the name of the new Australian capital would be Canberra. And what a celebration it was. The centenary celebrations highlighted the diversity and creativity of the people and industries in Canberra and the region as well as the significant and ongoing contribution that Canberra makes to the nation. Last year we saw Canberra at its best, from the Canberra Day celebrations in March, which included a symphony and a ballet commissioned especially for Canberra, and the world's longest champagne bar, to the international sporting events that were held in Canberra for the very first time.

Through the celebrations, we learnt more about the communities we are connected with in the Murray-Darling Basin, through the One River project; we saw the best theatre Australia has to offer, through the Canberra Theatre's special centenary season; we recognised the importance of the ACT's unique villages, through Unmade Edges; and we opened previously inaccessible parts of the ACT, with the Centenary Trail. We learnt more about our history, and we thought more about our future. The program of centenary celebrations was outstanding, and if I were to detail my own highlights we would be here for hours. The centenary has enabled Canberrans to celebrate what they love about this city. I hope that it has also enabled Australians outside of Canberra—including those opposite—to think of their national capital in a new light, to think of Canberra not just as the home of parliament but as a thriving, diverse and special place.

I would like to take this opportunity formally to acknowledge the work of the Centenary of Canberra unit, especially of Creative Director Robyn Archer, and the ACT government for their vision and their tireless work and dedication in making last year's celebrations truly wonderful. I would also like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the Canberra area, the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people. While we celebrate 100 years of Canberra as the national capital, it is important to remember that their connection with this land is measured not in hundreds of years but in tens of thousands of years, and that their role as owners and custodians of this land is as important today as it was thousands of years ago and will be in the future.

The most important thing I want to do today is to thank the people of Canberra for re-electing me to serve as their representative in this place for a second term. It is a truly great honour to stand here representing the wonderful people of Canberra—the public servants, military and civilian defence personnel, the small business people, the teachers, the students, the scientists, the carers, the community workers and the tradies.

This morning a group of students from Canberra Grammar School visited Parliament House and one student asked me what I thought I could do or wanted to achieve in opposition. My answer was simple: to hold the government to account and to protect Canberra. This is my promise to Canberrans. If I can do only one thing in this term, it will be to do everything in my power to protect our beloved city, to protect our schools, to protect our health care, to protect our jobs and to protect our community. You know, Canberra, I will advocate for you, you know I will promote you and protect you, and seek to protect you, and you know I will fight for you.

Finally—because this speech is formally a reply to the words of Her Excellency the Governor-General in opening the 44th Parliament—I would like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to the Governor-General, Her Excellency the Honourable Quentin Bryce, AC, CVO. I had the great honour yesterday to attend a farewell lunch for the Governor-General at Government House. I also had the honour to attend the presentation of the posthumous VC to the parents of the late Corporal Baird on Wednesday. It was a very moving service. So in the course of one week I have attended two extraordinary events, both held with great dignity by the Governor-General. Yesterday was a wonderful opportunity to reflect on what an excellent role model the Governor-General has been, not only as Governor-General but throughout her life. She has spent a lifetime breaking glass ceilings, she has been a pioneer for women and an eternal advocate for those less fortunate.

I know the Governor-General is much loved by the Canberra community. I have seen her at a number of events, including when she opened the new Canberra Rape Crisis Centre in Weston. At that event, she recounted the stories of when she was setting up women's refuges and rape crisis centres in the 1970s and how she managed to perform miracles on the smell of an oily rag. Her commitment to women's rights, women's health and women's wellbeing was particularly prevalent in the speech she made that day. The Governor-General is also very active in providing housing for less fortunate women.

On behalf of Canberrans, I want to say that it has been our absolute honour to have her as a resident of this city for the last five years. I think she has enjoyed her time here. Yesterday, she spoke about Canberrans in very fond terms—about the gardens at Government House, about the animals at Government House and about the infamous noisy cockatoos. She will be very much missed by Canberra. We look forward to seeing her and to welcoming her back to this city. She will forever be an honorary Canberran.

Darren Chester (Gippsland, National Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Defence) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I appreciate the opportunity to join the debate this evening to provide an update to the House in relation to the bushfires which have impacted the Gippsland region over the past couple of weeks. There is a bitter irony in the fact that just as we were commemorating and recognising the fifth anniversary of the Black Saturday bushfires on 7 February where, tragically, 173 people died in Victoria, the weather combined with some existing fires across the state of Victoria on 8 and 9 February to provide quite horrendous conditions. We were exposed again to another devastating series of fires across Victoria, particularly in the Gippsland region. On 9 February the extreme weather contributed to four large fires across the Gippsland electorate.

There were fires in the eastern part which continued to develop on that particular day. One was around Latrobe Valley in Morwell-Driffield area. One fire was around the South Gippsland region through Jack River near Yarram. Another was through the rural area surrounding Bairnsdale, around Glenaladale and what we call the Fingerboards area. The other one was at what we call the Goongerah complex, a massive fire in the order of 130,000 hectares north-west of Orbost in the Bonang and Bendoc area. For the sake of members, I will run through the responses to the fires by our volunteers, the professional firefighters and the agencies involved, and the local community. I will give an update on things now in the Gippsland region.

The South Gippsland fire near Jack River threatened the townships of Yarram and Devon North and burnt through in the order of 5,000 hectares of mainly agricultural land but also through pine plantations and quite difficult terrain. There were significant losses of equipment through the HVP plantations, loss of assets in the pine plantations themselves and there were agricultural losses. In many ways I think we were quite fortunate with that fire. If the northerly winds had continued for much longer and pushed the fire down towards the south before that southerly change came, the township of Yarram would have been threatened. So in some ways we dodged a bullet in the region that day through Yarram and Devon North.

Another fire which has been extinguished and contained was in the Glenaladale area, which is at the back of Lindenow in the foothills. There had been a fire burning a couple of weeks earlier, but on that day of extreme conditions the fire flared up again. Despite the efforts of departmental personnel and CFA volunteers, that fire got up and running on 9 February when we lost homes and a lot of outbuildings. Stock losses were also quite significant. I do not have the final tally with me; it is still being accounted for. There have been significant stock losses and a large amount of fencing has been lost from what was a very fast moving fire. The hot northerlies pushed the fire from the foothills down into the farming areas.

It is not all bad news. I had the opportunity to fly over the fire front a couple of days afterwards and it was obvious from the air that many people in that region had been very well prepared. They had their fire plans, they implemented them and that saved their properties. Though we did lose homes, there were some remarkable saves on that day. I pay credit to the agencies involved right across the Gippsland in working with the local community, spreading the message, informing them and preparing for the inevitability of fire during the dry and hot summer that we have just experienced.

My good friend Ewan Waller, the former Chief Fire Officer of Victoria, is one of those who saved his home. I know Ewan has been very busy within the community in these last 10 days helping with the recovery effort. In company with Ewan, I had the opportunity just last week to meet a family who, unfortunately, did lose their entire home. They lost property and suffered significant stock loss—in this case, they lost their entire goat herd. I saw their resilience and determination to rebuild and get on with their lives. Admittedly, right now it is a very difficult for them to figure out which job to start with, but they are determined to rebuild and get on with their lives. It was a great opportunity for me to meet with local residents and get a better understanding of how the fire has impacted on them.

The Goongerah complex fires are still causing major concerns in the east of the state. The fire started from lightning strikes. At various times over the last few weeks, it has threatened townships such as Bonang, Deddick, Goongerah and Bendoc, and also Buchan and Orbost at one stage. I visited the incident control centre on the eve of the day the fire really got going again. There were 500 personnel on the ground over that weekend, with people from right across Victoria, New South Wales and the parks service as well as the volunteers and contractors. Private contractors are such an important part of the firefighting effort in our regional communities. It is one of the key reasons that I am such a strong supporter of the timber industry. The timber industry brings with it equipment, material and people who know the bush and can go in there and help save properties and lives in desperate circumstances. This is a vast fire. It is in the order of 130,000 hectares. It is primarily in a remote area, but there are homes and properties there, and there have been losses from this fire.

It is the biggest fire we have seen in Victoria for quite some time and it will require a substantial amount of rain to extinguish it completely. The people in that community have been on high alert now for three or four weeks and the stress on families is genuine. They do not know when the fire is going to emerge again from the bush. It will threaten their livelihood and it will threaten their homes.

As the local member and a resident of Gippsland, it has been very pleasing that we have not lost any lives in these fires. The tragedy of Black Saturday was the number of lives that were lost. We did learn some lessons from Black Saturday about the need to leave early if you are not properly prepared and to seek refuge rather than to put yourself into a situation where you might be exposed to an inferno of the magnitude we have seen develop in Gippsland over the last couple of weeks.

In providing this update to the House tonight, I would like to thank the volunteers and the staff of all the emergency services and the local community groups like the Red Cross, and other organisations like the VFF and those who have rallied to help people who have been affected by the bushfires. I would like to thank our local councillors and the staff for the work that they do in very difficult times and the police and emergency services personnel. Gippslanders are a resilient bunch, but their resilience has been tested many times in recent years. I am sure we will recover and I encourage people, as they continue to face the fire threat, to put the safety of their families first.

There is one fire that is still causing a great amount of concern in Gippsland and the Latrobe Valley—that is, the Morwell mine fire. Members here in Canberra or from Sydney may not have heard much about this fire. In Gippsland and the Latrobe Valley region this is a fire that is causing a great deal of angst. People are becoming angry and frustrated with the amount of smoke, which is particularly affecting the township of Morwell, where there are health concerns. On the weekend that fire started there was a fire already burning at Hernes Oak, which is to the west of Morwell near Moe. It burnt down the Princes Highway corridor and ended up threatening the outskirts of Morwell. No primary residences were lost but an amount of shedding and fencing was lost. At one stage that fire got into the Maryvale mill site and burnt into the woodchips and the log stack. That was a huge concern for our community. There are 1,000 jobs associated with the Maryvale mill. That mill was threatened during the night and I pay credit to the people on the ground who managed to put that fire out and save the mill, and in doing so they saved 1,000 jobs. It would be very difficult for anyone to rebuild the Maryvale mill had it been lost on that night. It caused significant disruption and the highway was closed. The fire crossed the highway and burnt towards Morwell.

At the same time another fire which we believe was deliberately lit started on the Strzelecki Highway and burnt towards the Morwell mine, where the Hazelwood power station is and spotted into the mine. It ignited a redundant area of the mine on the northern face and started a coal fire. Anyone who has had experience with coal fires understands that these are very difficult fires to fight. It is not like a grass fire or a bushfire where you can hit it hard and hope to put it out. A coal fire takes time and unfortunately the patience of my community has been well and truly tested over these past two weeks as that coal fire has continued to burn.

There are three key issues for the community at the moment in relation to the Morwell mine fire, as I see it. One is that we need to put the fire out as soon as we possibly can. It started outside the mine. It was deliberately lit. I do not blame the mine personnel at all. The fact that someone lit this fire grates with my entire community more than you can believe. Resources have to be applied to that fire and to make sure it is put out as soon as possible. The second is the need to protect the health of local residents, particularly the young, the elderly and the more vulnerable who have existing health concerns. It is important that we get those health messages out to our community as much as we possibly can. The third is that we have to take whatever steps are necessary to prevent a recurrence of a fire like this. There will be sources of ignition, whether a lightening strike, an accident or an arsonist, and we just need to minimise the damage or reduce the fuel load when that occurs.

In relation to the open-cut mines in the Latrobe Valley, we need to make sure that any of the disused sections of these mines are properly rehabilitated to minimise the likelihood of future fires in those parts of the mines. In the day-to-day operation of open-cut mines sprinklers prevent any outbreak where the working face is involved. However, in the disused sections of the mine we need to make sure we minimise the likelihood of future fires occurring. That means proper remediation and rehabilitation of the disused sections. I am not seeking to apportion blame in that regard, because we are talking about a section of the mine that has not been used for 30 years. It was decommissioned 30 years ago under the former SEC. The site has been there a long time and it has not been fully rehabilitated, but we need to make sure, having learnt a lesson from this event, that a fire of this magnitude does not occur again.

To appreciate the difficulties, the discomfort and the concerns of the people of Morwell, you need to visit the town when the fire is burning and the prevailing winds are blowing the smoke directly across the town. It is like sitting around a campfire for six or seven hours with the smoke never leaving you. Ash and smoke are descending on the town on a constant basis. The challenges for the community to manage that for an extended period are very real, and I empathise with people concerned about their personal health and the health and wellbeing of their families and friends.

For the sake of completeness, I provide an update on the operation to suppress the fire. The latest update is provided by GDF SUEZ Hazelwood and I have made it available on my Facebook site. It indicates that work is continuing 'around the clock with all the relevant authorities to combat the fire in the Morwell mine and reduce the level of smoke' and impact it is having on people in the valley. Crews from the CFA, the Metropolitan Fire Brigade, along with mine personnel and contractors, are working there. The update says:

Over the past 72 hours crews have begun to gain the upper hand, with several milestones including significant blackening out of more than 300 metres of the Northern mine faces, more than 200 metres on the South-east faces …

The Northern mine face is creating the most angst for the people of Morwell, because the smoke and ash from it are descending on the town. Vehicles have arrived from Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory fire services. They are using compressed air foam systems to assist with fire suppression work. CFA strike teams have been in there, along with crane monitors and aerial fire suppression appliances involving long-line helicopters and sky-cranes. All have been instrumental in helping to progress the efforts to suppress this fire.

It is fair to say that a lot of resources—I understand, in the order of a couple of hundred people—have been applied to the fire. I am confident that the incident controllers are getting on top of the event and are reducing the impact on the local community. But I do sympathise and empathise with the local residents who feel as if they have been neglected. They believe the broader Australian community is not aware of the conditions they are enduring. I want to assure the residents of the Latrobe Valley-Morwell district that along with my state colleague, Russell North, who has been out and about almost every day working with the agencies and supporting his community, we have been regularly updating the upper echelons of both the state and the federal governments on the fire. We have made sure that the information provided to people regarding their health and fire suppression activities is distributed more widely.

It is fair to say that in the early days—the first four or five days after the fire started—there was not enough information given to the community. They did not know what was going on and the possible risks to their health. I am happy that in the past week various agencies, such as the Department of Health, the Department of Human Services and the EPA and CFA, have been getting information to the community and providing people with better updates highlighting steps that need to be taken by those with a pre-existing health concern or those worried about family members with respiratory conditions. This is a challenging time for the Morwell district community. No-one should be under any illusions about how difficult this firefight is. It is probably going to take another couple of weeks before it is completely under control and the smoke is reduced to the extent that people can go about their normal lives. In the meantime, I assure the people of the Morwell district and the broader Latrobe Valley that I am working with the state government and the federal government on steps we can take to alleviate their concerns.

I turn to my re-election as the member for Gippsland. In my maiden speech in 2008 I reflected on what a great honour and privilege it is to be elected to this place. It is hard to imagine that is almost six years ago. It has been quite a journey in partnership with my community. I vowed at that time that I would never take that honour for granted and I hope I have fulfilled my end of the contract with the voters of Gippsland. When you enter this place you have an unwritten contract with your constituents. To my mind the contract is always to put the needs of the people of Gippsland first. I have endeavoured to do that at every opportunity over the past six years. I will aim to work on several key projects during this next term in government, in partnership with state and local government authorities and the broader community. It will come as no surprise to anyone in my community that my key focus remains on job creation and helping young people in the Gippsland region to achieve their full potential.

To that end, I will be working towards delivering several key projects over the next few years. I do not guarantee every one of these projects will be delivered, but we are working on these projects as a community and I think they are very important for our region. One is the Latrobe Regional Hospital redevelopment, which is the most essential health service upgrade east of Melbourne. The plan is for a $65 million redevelopment of Latrobe Regional Hospital. The project is still awaiting funding. The previous federal government did not fund it, although I acknowledge it funded other regional hospital projects under the regional priority rounds. Unfortunately we did not secure funding for the LRH project even though it met all the criteria. I will still work with my state and federal colleagues on ways to fund the project in the future.

There is another project I am particularly passionate about in my new role as the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Defence but also in my ongoing role as the member for Gippsland, and that relates to the East Sale RAAF base and further upgrades of that facility. It is a magnificent RAAF base with a long association with the Gippsland community. There is already some work going on at the moment in the form of a $180-million redevelopment, which I had the opportunity to show the Minister for Defence and the Chief of Air Force just last week when they visited the Sale region. There are opportunities for further growth of the East Sale RAAF base and the community is keen to pursue those. In particular, the community in the Wellington shire is supporting a bid to bring the AIR 5428 contract to East Sale in the future. That is a competitive tender process but I know that the Wellington Shire Council is particularly keen to see that succeed.

More generally in terms of road funding initiatives, I am supporting efforts to upgrade the Princes Highway, not only the Traralgon-Sale duplication but also through Roads to Recovery, through accident black spots, through the Bridges Renewal Program and by making sure that Gippsland receives its fair share of any finding that is available through both the state and federal governments.

In 2015 there will be investment in the Stronger Regions Fund delivered by The Nationals and the Liberals in government, which will see $200 million invested each year in local capital works projects. Again, I will be making sure that my community receives a fair share of that funding commitment.

Gippsland will always expect its local member to fight hard to secure its share of funding, whether it be for capital works or for other projects, but I still maintain that our greatest asset remains our people. I mentioned before how incredibly resilient they have been in the face of adversity in recent times, whether it is young or old, black or white, we do have a very resilient community who are prepared to work together and who are determined to get on with their lives and help each other through volunteering, whether it be through sporting or through our various community groups.

I thank the people of Gippsland for the confidence they have shown in me over the last three elections. I intend to repay that faith in my efforts as the member for Gippsland and also in my new role as the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Defence. I would like to thank my family, friends, supporters and staff for their tireless efforts and their enduring patience. We ask a lot of our families in this place. I would like to wish all members a successful term in the 44th Parliament.

Stephen Jones (Throsby, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Development and Infrastructure) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a great honour to once again represent the people of Throsby, and I thank them for returning me for my second term in this parliament. I undertake to do this with the same vigour that I did in my first term as their member. Can I take the opportunity to congratulate all the new and returning members to the 44th Parliament.

At the opening of this parliament we gathered in the Senate chamber for the Governor-General's address. The Governor-General, I should say, undertakes her functions with an energy and dedication that would shame the most fervent of democrats, but when this ageing ritual is laid bare it rubs more than just a little at the Australian sense of democracy. The journey for members of the House of Representatives to the Senate remains a misguided nod to mother England. Lords down-under it is not but, still, we gather there in obedience in belief that the vice-regal should not address us all in the Commons. I say that it would do no harm to the splendour of the day if we were to gather for this formal occasion in the Great Hall, as has been recommended by many members of both sides of the House on several occasions over the last decade.

By tradition the Governor-General's address is given on the advice of the government of the day. While ever we remain a constitutional monarchy, with the King or Queen of England as our head of state, the monarch's representative in Australia deserves better advice than that that has been provided by this government. What we heard at the opening of this parliament was not a program for the betterment of our nation—not at all. For those who had hoped that the Abbott government could convert their seductively simple slogans into the necessarily complex policy, it has not started well.

I remind the House that while the first act of the Rudd Labor government was an apology to the stolen generation, one of the first acts of the Abbott government was necessarily to apologise to the leaders of the Asia-Pacific region for the Prime Minister's own oafish remarks as opposition leader and beyond. I have got to say that he had much to be sorry for.

While the government of Australia has changed, the challenges we face as a nation certainly have not. At the recent federal election, I stood on a platform that included taking strong action on climate change. I took this position because I believe in the science and because I believe that I do not want my children to have to pay the price for our generation's wanton indolence. This problem will simply not go away. The longer we wait, the more expensive it will be to make the necessary changes to deal with this threat. Our responsibility here is to heed the expert advice and to reflect that advice in policy and legislation. And when seeking advice on climate change matters, I err in favour of the scientists over the radio shock jocks. I agree with the CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology and with many other experts who say that climate change is underway and we need to take action now to slow and adjust that effect.

I support putting in place measures which are effective and have the lowest cost to taxpayers and to the economy as a whole. In my view, Labor's policy meets this test; the Abbott government's does not. The major snag in the government's obsessive crusade to repeal the carbon tax is that it leaves no useful or sensible policy in its place. Labor on this issue is on the right side of history. We want to make sure that Australia is not left doing nothing on the issue. We support ending the carbon tax. We do not agree with axing the law which caps it.

Since coming to government less than six months ago the Prime Minister, Mr Abbott, has presided over the loss of 63,000 full-time jobs. That is over 10,000 jobs a month, 2½ thousand jobs a week, 350 jobs a day. This is despite his promise to create one million jobs within five years. Contrast this to Labor's record—employment grew by over 960,000 jobs, with more people in work than at any time during our nation's history, despite the global financial crisis.

The government wants to dismiss their critics, particularly their economic critics, as champions of entitlement or the 'protectors of protection'. They beg us to avert our gaze from the thousands of jobs that are currently being lost and focus somewhere down the track—focus on the future. This is cold comfort for the workers in Geelong, in Elizabeth, in Altona, in Shepparton and in the suburbs of my own electorate, where one in 10 jobs have traditionally relied on the manufacturing sector.

While the Treasurer executes his own war on entitlements, I will be championing my constituents' entitlement to a decent job with fair pay that enables them to meet their cost-of-living pressures. Indifference to the loss of industrial jobs is a problem. The failure to have a plan to help those who are looking for work right now is a tragedy, which turns the entreaty for us to look to the future into a cruel farce. It is unusual in an act of leadership to entreat us to hope for less, but this is exactly what the Treasurer is asking us to do. Make no mistake, this is what this war on entitlements is all about.

I have to say the coalition likes a war. The Prime Minister has waged his war on the ABC. The education minister, despite not having done a skerrick of policy work in opposition, has launched a cultural war against universities, a three-day school funding war that did not end very well for him, a war against the national curriculum and, last week, a war on teacher training. But, Deputy Speaker, with an eye on more than his current job, the Treasurer is not going to be outdone: he is launching his own war on your entitlements and he is gathering his troops. They are never upfront with the Australian people about this; they do not talk straight. After weeks of broken promises on education, the National Broadband Network, debt and many other things, the Prime Minister simply waved it away as miscommunication—in his words:

We are going to keep the promise that we actually made, not the promise that some people thought that we made, or the promise that some people might have liked us to make.

This is the man who warned us not to believe anything he said unless it was written in stone.

The coalition, Deputy Speaker, wants you to think that an 'age of entitlement' refers to somebody else's entitlements, not yours—somebody, perhaps, who is undeserving of that which they receive. Make no mistake, this is a war on the entitlements of working people, a war on the entitlements of families, a war on the entitlements of pensioners. It is not a war on the entitlements of mining companies or wealthy CEOs. Let's be clear about what this actually means. This is about the affordability of health care. This is about a decent living wage. This is about dignity at work and in retirement. It is a war on equality in education, on a clean and sustainable environment and on reliable access to decent broadband. These are the real markers of a fair society and the real markers of what a responsible government will deliver. These are things that Australians have a right to feel entitled to.

In the Illawarra we are undergoing an economic transformation from the traditional manufacturing and mining industries towards growing retail, education, ICT and service sectors. However, despite its tremendous attributes, the region also includes some high levels of social disadvantage and higher than the national average of unemployment. The economic future of this region is heavily dependent on reliable, superfast broadband that the NBN could provide. Right now, a lack of reliable broadband is a huge problem for people in areas that I represent, such as Albion Park, Oak Flats, Horsley, parts of Dapto and the Southern Highlands, where overloaded exchanges and geographic difficulties mean many cannot even connect to basic ADSL services and have to rely on unreliable, overpriced dial-up or expensive, patchy wireless services. For suburbs and towns like those, I believe there is a strong case for fibre to the premises to be supplied to ensure an adequate broadband service is delivered. Labor is committed to rolling out the National Broadband Network to more homes and businesses in my electorate of Throsby than in any other region in Australia—but, of course, this is all now at risk.

I have had some harsh words to say about the government in this address, but one area that I am in complete agreement with is the commitment to closing the gap. I can say that I was genuinely moved by the statements of the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition when the sixth Closing the Gap report was tabled in the last sitting week of this parliament. Across the parliament we are in agreement that to make good on our historic apology and quest for reconciliation we need to close the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous disadvantage. While we have made a start in addressing the disparity in the key areas of education, health, employment and life expectancy we are still way off the pace. Let's not lose the opportunity that the 44th Parliament presents to make real and significant differences to Indigenous Australians. While money may not be everything, we need to ensure that as the government is taking the axe to so many programs that support equality and welfare, those who are making a tangible difference to Aboriginal Australians need not feel the blow. This should be a bipartisan commitment.

Can I also say something about parliamentary support for constitutional recognition of Aboriginal people. In our national anthem we sing the words:

For those who've come across the seas

We've boundless plains to share …

Of course, the plains were not empty when white people arrived here. They were occupied by a people who have practised their culture and lived on this land for in excess of 30,000 years. No other country in the world can make that claim. No other country can say: 'We are home to a place where, for 30,000 years, human beings have practised a culture and have been at one with the land—a culture that still exists to this day.' They were our first people and they deserve to be recognised as equals in our national Constitution.

The story is simple: for as long as our Constitution includes the vestiges of that first act of racism, we are not the country that we can be, we are not the people that we should be. I say that it falls to this parliament, in a historic act of bipartisanship, to pass the legislation that is unnecessary, to formulate the words that are necessary, so that we can rid our national body politic of this stain and not only recognise the first Australians in our Constitution, as our founding document, but also remove the last vestiges of racism from our Constitution so we can all stand tall and proud.

I will take the opportunity to use the time remaining to say thank you to the people who have assisted me in ensuring I can continue to represent them as their member for Throsby: the friends, the family, the staff, the volunteers, the members and all who assisted and those who voted for me in what was a very tough election. There were over 10 candidates running for the seat of Throsby. Most of them were from the area. There were one or two blow-ins including a blow-in for the National Party, whom they plonked into the campaign late in the piece, thinking that his pop star appeal might turn some voters' heads—and I am very pleased to say that no such thing occurred. It was certainly a hard-fought election. Mostly it was clean, and it is a fantastic honour to be standing here in our parliament representing the people of Throsby for another three years—an honour, I have to say, that I do not take lightly.

I thank my wife and children. As all members in this place know, it is not an easy job being a wife or child of a parliamentarian. They give up much so that we can fulfil the role as representatives in this most important of institutions. I thank my mum, my mother- and father-in-law and our extended family for the support they have shown me over the last three years and for the support they gave to me during the election campaign.

I would like to thank the staff who work for me. Simon Zulian is my indefatigable campaign director, and I am very pleased he has continued to support me by coming onto my staff full time after the election. He has been a pillar of strength. I thank my friend and former colleague Jane Mulligan for her steadfast support during the campaign and for the three years previously. It has been a great honour to work alongside a person of such capacity and integrity. I thank my electorate staff—Caitlin, Carol and Danielle—for the ongoing support that they provide to me. Quite often, as you would know, Mr Deputy Speaker Vasta, we get a lot of attention for the work we do in this place, but it is the day-in day-out work in our electorate offices that enables us to continue turning up here over the years. The staff who are manning the phones and the front desk at our offices deserve every bit of thanks that we can give to them for the difficult work that they carry out on our behalf. As you would know, Mr Deputy Speaker, people rarely ring the electorate office when everything is going well; it is generally with a complaint or a problem and it is our staff on the front line who deal with that. So I pay tribute to those staff who are doing that on my behalf.

I take the opportunity to thank the Mayor of Shellharbour, Marianne Saliba, and her team of councillors. I have worked very closely with them over the last three years and I hope to enjoy the ability to work very closely with them over the next three years. I thank the Deputy Mayor of Wollongong, Chris Connor, and his team of councillors whom I have also worked very closely with, and Councillor Graham McLaughlin from Wingecarribee Shire Council who is a great mate and who has been a great support for me up in the Southern Highlands of my electorate. Thank you very much.

There are also the local party members and volunteers, the executive members of the six Labor Party branches across my electorate—Port Kembla, Warilla/Mount Warrigal, Shellharbour/Barrack Heights, Albion Park/Oak Flats, Dapto and the Southern Highlands. I thank them all for the work that they have done. Each of the volunteers from the vast area of the Southern Highlands often travel great distances. Very frequently they come down into the campaign office, man the phones or do work on behalf of the campaign. Christine Tilley, Justine Fischer, Jan Merriman and Warren Glase were available at a moment's notice, like so many others in the Southern Highlands, and I thank them very much. I thank my great mate Louis Stefanovski for his ongoing and enduring support, particularly for his assistance in translating Macedonian both face to face and in my many election periodicals. To my mate Jose Madrid who did great work coordinating our campaign volunteers, thank you.

I also take the opportunity to thank the campaign teams in Cunningham and Gilmore for their cooperation and support. We work as team Labor in the Illawarra and Southern Highlands and we could not have done everything we have done without their cooperation. I thank the great team of New South Wales ALP, people like: Anthony Albanese, the member for Grayndler, for launching my campaign and for his support over the previous three years and over the last few months; Labor legend Bob Hawke for visiting the region in the lead-up to the campaign; and from the party office as the then party secretary, Sam Dastyari, who has now joined us in the other place; my mate the assistant secretary of the party, John Graham; and my friends from the Organised Labour Movement. I give special thanks to the members of the Community and Public Sector Union who have always supported me, and members of the Maritime Union of Australia and people throughout the South Coast who have seen the important work that I do, I hope, in supporting their causes and who have given up some of their time and effort to support me in my campaign.

I thank my opponents for what was mostly a fair fight. I thank the members of the media, local and national, for mostly fair coverage, and the Australian Electoral Commission for their impartial and professional conduct. They do an absolutely outstanding job. I know that from time to time, particularly over the last election, they cop a few brickbats, but in my division they were absolutely professional staff and I am sure that any of the candidates who stood in that election would say the same thing. The staff at the AEC in the Throsby division did an outstanding job and I thank them for their work. I thank the teachers in my electorate who overwhelmingly supported the government's plan for better schools.

I end where I started by thanking the people of my electorate. I truly am in love with the region. I think that it is a fantastic place and I thank the people for putting their trust in me for another three years. I leave you with this commitment: I will not let you down.

Don Randall (Canning, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I stand here as a member of this House, honoured to serve the electorate of Canning for the fifth time. I do consider it an honour. I never take it for granted. It is a privilege to serve in this place and to do it for the fifth time in the seat of Canning is something that I am particularly proud of because I am now the longest-serving member for Canning since it was created in 1949. This was not done just because I am the member; this was done because we had a magnificent team result in the election campaign, which I will refer to as I go on.

On 7 September last year we were ready to fight the campaign. And, as most people in this House would know, we were ready to fight that campaign probably for the three years beforehand, because we had a pretty dysfunctional hung parliament—which I will also refer to as I go on. I say at the outset that the Labor candidate, Joanne Dean, was somebody who I never met during the campaign. I want to pay tribute to all those people who ran in the campaign. Like the member for Throsby, my campaign was a good, clean campaign. Everyone who was involved as a candidate essentially got along. There were seven or more local people as candidates in this campaign; people like Derek Bruning for the Australian Christians and Wendy Lamotte, who ran for the Palmer United Party. One who was not a local was Richard Eldridge, who ran for Katter's Australian Party. This Richard Eldridge was a former member of the Liberal Party in the seat of Swan, so he was obviously seduced by Bob Katter. It is a pity that Katter's Australian Party crashed and burned during that election, with the member for the seat of Kennedy only recording 23 per cent of the primary vote. So much for the impact of Katter's Australian Party. We had Alice Harper for the Family First Party and Damon Pages-Oliver for the Greens. He is a local social worker, and does a great job in the community. And there were a couple of others, as I said, who filled some of the minor positions.

I was lucky enough to draw No. 1 on the ticket, which some people say is worth somewhere between one and two per cent. So that puts in context the election I ran in before against the now member for Perth, who championed a great result, because in my last three election campaigns in Canning my Labor opponent drew No. 1 all three times. Previously, when I drew No. 1 on the ticket I was the member for Swan and I lost my seat in the election, so I was a bit superstitious about drawing No. 1 on the ticket. But on this occasion I was pretty happy because we went from a margin of 2.2 per cent in this election to 11.8 per cent. I was very happy with the result—quite an outstanding result in terms of the overall swing, which was one of the highest for a sitting member in Australia.

In analysing the results, I was very pleased to see as well that I was able to gain 51.07 per cent of the primary vote, which meant we did not have to go to preferences. Some other interesting nuances that I would like to allude to before I go into some of the other details of this election campaign were that the Labor Party's vote actually collapsed; it went backwards by 13.71 per cent. On the night of the election, the Greens were actually polling behind the Palmer United Party. They snuck ahead with preferences as the vote count continued, but it just shows you, Mr Deputy President—and I find it passing strange—that a Gold Coast billionaire, spending millions on an election, could attract the attention of my hardworking blue-collar people in the state seat of Armadale, for example.

I am still amazed at this fascination of the people in a hard, tough area like Armadale, where they are essentially blue-collar wage earners—and that they are being seduced and attracted by somebody who was going to build the Titanic. I suppose it was about increasing pensions by 25 per cent and all the money he was going to give away because he was going to be the Australian Prime Minister. But at the end of the day they had a good result and, as we know, they had a good result nationally in the Senate vote.

Another interesting detail that I wish to allude to is that since becoming the member for Canning—and I will only go back to 2004—the Senate vote in Canning was 52.91 per cent in 2004, in 2007 it was 47.56 per cent, in 2010 it was 42.48 per cent and in 2013, even with that result, it was 38.11 per cent. That is interesting, because the primary vote of the Liberal Party had increased significantly in the case of Canning. In the seat of the member for Brand, Gary Gray, the Liberal vote was 31.94 per cent. If you follow that through there are some interesting Senate ramifications, particularly as we look at the new Senate election in Western Australia. People like Bob Baldwin, the member for Paterson, have a similar case. He has a good, strong primary vote but his seat's Senate vote is a little less than desirable.

But, as I said, we ran a strong grassroots campaign—as we have always done. Nothing can beat doorknocking. People want to meet the candidate; they want to meet the person. It does not cost you anything to get out there and shake hands with the people who you want to represent. They want to know who you are; they do not want to see somebody else from your team walking up and down the street and shaking hands. They want to meet the candidate. I think people are quite cynical when people do not do that. We had street stalls and we met people at shopping centres.

I had a magnificent staff. I have always been fortunate enough to have good staff in my office. That has been my strength—not me, Don Randall; I am not the hero of these election results, because Canning really is not a Liberal seat. To give you the context of that, Mr Deputy Speaker, the largest population base in the electorate is around the state seat of Armadale. The sitting member in the state seat of Armadale, Tony Buti, won most of the polling booths. Yet at this current federal election, I won all of the polling booths in the state seat of Armadale. There are 12 polling booths that represent the federal seat of Canning in that state seat of Armadale and I won them all—except one, which we missed by four votes. But, in saying that, we had something like an 11.6 per cent swing in that seat. So right across Canning we won every polling booth. And when you look at some of the demographics around Canning, there are some pretty tough areas. In Coodanup around Mandurah and some of the areas nearby there are a lot of issues, but people want the member to represent them not only on their local issues but on the issues that come to the parliament.

I hear those on the other side say—and I am sure we will hear it again shortly—that they stand by their commitment to the carbon tax. I have to tell the parliament that the electorate does not. When we have another Senate election in Western Australia shortly we will remind the people that there is a party on the other side of this House that still wants to slug them $23 a tonne through a carbon tax.

The people also want to know why Western Australia has been targeted with the mining tax. It had many incarnations and was going to collect billions of dollars but did not collect the money. When the mining tax is combined with the carbon tax it is an albatross around the neck of development in Western Australia. There is no other spin anyone on the other side can use. 'There is a downturn in the resources sector'—yes, there is all that sort of stuff, but at the end of the day a whole lot of mines are not going ahead or expanding because of the high cost of labour and the high costs of doing business in Australia due to things like the mining tax and industrial relations, which we know those on the other side are wedded to because their union mates put them in this place and fund their campaigns. We heard a bit about that today in relation to Dobell.

In addition to that, when walking down the street people asked me: 'Can you people really stop these boats? If you become the government, can you guarantee that you will stop the boats turning up?' It has been 67 days since the last boat. At the same time last year when the Labor Party were in charge there were 30 or more boats with close to 1,500 people on those boats and people had died at sea. If that is the way you want to conduct your migration system and border security in this country, the public do not want it. This will be another thing that we will remind people of in the Senate election in Western Australia.

I also used to be stopped in the street by people saying, 'We are sick and tired of the way this parliament is running.' I used to go to schools and had to apologise to the children when I addressed them in their politics classes, more generally at meetings or with their parents. The parliament had become dysfunctional. The 43rd Parliament had become highly dysfunctional and it was not a good look. In the 42nd Parliament we had the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd incarnations. My room in this house is next to the government party room and I used to see them coming and going all of the time. It was a charade. There were cameras and that corridor was locked up with journalists wanting to see the next dysfunctional charade going on when the Labor Party were in government.

People had had enough. They were embarrassed. People would say that when they went overseas they were embarrassed by the way the Australian parliament was being run. The other side would say to us, 'Yes, but look at all of the legislation we passed.' A lot of that legislation was ethereal. Where was the money coming from in relation to the NDIS and Gonski? For example, Western Australia did not even get a trial for the NDIS out of the previous government. There is no money to roll it out, despite what the poor deceived parents of disabled children think. We have not even got an NDIS trial in Western Australia.

There was less money in Gonski in the early years than later on. So it was to be two parliaments later from when the now opposition promised the money would be delivered; it was going to be six years later. As you know, the chances of them making it six years later were very ordinary. So at the end of the day this was a dysfunctional parliament.

We had the case of the hung parliament being run by the crossbenchers here. You expected the Green to get into bed with the Labor Party and form a coalition. Bob Brown met with Julia Gillard all of the time and discussed tactics. Bob Katter was not quite sure which side he was on half of the time. We had the two smarmy Independents from north New South Wales. The then member for Lyne took 17 minutes to tell us he was going to vote with the Labor Party. It was all about the money for him. He wanted to be the Speaker. He wanted to be a minister in the Labor government. Eventually the fallback position was they gave him a heap of committees. What do these committees pay? The ones he was on gave him $20,000 to $23,000 extra and that fed into his superannuation. He was being drip-fed all the time to support the Labor Party in this place.

You would see the charade every now and again on a few procedural issues. When it looked like his vote would not count, they would sit there watching each other to see how they were going to vote so there was always one extra vote. People did not miss this. People rang me up all the time asking how they could get the phone number of that smarmy bloke in Lyne, Mr Oakeshott. I gave it to them and said, 'Ring him up and tell him.'

Then we had the member for New England, who was part of this cabal of supporting this dysfunctional Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government. His whole reason for being here in the last parliament was to square up with his enemies in the National Party. He spent the whole time trying to take out the people he had had a beef with for years and years in the National Party. That was the way this parliament was being run. It was an absolute disgrace.

In the last few moments I want to say that we promised the electorate of Canning a number of things. We promised that we would give $10 million for the Mandurah Aquatic and Recreation Centre redevelopment. It is a vast vital piece of community infrastructure in this area. We are going to do this because the Prime Minister has always said that we are going to deliver on our commitments. The Peel-Harvey catchment is to be recognised as its own natural resource management region. The Minister for the Environment, Mr Greg Hunt, is already delivering funding towards that to start on 1 July this year.

There is more than $360,000 for the Pinjarra Bowls Club upgrade. We promised that when we were the government. When we did not become the government, the Labor Party took six years to even deliver one project under the RDA and this was their one project. Prahran got plenty but Canning got nothing. We said we would match their funding because it has always been one of our priorities. There is the Plan for Safer Streets in Armadale and Mandurah. Armadale will receive $170,000 for CCTV systems and support for help with crime. Mandurah will get $250,000 funding for crime prevention infrastructure under our safer streets program.

We are going to reintroduce the Green Army because those opposite got rid of the Green Corps. All those young kids who were being trained in jobs—we have one of the highest youth unemployment statistics in Australia, in Mandurah in particular—and they took away a good environmental training initiative like Green Corps. And they took away Work for the Dole. Then they combined the two and bastardised the whole thing by putting together Green Corps and the long-term unemployed, which basically wrecked the whole system, and then they just walked away from it.

But we are re-establishing all of that. We are going to have the Darling Downs Equestrian Estate and Birriga Brook freed up, Peel-Harvey catchment council will get the Len Howard park in Erskine done, and Boddington is going to get money to fix the community resource centre. We are going to give money to the Mandurah Migrant Centre to help people like Cathy Bickell who are doing such a great job in helping a lot of people who have arrived on visas and who are stranded down in the regional areas. There are also grants for Mandurah and Port Bouvard surf lifesaving clubs to help them purchase equipment and first aid and medical supplies. And we will be helping families by building a stronger economy, taking away the carbon tax et cetera.

You have heard the minister in this place talking about the NBN. As I was doorknocking streets around Mandurah, I was near the telephone exchange. The people in the same street as the telephone exchange were telling me they were not connected to the NBN even though it had gone past their houses. What a joke. Here they were, they had signs everywhere saying: 'The NBN's coming.' Then they smashed up all the asbestos boxes and they had to stop work because there was asbestos flying around by the lawnmower contractors.

I want to thank a lot of people very quickly. I want to thank Caroline Boyer in my office. She did a great job of helping to lead the team. I want to thank Dave De Garis, an outstanding young man who is going to go places. I want to thank Tess and I want to thank Eilidh. Nicole did a fantastic job. She is now working where she should be and increasing her professional career. There are people like Tegan. We had a great team. The Canning division gave us great support. I thank all of those people who worked for me on polling day, and worked well before polling day, like Lyn Pushon at the Greenfields centre. We had a great result on the pre-poll there, but it took hours and hours and hours and, being a dual poll with Brand, it was pretty hectic. She did a fantastic job.

I want to thank all of those people who financially supported us by coming to functions as well as those people who sent $5 and $10 to us to help with the campaign. They wanted to get rid of the terrible Labor government that was taking Australia backwards, the government that had gone into office with no debt, with money in the bank, that suddenly ratcheted up debt. It has put us into debt and created uncertainty in the community. It ruined a migration system that was working. They wanted to get rid of those people, so they were willing to give us money and give us their time.

I want to thank the local Ford dealer who allowed me access to his vehicle to tow my great big sign around everywhere. The old-fashioned stuff about putting signs and placards out still works. All the fancy electronic stuff like Facebook and Twitter—that is probably the new way of winning a seat. So the next member for Canning—may that be well into the future—will probably win his seat by being on social media. But the old-fashioned way of getting out there, shaking hands, putting up a placard and telling people who you are, and listening to them, still works. My motto is: you talk, I listen. And I do, because I am interested in what my people have to say. I do not always agree with them and I cannot always deliver for them, but I am interested in listening to what they have to say. That is why we come to this place: to represent the people in our electorates. There is a pretty cynical view about politics in this country—that is, politicians are here just for themselves. If we are here for the people, they will continue to give us the benefit of the doubt and give us the strong result that we got in Canning. (Time expired)

Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a privilege to be in this place. It is an oft-used expression, I know, but it is an apt one because it is a privilege to serve those who voted for me, now on two occasions, and those people who voted otherwise. When I walk through the neighbourhoods of my Western Sydney electorate of Chifley I am very aware that I am entrusted to stand up for local residents, to make sure their voices are heard and to do those things that make their lives easier. I certainly take that role and that task very seriously.

This is my second address-in-reply in this place; in the first instance I delivered it in my inaugural speech. Back then I was able to thank the many people who helped me on my path to this place, and I am grateful to be able to do the same today. But I also want to reflect on the issues I pursued on behalf of Chifley residents during the 43rd Parliament and to focus on those issues that will form the bulk of my work during this term of office.

I am proud to serve as a member of the Labor Party because I believe in its values, and I have for many years. When I first took out my ticket, as a 19-year-old, it was on the basis that, no matter who you are, you are able to have an opportunity to play a part either in building a better neighbourhood or building a better nation. Ours is a party built on the back of the motivations and hopes of ordinary working Australians. It is a party of the battler, and it will continue to be. But, as our country has evolved, so our party has evolved. We retain our commitment to be a party that will press for the greater cause—not opposition for opposition's sake, but looking to create something enduring for the betterment of all, not just some.

I like working for the Chifley electorate. I love the way locals call it as it is. They will tell me to my face or walk into my office and tell my team that work with me how they feel, the things that I should be working on, the priorities that I should have, and I am grateful for that candour. And there are things they are telling me loud and clear that they believe need to be worked on both in the immediate sense and in the longer term sense, and I certainly want to reflect on some of those.

For example, one of the things they are telling me loud and clear is that in relation to their health care they deserve better. They think that the proposed $6 co-payment to visit a GP is a step too far. Six dollars to the constituents I represent may not sound like a lot to many other Australians, but it is a big deal to the vast majority of people I represent. Grabbing $6 here and $6 there from those who can least afford it, from people who look at their weekly or fortnightly budgets and realise that they have their backs against the wall, is a painful prospect. I would hate to think that Australians who really need to see a doctor will not, simply because the extra $6 they will need to find stops them from doing so, and so they avoid attending to their health problems now—at greater cost to them and their communities later on. Or, worse still, I would hate for them to turn up at a hospital emergency department and clog up a system already under strain. Six dollars might be a coffee and a bit more to some, but for others it is a whole lot more. Ninety-nine per cent of the GPs in the electorate I represent provide bulk-billing services—the highest rate in the country. There is a reason for that. People in our area need a healthcare system they deserve, not just one they can afford.

Health care is a big issue for people living in our area of Western Sydney. We have major health problems we are forced to deal with: diabetes, asthma, heart conditions and cancer. For me, it is an absolute priority to ensure that locals have affordable, accessible, quality health care. That is why we want to see Medicare protected as part of the front line of primary health care. That is why we are, for example, fighting the New South Wales government over its diabolical closure of our cardiac ward at Mt Druitt hospital—an unbelievable move. That is why we pushed to get an MRI for that same hospital. I was delighted when the federal government, under Prime Minister Rudd, announced funding for a desperately needed MRI at Mount Druitt hospital. This reflected the fact that over 4,000 people had signed a petition for that very MRI, many of them elderly constituents for whom travel and transportation is a major obstacle and difficulty. You can imagine their dismay when, just before Christmas, official word came through of massive health cuts ushered in by the incoming Abbott government and that the new MRI, which was set for delivery to Mount Druitt, was one of the casualties. It is just wrong, and the people in my area deserve to be treated much better.

The public is not stupid. They watch our actions like hawks. They celebrate with us our victories, both big and small, and punish us when we make promises that are not kept or when we have been callous in the decisions we make. The removal of funding for an MRI at Mt Druitt hospital is one of those decisions that everyday people in the electorate I represent will see as callous. They should not be made to think, for even the slightest, remotest moment, that they are undeserving when other areas are able to access this equipment easily.

Prior to the announcement, when I thought government money was being promised to less-deserving projects, I took a very public stand on this MRI. It was a difficult decision but I honoured the commitment I made to be an advocate for the constituents I represent—for the neighbours and the people in the areas I have grown up in. They are people I am proud to represent and I will continue to do so as long as I am given the privilege. Today, after many trips down the Hume Highway, I have wised up to this place, learning what is needed to keep governments to account, and I will certainly fight for this MRI for Mount Druitt. I have written to the health minister seeking the reintroduction of funds promised by the Labor government last year because I do not think people should be forced to travel long distances for a diagnostic service that could be the difference between life and death for many of them.

It might not mean anything to people outside Chifley—even outside Mount Druitt itself—but the beauty of our political system is that we represent people of all ages and persuasions whether they vote for us or not and, to many, an MRI at Mount Druitt is a very important thing. Four thousand people who were prepared to put pen to paper in a petition thought so at the time and they should have their voices heard.

This leads me to another contentious issue: the National Broadband Network. This was a matter that attracted considerable attention in our area for a number of years. I have worked with residents, NBN Co and Telstra on this issue. We held community forums. I have advocated publicly on this matter and addressed parliament numerous times on the plight of residents in some of the worst affected areas, suburbs like Woodcroft and Doonside. As a result of our collective efforts my constituents were successful in getting included on the NBN Co construction program, which would have seen high-speed broadband delivered to their homes and businesses by a Labor government which had the vision to realise that Australia needed to be brought into the 21st century when it comes to communication. Once the member for Wentworth, Malcolm Turnbull, and the Abbott government arrived, these promises went out the window. This is from the same member for Wentworth who, when in opposition, said it would be a 'travesty of social justice'—his words—if places like Woodcroft did not get access to the NBN. Despite claiming in opposition that they would honour rollout contracts, the good people of Woodcroft learned pretty quickly that under an Abbott government their suburb would disappear completely off the map—all due to a sneaky redefinition of a coalition promise. Regardless of the tricks and the word games, this stands as another broken promise that suburbs and neighbourhoods in our area will lose out because of. I intend to pursue this during the life of this parliament because, again, these residents simply deserve better.

I am proud to say we have almost 70 schools operating in the Chifley electorate—good schools with great principals, teachers and staff, and keen students. Relative to other electorates, Chifley might be made up of more people on lower incomes; but I can certainly inform the House that there are many hardworking families who place an exceptionally high value on good education. They make sacrifices to ensure that their children get a great education and, as a government, Labor wanted to play a part in helping lighten that load. Families in our electorate treasured the small leg-up that was the schoolkids bonus—$400 per primary student and $800 for secondary students. For many, the schoolkids bonus was not a luxury. It helped families with the cost of living and ensured children's education costs could be met. Yet it was also subject to cruel cuts by an incoming Abbott government which figured it could simply save money by snatching it back from those who need it most.

I attended an award ceremony just before Christmas, one of the many I am lucky enough to attend each year. I gave out a sporting prize to a young boy from a local public school, a boy of humble means; his family are salt-of-the-earth members of the community who, like many, do it tough. As I was handing the award to this young man, his mother stood at the back of the room attempting to take a photo with shaking hands while tears were running down her face. These were tears of pride that her boy, despite all the challenges, had achieved something and was being recognised for it. It was a moment that struck someone who works with me and will stay in his memory for a long time. He said to me that this was 'his day and her day' and that, my friends, is a good day—one we need more of. We need more of those better days to ensure that, besides the help we can offer families with education costs, these families can be confident of the quality of schooling their children can get, that areas of need, like many places within Chifley, will get stronger, targeted support.

This is the thinking that sat at the heart of our Better Schools Plan, the work that was built on the back of the Gonski report. This was a plan that would have seen more effort dedicated towards improving teacher quality and principal autonomy and ensuring that a new resourcing standard would better direct resources to schools in need for smarter outcomes. That transition to better education remains under threat by a new government which seems to focus more on saving money than on ensuring a better outcome in education.

The Gonski reforms were agreed to by governments at the state level, regardless of political persuasion. They realised that an overhaul in education was overdue, that systems needed rebalancing at their base. After pretending during the election to suddenly support the Gonski reforms, the Abbott government did a backflip. After coming into office, and after coming under fire, they backflipped again, promising that the funding pie would remain the same, but with a caveat—it would see only four of the six years funded and the last two years unfunded. Those are years where significant support would have flowed.

There are simply no guarantees by this new government on how the money will be distributed. You can be sure, based on their track record, that elements of the coalition will not focus on education funding that reflects need. This is something that families in the Chifley electorate should be seriously concerned about. A good education should never be for an exclusive club of those who can afford it. It should be afforded to every Australian child.

On Saturday, I was delighted to read an article in the Sydney Morning Herald, written by Amy McNeilage, that outlined and destroyed the myth that education standards in Western Sydney are deplorable. The article highlights Rooty Hill High School, in the Chifley electorate, and the vision of principal Christine Cawsey when she took over as principal in 1997. She reflected that even her own staff had suggested at one point that students would not be in need of computers because advancement to a university education in a largely working-class area simply did not happen through Rooty Hill High, which is staggering. She certainly was not prepared to accept that, and she fought for better.

This is what I have discovered in schools in our area. They are saying that not only are students capable but they are expecting more out of students. As a result of that higher expectation, we are seeing results improve across a range of schools. Rooty Hill High School and Plumpton High School are two schools whose results, I have noticed, have gone up. I single them out but I have noticed that there has also been improvement in a number of other schools where there has been similar active leadership. I visit local schools often and I can tell you, Mr Deputy Speaker, that university study is today very much in the minds of students in Chifley, largely due to the pioneering work and mindset of people such as Christine Cawsey. Congratulations to her and everyone at the school.

I am also proud of the fact that we invested over our last six years in trades training centres, for example, at Doonside Technology High School, Evans High School and Loyola Senior High School. At those schools, the automotive, electrical, hospitality and hairdressing trades, and a whole range of other trades, are being taught. Those students are proud to take up a trade. They will be on the front line of ensuring that we address some of the skill shortages that hold back the Australian economy. The face of Western Sydney has changed for the better. It seizes on opportunity. That is why I am determined to ensure that we get everything that we deserve, and more, in our area.

Promises made in election campaigns should become a reality when the dust has settled and we are back to business. That is certainly something I live by in my role as a local MP. I will give some quick examples. I said that, if elected, I would fight for better broadband. I did. We were due to get it. It was denied by the Abbott government. I said I would push for better healthcare investment. I did. We were due to get it. It was denied by the Abbott government. I said we would push for better funding to help clean up neighbourhoods affected by antisocial behaviour such as graffiti and vandalism. After a long campaign, we got this. Again, it was denied by the Abbott government. During the last term, I actively lobbied government to invest proceeds of crime in cleaning up areas like Rooty Hill and Doonside, teaming up that funding with the funding set aside by Blacktown City Council. To their credit, council—which spends nearly $1 million per annum on graffiti clean-up—thinks laterally on how to tackle this problem. We saw federal funding combine with council funding on offender rehabilitation via local community groups. We teamed up with schools to help get in early to tackle behaviours that might lead to problems down the track. In August, we announced funding for mobile CCTV cameras to help provide better support for police and council.

Additionally, we saw funding directed to some great groups in our area, such as the PCYC and Marist Youth Care, to find ways of engaging with local youth to help build skills and tap into their creative energy, all with a view to reducing instances of antisocial behaviour while investing in the talent of local young people. Marist Youth Care, working with Blacktown police, saw some terrific results through the Comm4unity initiative. But, after being successfully selected for funding, this funding was ripped from them by an incoming Abbott government that refused to honour the contracts. I am absolutely staggered at the brutal stupidity of this move, which will save money in the short term but cost our community in the long term.

The alternative being pursued by the Abbott government is simply throwing money at CCTV cameras while denying a broad, multidisciplinary approach to cracking down on antisocial behaviour. They should not get off the hook for this, especially with the terrible signal it sends that governments can betray commitments if it suits political advantage. I intend to pursue this further.

While politics divide many of us in this place, we speak as one on this critical point: our elections to this House are not efforts of spectacular individuality. We are truly indebted to the many who give of themselves freely and generously. I start by thanking my family: my wife, Bridget; my son, Sam; my parents; and my parents-in-law. In particular, Bridget's and Sam's kindness in overlooking my extended absence, and being incredibly supportive through that time, meant the world. My sister punctuated that absence by helping me out on my campaign. Sabina remains an inspiration and a source of constant candid, frank counsel. While not family, he spent so much time with us he could be an honorary relation—thank you to Nathan Metcher.

To my federal electorate council, led by president Gayle Barbagallo and secretary Tom Kenny, I extend my deepest thanks. I also thank all the ALP branches for their support and generosity. My deepest gratitude also goes to the state member for Mount Druitt, Richard Amery, and to councillors Charlie Lowles and Edmond Atalla. I thank my friends in the CEPU, NUW, FSU and United Voice, who helped out.

I also want to record my heartfelt thanks to some people who devoted their energies and care to the constituents of Chifley via our electorate office: Nicole Seniloli, Rosanna Maccarone and David Field. Thank you. Thanks to Melisa Mahmutovic, Kara Hinesley and Matthew Overton. In addition, I thank Louise Crossman, Danielle Bevins-Sundvall and Solly Fahiz—a worthy competitor on the basketball court as well. Particular thanks go to Ausseela Thanaphongsakorn, who has moved on to start a new, exciting episode in her life. She will be remembered by me for playing such an enormously dedicated part over an exceptionally long period of time. I cannot thank her enough for everything that she did.

There were many, many volunteers who gave so willingly—finishing their day jobs and then helping out after hours and on weekends. They talked to constituents in streets and on phones, they attended shopping centres and cold railway stations with me, they put up posters, they came to community group meetings and they stood at prepoll and polling booths. They were phenomenal and sensational and I cannot thank them enough. Like my friend and colleague the member for Throsby, I also want to recognise the local AEC staff and thank them for all their tremendous effort. I have thanked those volunteers personally. There are too many names here to mention but I would like them to know that, in this House and beyond, I will remember them eternally for their generosity.

I end as I started, reflecting upon the privilege that is extended to us to be able to serve in the House of Representatives. Like some others here, it took me a number of goes to get to this place, but I remain not only grateful but focused upon the job of faithfully representing the people who voted for me, and those who may not have voted for me, ensuring that their voices are heard and ensuring that government has a meaningful impact upon them and their lives and, importantly, that they never feel like they are an afterthought from government, from business or from anyone who operates in our community. The people of Chifley deserve the very best, and it is my firm intention that they get that through this term and, if I am lucky enough, terms beyond.

Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to pay tribute to all who are a part of the fruit-processing industry of Australia. Probably some 90 per cent of these people and their enterprises are located in my electorate of Murray. Others—for example, navy-bean growers and sugar producers—are far away in Queensland. Only one Australian fruit processor, SPC Ardmona, remains in business in 2014. It has survived where others have collapsed, victims of the policy failures of successive governments, both state and federal. But soon, I anticipate, these failures will be addressed by us and they will be something of the past.

The failures of successive governments include the costly and ineffective Australian antidumping regime and the failure to use the WTO-sanctioned emergency safeguard measures, which could be in place while the month after month of analysis of antidumping claims churn its way through the commission. The crippling overvaluation of the Australian dollar, which killed export competitiveness and triggered a flood of cheap, often dumped, imports has also made a victim of too many Australian manufacturers. Then there is the massive market power of the two biggest supermarkets in Australia, who control over 80 per cent of the retail grocery business, making it almost impossible for the suppliers to have any chance of competing for better prices. These supermarkets' strategies of relentlessly growing their market share through more profitable home-brand offerings on their shelves, aided by obscure country-of-origin labelling, poor at-border food safety inspection and weak antidumping protection mean that, in Australia, our fresh and manufactured food suppliers are up against it. And these supermarkets compete with ever-cheaper prices, with the losses borne by their overpowered suppliers.

Then there continue to be the massive increases in energy costs, exacerbated by the carbon tax and carbon equivalent tax on refrigerant gases. Between 2010 and 2013, SPCA's sales revenue, net of discounts, per unit of product sold decreased four per cent—as I say, squeezed by the supermarkets—while the unit cost to make and sell increased by around 22 per cent, reflecting the huge increases in energy and other non-wage input costs. How could any of our manufacturers survive in such a perfect storm? In the case of SPC Ardmona, there were also 10 years of the worst drought on record, from 2001, followed by the worst year of floods on record, which inundated some orchards for up to 12 months.

You will not be surprised for me to tell you that, for a succession of recent years, Coca-Cola Amatil, an Australian owned company, the parent of SPC Ardmona, has carried the losses of this, the last remaining fruit processor in Australia. It has just been announced, the write-down of losses from SPCA for last year was an accumulated $400 million. You could have seen other companies walk away with such losses, at the demand of their shareholders. I want to commend Coca-Cola Amatil for understanding the icon status of the last remaining fruit processor but also its great future prospects if only it can get through the perfect storm that I have just described.

SPC Ardmona management in April 2013 had to walk into their growers' orchards, their kitchens or the small offices attached to their cool stores—and some of these family orchards have been with the same people for generations, since they arrived from places like Italy, Macedonia, Greece, Albania, Turkey and, more recently, the Punjab. They had to face these orchardists and tell half of them that they could not take any fruit from their orchards anymore, not a single tonne.

More than 50 growers in the Goulburn and Murray valleys then faced, as you can imagine, extraordinary financial distress and, for some, collapse. They knew that flooding the fresh fruit market with their canning varieties of fruit was not an option, and they had to find the funds to bulldoze their apples, pears, peaches and apricots or continue the costly business of spraying, pruning and picking the trees but with no returns. This continues to be a very dark time for those families and the hundreds of workers in the small-town communities which depend on their enterprise. I want to express my deepest sympathy for those who still have this terrible financial problem to overcome, where they have no market for their varieties, which were developed for canning.

The remaining 50 or 60 families with orchards developed for fruit processing—covering hundreds of hectares, with cool stores and equipment and highly developed irrigation systems—were informed by SPC Ardmona that they would only have half of their fruit taken in the next season, with very few firm prospects for the future. Imagine the extraordinary distress that occurred with over 100 orchard families in April last year being given this shocking news.

Obviously, all of our orchardists who have developed for the processing industry face enormous difficulties, with the same drastic employment impacts on the districts and towns where they lived. We thought that was the worst of it because, with the huge diminution of the amount of fruit to be taken, at least the factory could limp along, but there was worse to come.

Let me tell you about SPC Ardmona.    Australia's largest and now last-remaining fruit processing enterprise began with the establishment of two grower cooperatives—the Shepparton Preserving Company established in 1917 and Ardmona established in 1921. In 2002, SPC and Ardmona merged and in 2005 the processor was purchased by Coca-Cola Amatil when the Australian dollar was at about 60c against the US dollar. The parent company had changed its name from Amatil in 1989. Let me stress: it is not a subsidiary of the multinational Coca Cola. It is not an American-owned company; rather, among other enterprises, it has a franchise to sell Coca Cola product in defined regions.

Australia's fruit processing sector has always been an innovator, with the Tatura trellising system developed for orchards now used throughout Australia and with Ardmona being the first manufacturer in the world to develop single serves and to put preserved fruit into resealable plastic packaging. SPC Ardmona is often referred to as 'the cannery' but in fact it is a highly innovative and mostly plastic packing enterprise in the Goulburn and Murray valleys.

The growers who supply the fruit and tomatoes for SPCA have been benchmarked as highly productive, in particular the tomato growers who are benchmarked as some of the best in the world. For convenience and efficiency, these growers are concentrated within a 50-kilometre radius of the factories. They grow over 80 per cent of Australia's pears and apples and most of the country's apricots, peaches and plums. This is the food bowl of Australia, especially if you focus on the fruit food bowl. The orchards take advantage of the flat topography, fine Mediterranean climate, good soils, excellent road transport infrastructure and water security provided by the Goulburn-Murray system, the oldest irrigation network in Australia.

The federal government committed $1.216 billion in 2011 to modernise this irrigation system in order to serve the fruit and dairy industries of the Goulburn and Murray valleys better. The Victorian state government recently invested another $l billion into this irrigation system. The towns of Cobram, Kyabram, Mooroopna, as well as the City of Shepparton are dependent on the fruit manufacturing industry, in all over 150,000 people, but directly employed in the factory are over 800 people and directly linked to those 800 people are another 5,000 or 6,000 jobs. This is the equivalent of Holden in Adelaide or Alcoa in Geelong.

Given it takes four to seven years, depending on the variety, to grow a new fruit tree to a stage of commercial production, once people have bulldozed their orchards, they do not come back. You cannot afford it, you do not have the time to wait for the trees to re-establish, especially when you are carrying debt from 10 years of the worst drought on record and especially when SPCA has not been able to pay you very much for the last few years of your fruit production. The tragedy is that from April 2013, with contract cancellations, 25 per cent of the fully productive pear trees in this area were bulldozed and since then another 60 per cent or 300 hectares of the canning peaches. This is a catastrophe that most other nations in the world would be shocked to hear about. How could a country through market failure, through no fault of the manufacturers themselves, be bulldozing highly productive fruit trees, knowing they would not return? Growers had no other option but to try to avoid a phytosanitary crisis for their neighbours growing fresh fruit varieties or, alternatively, they did not have the means to keep spraying the trees to manage pests and then to bring in the pickers and pruners. Calls on the state government of Victoria for help with these costs fell on deaf ears.

A perfect storm had descended on Australia's last fruit manufacturing industry and little of this perfect storm could be deflected or influenced by Coca-Cola Amatil, SPC Ardmona or the growers, their cool store operators, their transport industry, the makers or their cans and plastic containers and cardboard boxes, Visy, the pickers, the pruners or the packers. All were powerless to influence what seemed to be the only rational outcome to save further losses for the parent company shareholders and that was to close the whole business down, literally to turn the Murray and Goulburn valleys into a desert.

In April 2013, the management of SPCA was changed and they did not close down, but did what they could do with business restructuring. SPC currently employs 840 FTE staff—528 full-time and 921 seasonal workers—at its three factories in Kyabram, Mooroopna and Shepparton. The vast majority of SPCA's workforce is in Shepparton and the decision was taken that the Mooroopna and Kyabram factories would shut down. Seventy-three trade qualified maintenance workers who had not been able to agree on new productivity and flexibility measures saw an announcement in December 2013 that these positions would all be outsourced. The vast majority of the other food preserver workers at SPCA, some 767, have a living wage of, on average, $53,000 per annum, not a huge amount. The award wage for this group is some $27,000 per annum. It was not possible for them to be pushed back down to their award wage and for them then to be able to feed their families and pay their mortgages. The average wage increase agreed in the food preservers EBA by SPC Ardmona from 2010 to 2013 was 2.4 per cent per annum, which was lower than the negotiated food industry average of four per cent per annum and lower than the national average wage increase of 3.4 per cent. So their wage increases were way below the national and their own industry standards. One hundred and ten weekly EBA positions—that is, 29 per cent of the total—at SPCA were made redundant between 2011 and 2013. You can imagine the pain of that 30 per cent of the workforce no longer with their positions.

The salaried headcount was reduced by 31 per cent during the same period. This was a very painful but significant workforce restructuring and downsizing made by the management in an effort to maximise efficiency and so save the industry. So the orchardists suffered, the workers suffered, but they understood this was one measure they could all take in trying to save the last Australian fruit processing industry.

It is not correct to say that SPC Ardmona had not made major changes to workforce size, conditions and entitlements or that they paid exorbitant wages compared to national or industry standards, or that their problems stemmed from wages. That is what the Productivity Commission concluded on page 75 of their 12 December 2013 report Safeguards inquiry into the import of processed fruit products. They said that labour costs are 'a relatively minor contributor' to total costs and SPCA is 'suffering serious injury'.

I have already said that SPC Ardmona's earnings before tax had been significantly eroded and had declined by over 25 to 30 percentage points between 2010 and 2013 for their key domestic processed fruit categories. The business wrote off more than $300 million in the last several years. This year it has announced a further write-down of $400 million. The response of the shareholders in not closing this sector has therefore been magnificent. But what to do? The industry had restructured its workforce, reduced it by 30 per cent and removed off their payroll those with whom they could not negotiate. They understood that to survive they had to innovate, and they have done that with some magnificent new products. But that innovation required new machinery and retooling the factory, given that it was to consist of one factory campus instead of three. These new products require very different equipment.

SPCA, supported by their parent company Coca-Cola Amatil, embarked on a four-pronged strategy. The first was to request an innovation co-investment grant of $25 million from both the Victorian government and the federal government which would be matched by $90 million from Coca-Cola Amatil to invest exclusively in the new equipment and retooling. Remember, I just referred to the huge losses that Coca-Cola Amatil's shareholders had been taking. So to invest $90 million into this significantly damaged industry was an enormous step for them to take. The Commonwealth chose not to extend this support, but with a $22 million grant from the Victorian government and $78 million from Coca-Cola Amatil there is now $100 million to retool and buy new equipment to manufacture the new products, which have been doing so well in their trials. This is going to give us a real, new chance of having a market beyond the reach of the supermarkets. These new products can be put into the fast-food sector, it is hoped, and repositioned into the export market as the dollar begins to retreat.

The cheating at our borders with dumped imports also has to be addressed. If there was fair play in pricing, SPCA estimate that in regard to the dumped tomatoes from Italy, if the up to 20 per cent margin was applied as tariffs or duties then they would immediately experience a 25 per cent improvement in price competition with those dumped products—a significant amount. SPCA took a case against Italian tomatoes and South African peaches to the Anti-Dumping Commission, expecting fair outcomes. Of course they did not receive that in the case of the South African peaches. The Anti-Dumping Commission found there was dumping, but they used a different methodology to that applied in the case of the tomatoes. They used the weighted average instead of the transaction methodology. They said the margin on the dumping of the South African peaches was only two per cent. They refused to do anything to support SPCA. New Zealand used a different methodology, and immediately reintroduced antidumping actions against South African peaches, thereby protecting their industry.

In the case of tomatoes, not even our great Anti-Dumping Commission could turn its back on a dumping margin of up to 20 per cent on Italian tomatoes into Australia. However, it has now been 11 months since SPCA brought this case, and still we do not have an outcome. The minister has not received the final recommendations from the Anti-Dumping Commission asking that these duties be imposed for a period of time. How can an industry like SPC Ardmona compete with this massive dumping and the super cheap prices of other products coming into Australia? We are supposed to have fair play. We were supposed to have a strengthened antidumping regime from Labor. I am pleased that our minister is going to make sure that the Anti-Dumping Commission improves its game, reduces the time it takes to look at these cases and reduces the costs imposed on Australian industry trying to get a fair outcome.

We also have to address our flawed labelling laws that allow dumped product to come in disguised as something else under the heading 'Made of local and imported ingredients'. We have to have a better food safety inspection regime. At the moment, canned peaches from China are entering this country with lead levels double the Australian allowable limits. I am deeply concerned that those canned peaches in their three-kilo tins are still being snapped up by the food services sector, particularly in government procurement outcomes where the cheapness of the food is the most important factor in keeping the hospital, the aged-care facility or even the Defence Force canteen afloat. We have to address all of these fundamental issues.

We also have to make sure that when a company like Coca-Cola Amatil does the hard yards with its own restructuring and innovation, that Australian government competition policy is changed so that the supermarkets cannot take advantage of their market power to drive down prices to their suppliers and to put their product into home brand generics, which kills innovation and new product development in branded product. We have to make sure our antidumping regimes work and our quarantine inspection services are based on real concerns about Australian food safety. All of that is important. It must occur. The good news is that SPC Ardmona will be continuing to produce some of the best food in Australia and the world. (Time expired)

Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is not often that I begin a speech with a quote from Ronald Reagan, but here I think it is particularly apposite because Ronald Reagan said that the first duty of any government is to protect its people. If that is right, it means protecting a country's people, their lives and property and their way of life. It is against this test that in particular conservative governments, but I think any governments, and their programs should be assessed. It is clear that the Abbott government is failing this test and failing it miserably. In fact, the Prime Minister, his government and its program stand condemned not just because they are failing to protect Australians and their way of life now but because the policies of this government will endanger Australians into the future.

The recent fires in Victoria are not over. The city of Morwell remains shrouded in a dangerous cocktail of smoke from the Hazelwood coalmine fire. Suburbs of Melbourne were threatened. Hundreds of brave firefighters supported by the community are continuing to battle the fires to protect their communities. These same firefighters and their organisations tell us that the worst could be still to come as we face the prospect of more bushfires influenced by climate change. These fires and the fires in South Australia come on the back of an unprecedented year of heat across much of Australia and a devastating early start to the fire season in New South Wales. The Victorian fires also follow an unprecedented period of heatwaves in the south-east of Australia. That heatwave itself killed people. In the north of Australia, the country is in the middle of a severe drought.

We know that global warming is already starting to have an impact and that climate change will make fires, heatwaves and droughts worse. We know that only strong and urgent action to cut pollution will lessen these impacts. That is why this government and its program stand indicted. Instead of protecting the Australian people and taking strong action against global warming, this government has set out to systematically dismantle the action Australia is taking to fight climate change.

First the government abolished the Climate Commission. Then it scrapped the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency. Then it sought to scrap the $10 billion Clean Energy Finance Corporation. Then it moved to abolish the Climate Authority. Then it moved to cut the price on pollution. Now it is coming after the renewable energy target. Along the way it has continued to peddle misinformation and, in the case of the Prime Minister, lies about the link between extreme weather and global warming. There is very clearly a direct relationship between extreme weather and climate change. It is common sense that as ocean and land temperatures rise there will be an impact on weather conditions. Scientists are telling us that what we are starting to see is consistent with their predictions.

When I say there is a direct relationship, it is absolutely crystal clear that according to the science global warming is influencing extreme weather events. The Climate Council, including one of Australia's most eminent scientists, Professor Will Steffen, released a report earlier this year entitled Be Prepared: Climate Change and the Australian Bushfire Threat. The report outlines five key facts about bushfires, which I will outline because amongst the chortling and interjections from those opposite it is concerning that there is a complete unwillingness from the coalition to do what other conservative governments around the world have done, and that is to say we accept that there is a link between global warming and the extreme weather events we are facing.

As I said, the report outlined five key facts. Fact one, climate change is already increasing the risk of bushfires. Extreme fire weather has increased over the last 30 years in south-east Australia. Hot, dry conditions have a major influence on bushfires, and that is just common sense. Climate change is making hot days hotter and heatwaves longer and more frequent. In fact, according to a report released in the past few days, it is clear that in places like Melbourne, in Victoria, these heatwaves are now commencing on average 17 days earlier and they are between 1.7 and two degrees hotter on their hottest days. Some parts of Australia are becoming drier. These conditions are driving the likelihood of very high fire danger weather, especially in the south-west and the south-east. Australia is a fire-prone country and has always experienced bushfires. All extreme weather events are now being influenced by climate change, because they are occurring in a climate system that is hotter and moister than it was 50 years ago.

Fact two, in south-east Australia the fire season is becoming longer, reducing the opportunities for hazard reduction burning. The report made it clear that these changes have been most marked in spring, with fire weather extending into October and March. The scientists tell us the fire season will continue to lengthen into the future, further reducing the opportunities for safe hazard reduction burning. One analysis indicated that, under a relatively modest warming scenario, the area of prescribed burning in the Sydney region would need to increase two- to threefold to counteract the increased fire activity. Under a more realistic scenario, the report predicted an increase of fivefold would be noted.

Fact three, recent severe fires have been influenced by record hot, dry conditions. Australia has just experienced its hottest 12 months on record. New South Wales has experienced the hottest September on record, days well above average in October and exceptionally dry conditions. These conditions mean that fire risk has been extremely high and we have already seen severe bushfires in New South Wales, on the Central Coast and in the Blue Mountains. The Black Saturday fires in Victoria were preceded by a decade-long drought with a string of record hot years, coupled with a severe heatwave in the preceding week. The previous record for the Forest Fire Danger Index was broken by such an extent that it was revised and, of course, as you would know, Deputy Speaker Broadbent, we saw the category 'Catastrophic' or 'Code Red' added. Since 2009 there have been a number of subsequent declarations of catastrophic conditions around southern Australia in step with the hotter and drier climate.

Fact four, in the future Australia is very likely to experience an increased number of days with extreme fire danger. Fire frequency and intensity is expected to increase substantially in coming decades in many regions, especially in those regions currently most affected by bushfires and where a substantial proportion of the Australian population lives. Australia has always been a country that is prone to bushfires and extreme weather events. So why on earth would you wish more of them on us and the population? Because those who deny that global warming is having an impact right now are doing exactly that.

Fact five, it is crucial that communities, emergency services, health services and other authorities prepare for the increasing severity and frequency of extreme fire conditions. As fire risk increases, disaster risk reduction and adaptation policies will play a critical role in reducing risks to people and human assets. Increased resources for our emergency services and fire management agencies will be required. One estimate of the future economic cost of bushfires indicates that, with no adaptive change, increased damage to the agricultural industry in Victoria by 2050 could add $1.4 billion to existing costs. By 2030 it has been estimated that the number of professional firefighters will need to approximately double compared to 2010 to keep pace with increased population, asset value and fire danger weather.

The heatwaves which we have been experiencing in recent months are not only exacerbating bushfires they are thought to be directly responsible for the loss of life. A report in The Age newspaper has outlined the impact of the recent heatwave. According to the report:

Hundreds of Victorians died … during the [January] heatwave and there are fears the death toll could match or exceed the lives lost during the 2009 heatwave that occurred a week before the Black Saturday fires.

As doctors called for a review of how heatwaves are managed across the state, the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine said it had recorded 203 deaths between last Monday, January 13, and Sunday—double its historical weekly average of about 98. The institute works with the State Coroner to investigate reportable deaths.

The deaths, which so far amount to an average of 29 per day, far exceed the average of 19 per day recorded over two weeks during 2009's unprecedented heatwave, believed to have killed about 374 Victorians.

The deaths in Victoria are the most horrific impact of the heatwave, but countless other Victorians have suffered through these heatwaves too. For vulnerable people living in my electorate, and especially those living in public housing, these increased heatwave days mean a constant search for shelter from the heat. Many people have been forced to crowd into air-conditioned spaces in the bottom of public housing to deal with the heat.

Many people here will know the public housing blocks in my electorate. As you come in on the CityLink freeway, as you hit the yellow and red sticks, if you look to your right you will see some of the big concrete public housing blocks that were built around the sixties that are not air-conditioned. When you have three days when it is over 40 degrees consecutively and when it does not drop below 30-odd degrees at night, they become hot boxes. It is getting to the point where one constituent rang me to say that, in her flat with her family, she was measuring the temperature and it was nudging 50 degrees. It got to the point after a couple of days of this where the housing just did not cool down. They have taken to going downstairs and sleeping on the oval. Families with their young kids are now sleeping on the oval in the middle of Melbourne because the heatwaves are rendering their homes uninhabitable.

Community agencies and local councils have done their best to assist but it is clear that the state government must do more to lead all levels of government and community agencies in a plan to deal with this crisis, which will grow year after year. This is what global warming looks like. We have been talking about the dangers of global warming for some time now, but now we are experiencing them.

If there is any doubt in anyone's mind about what we are experiencing, just look at the tumbling records of the last year. I want to go through a few of them. 2013 began with the hottest January on record, and it was smack bang in the hottest summer on record. We then had a record-breaking heatwave in March in Melbourne and the hottest March on record in Tasmania. January to June was the hottest start to the year on record and this was followed by the warmest July for Canberra and a number of other regions in the south-east of Australia. August saw the warmest winter on record in South Australia, New South Wales and Queensland—a factor in the early and devastating start to the fire season in New South Wales. September was the hottest on record across the country, starting what became the hottest spring on record. December ended a scorching year, which was the hottest on record in total and which brings us to the last month of scorching temperatures, heatwaves and bushfires in the south-east.

This is what global warming looks like and it is only going to get worse and worse if we do not act. This is where the Abbott government is failing to protect the Australian people. Not only is it failing to protect the Australian people, it is in fact making it worse with its campaign to junk any meaningful action to halt Australia's pollution. If Prime Minister Tony Abbott and the government get their way, future generations will look back on this government as a bunch of shameful cowards in the thrall of special interests. Last year a number of people took exception to my criticism of the Prime Minister for wearing a firefighter's uniform while enacting policies that will make risk of dangerous bushfires worse. It was clear that my criticism touched a nerve. But if the truth hurts, deception and obfuscation will hurt us more.

The signs are clear: if the last year of record heat tells us anything it is that we are running out of time. What is at stake is whether, when you go on holidays every year at Christmas, you are going to have to be worried about whether bushfires will threaten you and your family where you are. If you want to go fishing, the question you will be asking is whether ocean acidification has meant the fish are not there to catch in the same way that there have been in previous generations. The signs are clear and we are running out of time. Severe climate impacts are starting to be felt now and they will get worse year after year. Scientists are telling us this is the critical decade when we need to urgently turn our pollution downwards, but the Abbott government is set to squander years of work and squander even more of this decade with its campaign to smash renewable energy. When the scientists are telling us that this is the critical decade, what they are saying is that in the whole of human history this has to be the decade in which our pollution is at its highest and that we need to start cutting now to become a zero pollution economy in the next couple of decades. And the tragedy in all of this is that it is completely possible.

The adviser to the German Chancellor and to the G8 said: 'We look at you Australians and we wonder, with all your sun and wind and wave power and with all your incredible manufacturing capacity and your high level of smarts and intellectual capability, why aren't you leading the world in renewable technology? Why is it being left up to cloudy Germany to do it?' In cloudy Germany a couple of years ago, according to recent figures, they had 382,000 jobs in their renewable energy sector. To put that in the Australian context, that is about 102,000 jobs; and, to put that figure in context, that is more than twice as many as in coalmining, oil and gas combined. In Germany they also have some very straightforward mechanisms that are helping boost their economy and cut their pollution: if you build a renewable energy power station above a certain size, then the electricity grid is obliged to connect you to it, and so there are people building offshore wind and large solar plants and building wind farms.

This is all within our wit to do here in Australia as well. There are people at the University of Melbourne in my electorate, together with universities in other electorates, who have developed printable solar cells. They are on the verge of being able to commercialise that. Just think for a moment about being able to print a solar cell. At the moment they are doing it with the polymer technology that makes banknotes. If you are able to print a solar cell, you could print one onto the cover of your laptop so that the lights in any room could power it. If you could print solar cells directly onto your corrugated iron you would not need to install a solar panel on your roof because the roof would be a solar panel.

It is exactly these and similar kinds of technologies that could set Australia up for the 21st century, that could ensure that our manufacturing base thrives, that could ensure that we have something to sell to the rest of the world in 15 years time that is not just coal or woodchips. But all of this is under threat from this government as it seeks to rip up all the laws that are having an effect to drive Australia to a clean energy future. It is incumbent on all of us in this place and throughout the Australian community to stand up. We need to have the courage to look reality in the face and connect the dots between what we are experiencing and the impact of global warming. We need leadership that has the courage to do what is necessary to combat the climate crisis. The Greens stand ready to protect the Australian people from global warming. The government clearly does not, so it should get out of the way.

George Christensen (Dawson, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I did not want to start my speech this way but when you have to sit through 20 minutes of extreme green statements being thrown about in this chamber that are basically just absolute rubbish you have to say something in return. The member who just spoke—

Josh Frydenberg (Kooyong, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Who misspoke!

George Christensen (Dawson, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Well, who misspoke—shows exactly why the voters kicked out the last government that was beholden to his political party, the Australian Greens, and a ragtag bunch of Independents who used to sit behind me here. It is disgraceful that people are politicking off natural disasters in this country. We have had bushfires before, we have had droughts before, we have had floods before. They are terrible, terrible things. And up my way we have had plenty of cyclones before. But every time one happens now we have the Australian Greens jumping on the bandwagon and saying: 'This has to do with climate change. Oh, woe is me, the sky is falling!'

Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Doesn't it? Are you saying it doesn't?

George Christensen (Dawson, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

No, it does not because they have happened before. These events will happen again. Australians know it and, I have to tell you, they feel very offended when the Greens come out and try and play politics with these issues. The member pointed to all of these so-called record heatwaves that we have had through Australia, forgetting the fact that Australia is not the only place on the globe. It is supposed to be global warming. We have actually had record cold temperatures in many countries right across the world. In fact, nearly universally, all climate scientists will tell you that for the last 17 years there has not been evidence of warming in the globe. That is something that even the most ardent proponents of the theory of man-made climate change are scratching their heads about.

Mr Bandt interjecting—

The member here has proven why the last government was kicked out. He talked about us acceding to special interests. Well, we do accede to one special interest: the Australian people. They did not want a carbon tax, which the previous speaker, the member for Melbourne, concocted with the previous government and the other Independents and forced on the Australian people.

In making my contribution to the address-in-reply to the speech by the Governor-General, I want to acknowledge the Governor-General and thank her for that speech on behalf of Her Majesty's government. I also want to congratulate retired General Peter Cosgrove, AC, MC, who has been appointed to the role of Governor General and will be duly sworn in to that position in coming months.

I also want to thank the electors of Dawson for having faith in me to represent them again in this parliament. From Mackay, right along that North Queensland coast up to Townsville, the many different communities—the Whitsundays, the Burdekin and also the community of Bowen—once a Labor stronghold with 60-40 in most booths, flipped around to be 60-40 LNP this time and I am particularly pleased with that. I was very sad to hear on the news today that Bowen's famous Big Mango has gone missing. Apparently, overnight, something happened and there is some footage of that floating around. The Bowen tourism people turned up this morning to find the mango gone! I hope and pray for the sake of that town's honour that the Bowen Big Mango is restored and we do not see thefts of the Big Banana and the Big Pineapple to create some Big Fruit Salad!

Getting back to the topic, it is a privilege and an honour to have been re-elected as the member for Dawson. I said during the election campaign that I was going to be a strong local voice for those people in a better government, and I am very glad that I can be that strong local voice in a better government. We set out with a plan for the Dawson electorate. The plan involved fixing the Bruce Highway. The plan involved having policies that would stop the boats. The plan involved axing the carbon tax, and the plan involved restoring job security for local industry. I have got to say that we are doing it on all of those fronts.

Certainly, with stopping the boats it has now been nearly 10 weeks since we have had unauthorised boat arrivals in this country. When I walked around the electorate and talked to people in the street and asked them what was their biggest concern, they would say to me, 'On the national level, this whole illegal immigration thing is out of control. We have got to do something about it.' It was one of the issues for them.

And they were right to have those concerns and they should not be denigrated for having those concerns, as so many on the left do particularly the Greens. We need to know exactly who is coming into this country. We need to know their backgrounds. We need to know that they are not a security risk. We need to ensure that our immigration system is sacrosanct and is not being undermined by people coming through methods which, as a country, we simply do not prefer. So I congratulate the Prime Minister and the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection for all they have done in the short time we have been in government to achieve this quite remarkable result. We have taken what was a full-blown crisis and actually almost completely solved it. For nearly 10 weeks that has been the case.

More than that, we have obviously got a plan to get rid of the carbon tax and, along with it, the mining tax. That plan is currently being frustrated in the other place where the Liberal and National coalition do not have control of the Senate. That is a shame. I would have hoped that Labor and even the Greens—yes, I can hope that much—would have recognised that the government have a mandate on these issues that we campaigned so strongly on: getting rid of the carbon tax and getting rid of the mining tax. In my community of Central Queensland in particular and all up through North Queensland, those two policies have caused economic chaos. We have had thousands of job losses. In fact, I think the figure at last count by the Queensland Resources Council put it upwards of 15,000 job losses in the mining sector particularly in the Bowen Basin. That, I have to say, is particularly being felt right on my doorstep throughout the Mackay region. The carbon tax and the mining tax were putting pressure not just on large coal mines and potential future investment in coal mines but also on mining service businesses that were feeling the squeeze at the time when they really could not afford to. If the Labor Party would get out of the way and allow us to implement what we were elected to implement, we could get things up and running again and restore some of the job security.

There have been a few brickbats thrown at the government from those opposite about the car makers leaving Australia, conveniently forgetting the fact that Ford announced they were leaving under the watch of the last government. I have made my position pretty clear on this issue. These were industries which were being propped up by taxpayer dollars. No-one ever came to Central Queensland to those mining service companies in my area that were feeling the pinch and having to shed jobs, actually closing the doors and going into receivership because of the downturn, because of the policies or partly because of policies implemented by the previous government—policies like the carbon tax and the mining tax—and said, 'How much do you want a cheque made out to to keep your doors open?' If that is the case for businesses throughout Central Queensland, then it should be the case for businesses in Geelong in Victoria, and in South Australia as well, particularly when they are multinational companies.

To go with what our plan was for the electorate, I have made many local commitments. We are committed to, and have a time frame in place, for the rollout and construction of the Mackay Ring Road, something that is vitally needed in our region, something that the last government actually did little about apart from the $10 million study. They did not even set aside funding in this financial year to do the detailed design work and the resumptions that were needed, and they should have done that. Now it is up to this government to get on with the job and do that, and we will be doing it. I am in continuing discussions with the Minister for Infrastructure about getting that funding called on sooner rather than later, in fact going quicker than the time frames that was announced during the election, and I am hopeful about that. We also have plans for the upgrade of Sandy Gully—a flood-prone area that we have near the Bowen community. We also have plans in place for the upgrade of the patently unsafe and also flood-prone Horton River bridge, just north of Brandon in the Burdekin.

We committed to providing social infrastructure for the electorate, with a contribution of $750,000 going to Mackay Gymnastics for their new gymnastics centre. That was something that I campaigned long and hard about in the previous parliamentary term, repeatedly asking the government to approve the requests from Mackay Gymnastics for funding to go towards that centre.

We committed to projects such as the Green Army, one that we would locate in the Whitsundays to help an excellent organisation called Eco Barge Clean Seas Inc. Eco Barge do this great practical environmental job—better than anything you would ever see coming from the Australian Greens. They go out and actually clean up the marine debris. They go out into the Whitsunday Islands, get their hands dirty and pick up all the rubbish—the flotsam and jetsam that is coming from boats and which washes up out of our waterways—that comes, quite frankly, from kitchen and bathroom sinks and which ends up washing out into the ocean. This is practical stuff, and we are going to provide a Green Army for them—it will actually be more like a 'Green Navy', given that it is going to be out in the sea—to help them do that job, and to do that job better.

We also have a Green Army for the Don River Trust in Bowen. They are going to do some environmental work that will assist that river in flowing more freely, ensuring that there is not a build-up of sand. That actually poses a risk to both life and property in the Bowen and Queens Beach areas.

I will go on with a few other government commitments that we have made: mobile CCTV units for the Mackay Regional Council. We are talking about funding at least two of those and possibly up to four, depending on how far the dollars stretch. That funding will, as I said, go towards these mobile CCTV units to investigate things like vandalism in parks and illegal dumping, with which we have a problem right throughout the Mackay region. We also promised funding to light up some of the inner-city CBD car parks—a problem that has been raised with me by younger women in particular, and also by shop owners and female workers in the CBD. I am very glad we have provided those commitments for the region.

Personally, I actually promised some things myself—some sponsorships for groups—and I am currently rolling those out. We have already contributed $5,000 to improve and build upon the Mackay Recreational Fishers Alliance's young angler education program, where they are teaching kids how to fish. It is amazing when you go and see some of these kids out there, learning how to fish for the first time—putting the bait on the hook and learning how to cast a line. They end up loving it and taking on that hobby for life. I have given $5,000 to the 50 & Better Healthy Ageing Programme Inc. of Mackay, also to build upon the activities that they provide for seniors in our region.

Fifteen thousand dollars from my pocket is going to the Whitsundays community to help them build an adventure playground in Cannonvale. It is an innovative community-driven concept, and something I have been very happy to support. Along with that, there is $12,000 going to the establishment of a homeless drop-in centre in the Mackay region. They are just some of the things that I committed to personally, utilising funding from my electoral allowance, and I think that these are important projects for the region that I can contribute to directly as a local MP.

One of the other things that we also promised was to get on with the job of approving the Abbot Point coal terminal expansion. It has been a controversial decision, I know, but I have to say that there have been so many green lies told about this project it is not funny. For the town of Bowen, this project is so important; it is vital. We have had business after business shut their doors, people out of work and a community that really is in decline and in the doldrums. They were hanging their hats on Abbot Point being approved. We have approved that; we approved that at the end of last year. That project will go ahead once the green groups actually finish their court challenge for it, which is probably obligatory. What disturbs me is the fact that the green groups that are now taking this matter to court and the green groups that engaged in political campaigns against the government and against this project are the green groups that also receive tax deductibility status. I have to say that I will make it my mission this term to see that that tax deductibility status is stripped from those groups that engage in political campaigns like this—destructive campaigns like this—where they tell blatant lies about job-creating projects. It is always harmful to North Queensland.

I will go on to attacks that the green groups and other people in the nanny state brigade have also waged against the sugar industry. As someone from the biggest sugar-growing electorate in Australia I feel obliged to stand up and defend the sugar industry, and I will continue to do that this term. Along with that now, unfortunately, we have people within the bureaucracy, from the Bureau of Resources and Energy Economics, who have come out with this report saying that these so-called subsidies to the ethanol industry should be scrapped. I am fiercely against the recommendations that came out of that report. That report was clearly wrong. It has understated the employment that has been generated by the ethanol industry. They were even talking about how ethanol excise was being forgone to the tune of 38c a litre, forgetting the fact that actually government—and both sides of the political spectrum—has only ever said that ethanol excise will, at the most, be 12½c a litre. That report was based on outright lies, and I will continue to stand up and speak up for the sugar industry in matters like this.

In the short time that I have left, I will thank a bunch of people. I want to thank the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister and the ministers for agriculture and industry, and a former member, Sophie Mirabella, for coming to my electorate. I also thank the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Finance, who also came to assist me in my electorate.

I thank my staff members: Dave Westman; Dennis O'Reily; Nicole Laffin, who has since left to have a baby; Anne Whitson; Kathleen Agnew; Margaret McLean; and Danielle Nielsen. I thank the people who assisted temporarily and in volunteer roles throughout the campaign—Anne, Tamara, Casey and Rebecca—and my indefatigable electorate council and campaign committee people: Charlie Camilleri, Kerry Latter and a bunch of other members. If I were to read that list out, I would have to have another 20 minutes—and, Mr Deputy Speaker, I do not think you will give that to me—but I do want to mention Jim Wort, a stalwart of the Liberal-National Party in the Airlie Beach area.

Sadly, I found out a week ago that Jim had passed away due to pneumonia. I probably never really stopped to give Jim the thanks and appreciation I should have. I am sure I said, 'Thanks for the help,' but we always say, 'Thanks for the help,' to our volunteers. Jim went out of his way for the cause. He went out of his way for me. I thank him and his family so much from the bottom of my heart. It is going to be very sad not being able to talk to Jim in the future, catch up with him and be harangued about the things he thinks we could be doing better. I do thank Jim. With those words I want to again thank my entire electorate for the privilege of being here. I will be their strong voice in a better government.

Wayne Swan (Lilley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to start today by thanking the electors of Lilley for the trust they have placed in me for another term in this parliament. It is a great honour to represent the people of Lilley in this parliament. I will do everything I possibly can, with all of the energy I have got, to make a difference in the lives that they lead, a difference for the better. The people who work hard—those people who get up every day, send their kids off to school, go to work, come home, cook the tea, get up the next day and do it again—deserve the support of a government that is looking after their interests, that, if they suffer misfortune, someone will be there with a helping hand for the vulnerable and those left behind. Australians who work hard have the expectation that they will get a fair day's pay for a fair day's work and that they will have access to affordable health care, education and housing. Australians want a community and a society where it is possible for all to get ahead, irrespective of their background. They want to know that their kids have the opportunity to succeed in life through getting a decent education. They want to know that they have the peace of mind of always having Medicare there should they suffer ill health.

Lying beneath all of these public policies is the fundamental fact that you can have none of those things unless you have a job. Jobs are central to my agenda in this House and are central to the agenda of my party, and it has been that way for over 100 years—not just the number of jobs but the quality of the jobs and the working conditions that go with them. In Australia over two terms the Labor government participated with the private sector in the creation of nearly one million jobs. Jobs were constantly on our mind—firstly, secondly and thirdly—every day we were taking decisions about the future of our economy.

As a Labor member of parliament I appreciate particularly the economic and social destruction that arises from high levels of unemployment and prolonged unemployment, the destruction that high and prolonged unemployment brings to communities. When that prospect was threatened in this country through the global financial crisis and the global recession those considerations of preserving communities through supporting employment were No. 1 in our concerns. By dealing with the global financial crisis and the global recession in the way we did we supported employment. Hundreds of thousands of people kept their jobs. They would have otherwise been unemployed and suffered all of the consequences of that in their households and in their communities.

We should never forget that during this period in the Labor Party's endeavour to support jobs we were opposed every step of the way by those opposite, who used some of the most crude and destructive politics that I have seen in the 20 years I have been a member of this place. But, because of the actions of the Labor government, Australia almost alone among developed economies avoided a deep recession and the social and economic destruction that comes from it. Indeed, we did much better than that. Australia has grown 15 per cent since 2007 while just about every one of our peer economies in the developed world struggled during that period to keep their head above water. As I said before, as a nation we added nearly one million new jobs during that period. It is a record I am deeply proud of and it is a record that every Labor member in this House is deeply proud of.

Our economy continues to face challenges and at the moment it is the challenge of transition—transition in the mining sector from an investment phase to an export led phase, transition from mining sources of growth to non-mining sources of growth. Naturally these challenges have not been made any easier by the very high and artificial level of the dollar for a long period of time. That has had a profound impact on our proud manufacturing sector.

We can meet all of these challenges with confidence. We can meet all these challenges if we have a plan for the future, if we have a fiscal policy that is expressly designed to support growth, if we have appropriate monetary policy and in particular if we have an active industry policy. We can meet these challenges if we have a determination to invest in infrastructure, such as superfast broadband. We must meet the challenge of increasing our educational performance, which is why the Gonski recommendations were so important. Make no mistake, these educational challenges in particular are the key to Australia reaping the benefits of the Asian century.

It is deeply disappointing that jobs are once again under threat in this country in a way in which they were not previously. We have a government whose policies are infected with what I call a vicious ideology, and at its core—at the core of this vicious ideology—is a government absolutely determined to dismantle the social safety net in this country. We have a government that fully subscribes to Maurice Newman's maxim of 'creative destruction'. There are plenty of people, particularly in right-wing economic circles, who follow that maxim. But when Maurice Newman, the chair of the Prime Minister's Business Advisory Council, says very clearly that he believes in creative destruction—that is, let the market rip and do not ever, ever intervene to protect the vulnerable or necessarily make the platforms for future investment—we know this is a very destructive attitude that starts at the top, from the Prime Minister, runs through his Business Advisory Council and right through his cabinet. Basically they believe in the destructive powers of the market to be used against anyone or anything, and it cannot be masked by the fancy language that we hear occasionally from the Treasurer. It is about justifying sawing the bone of the most vulnerable. And that is the very last thing our economy needs at the moment. The very last thing our economy needs is a dose of European style austerity through savage cuts to the social safety net and cuts to critical investments in infrastructure, and in particular to the NBN.

These are all plainly the goals of the coalition government. Over the past six months, they have gone about systematically trashing our country's economic record and economic performance by deliberately exaggerating deficit and debt. This trash talking of our economy has already had a corrosive effect, particularly on consumer confidence, which has dropped substantially since September last year. This characterisation of our economy is completely repudiated by international financial institutions, reputable market sector economists and credit rating agencies. Just a week ago the International Monetary Fund, in their Article IV assessment, had this to say in their lead paragraph:

The Australian economy has performed well relative to many other advanced economies since the [GFC].

But you did not see a word of that in the newspapers and you did not hear a word of that from ministers in the government. The International Monetary Fund, in this report and many other reports over the past five years, have always strongly supported Labor's strategy through the global financial crisis and continue to oppose European style Hockey-Abbott austerity measures for this country.

Despite all of this, every time the Treasurer or the Prime Minister open their mouths, they deliver a depressing speech on the state of the economy: 'It's heading in the wrong direction,' 'Debt is a huge burden,' 'Spending's out of control' and 'Wages are increasing too fast'. Well not according to the IMF, not according to the credit rating agencies, not according to the World Bank, not according to most market sector economists, not according to Moody's, not according to Bloomberg—and, most importantly, not according to the Reserve Bank of Australia, which only this month produced a new set of forecasts that are much higher than the forecast produced by the government in their midyear update at the end of last year. So you have every credible commentator on one side of the debate, and that lot over there on the other.

Once again, according to the IMF:

[We have] a track record of sustained growth … a resilient financial sector, and public debt [is] still low … and [we have] strong and transparent fiscal institutions.

It is a complete endorsement of the fiscal strategy of the previous government. Bloomberg came out the same day that the Prime Minister was in Davos—he was making the extraordinary statement that the global financial crisis was 'caused by governance, not by markets' and saying that 'finally the country was open for business'—and said Australia was the fifth most open economy in the world.

You can also go through the reports from the credit rating agencies. All of these agencies have maintained Australia's AAA rating, despite the deliberately downbeat forecasts that were put forward by the government in December last year in their MYEFO report. Indeed, Fitch upgraded their rating for Australia in late 2011 and they said then, expressly—they were the third major rating agency to give us a AAA rating; the first time in Australian history we have ever had it, and not something that had ever happened under the Liberals—that they gave it to us because they supported the practical use of fiscal deficits to maintain economic growth and cap the unemployment rate.

We got the September national accounts last year that confirmed our economy has completed a remarkable period of 21 consecutive years of economic growth. In fact, economic growth in this country has largely left every other developed economy in its wake. This is what the IMF observed just last week:

The budget deficit was reduced from 3 percent of GDP to 1½ percent in 2012/13. [The previous government's] goal of returning the budget to surplus last year was held back by slower-than-projected output growth and weaker commodity prices. Revenue fell short of projections—

That is, what occurred was that revenue slowed down; it was not the consequence of government spending. And of course to cut harder at that stage would have undoubtedly produced negative growth in this country.

As much as they absolutely hate it, the fact is the coalition have inherited one of the strongest economies in the developed world—a country that got the big calls right at the right time! The danger we see now from this government is they might make some big calls, but they might not get the timing right and they most probably will get them wrong. Let us take what they are saying about one of their favourite topics at the moment—that is, tax. When Peter Costello described Australia as a low tax country, our tax-to-GDP ratio was 24 per cent. After six years of Labor, our national tax-to-GDP ratio is currently 23 per cent. Add in state and local governments and the tax ratio is around 33 per cent of national income. Compare that to New Zealand and the United Kingdom, where the total tax-to-GDP ratio is over 40 per cent. That is in countries with conservative governments.

What is the purpose of all this trash-talking of the economy we hear from the Prime Minister and the Treasurer? What they are on about is demonising government and the services it provides as a way to opening the door politically to bring in the savage cuts they were not game to tell the Australian people about during the election campaign. That is what all this demonisation is about, and it is straight out of the playbook of the Tea Party in the United States. They spout mantras like growth and productivity and debt, but the reality is that the sort of savage program they are planning will result in the opposite: it will result in lower growth, less productivity and higher debt.

They say they are for growth, but here is a government where the Treasurer stood in this House and hounded Holden out of our country. The day he stood here doing that, everyone knew that Toyota would go too. He did it gleefully, and he did it arrogantly, and it sent a terrible message to international investors in our community. After six months it is clear that Australians have not got the government they voted for. Sadly, they are just what we warned they would be, only worse.

Given this record, if there were to be a new economic emergency in Australia we had all better pray that the ambulance is not being driven by Joe Hockey. It was Mr Hockey and Mr Abbott who, back in 2008 and 2009, opposed the essential measures we took to save our country from recession. What we know now, as we knew then, is that they believe in the cleansing powers of recession. That is what they mean when they use the words 'creative destruction'. They believe in it. It is a value system which infects their economics and produces the hardline politics that we are seeing.

For years Mr Hockey would not even admit that the global financial crisis had occurred. In fact, on one occasion he said it was confined to the North Atlantic. We had the Prime Minister in Davos in January saying the global financial crisis was not caused by markets but by governments. Tell that to the countries around the world with tens of millions of people unemployed as a result of the irresponsible actions of some of the largest banks in the world! They are either deeply ignorant or deeply misleading; I guess it is probably both. Either way, all of this rhetoric and all of this practice is not a solid basis on which to make policy which will affect the lives and fortunes of millions of Australians—not least the kids and teachers that are depending on the money that should be flowing through to provide Gonski and the quality of education that would come with it—so that we can get a fair share of the prosperity that will come with the Asian century.

Over the weekend Mr Hockey was at the G20. I hope it goes well for Australia. But he did not believe in the G20 back in 2009. He said it was a left-wing conspiracy. It was not an organisation he was supporting. At that stage I would imagine even Chancellor Merkel would have thought that was a little odd. The point is this: at the height of the global financial crisis the Treasurer did not see the G20 as an important decision-making body, and that has implications for how he uses the chairmanship now. He did use the chairmanship over the weekend for a partisan domestic political agenda. This was deeply ill considered. He is the chair of the G20. He does not have the luxury of trying to dress up his domestic agenda as a collective international agenda. That will, sooner or later, produce problems for the G20.

In Sunday's newspapers, for example, he claimed the IMF had recommended, in its suite of structural reforms to reinvigorate growth, that Australia should further deregulate the labour market. It must have been in the IMF report in invisible ink, because it cannot be found. He is simply making it up as he goes along. He might be saying that because he is a former minister for Work Choices, but there is no such recommendation to further deregulate industrial relations in the IMF report. What he is really trying to do is warm the country up for another attack on workers' rights. It is the same old Liberal Party with the same old preoccupations—get stuck into the workers, rip into industrial relations and rip away essential protections.

This government has a completely ideological agenda. It will go to any lengths to prosecute them, which brings me to MYEFO. The MYEFO forecasts, which are excessively pessimistic, are the government's forecasts. They are not the Treasury's forecasts. They differ markedly from the PEFO, which is produced by the independent Treasury and the finance department, without government. They differ markedly from the Statement on monetary policy brought down by the Reserve Bank in February this year. Why is it that the forecasts that underpin the calculations in MYEFO that the Treasurer uses to claim there is an extra $70 billion of debt are markedly different from the PEFO before it and the Statement on monetary policy from the Reserve Bank after? The answer is pretty clear. There is a fiddle going on here with the forecast. It has been put in place deliberately by the Treasurer to exaggerate deficit and debt and create an environment in this country where they can get out of the commitments they made during the election campaign not to cut the social safety net. That explains why they are out there now suddenly claiming there is a problem with the pension. They are going to do all these things they said they would not do during the campaign; they have to do it because they have $70 billion more debt, most of which has come from a change in the forecasts which were not produced by the Treasury and which the Treasurer himself says are government's forecasts. That is what is going on in this country. It is an agenda that we on this side of the House will fight because it is a bad agenda for the country. It is bad for jobs, it is bad for growth and it is bad for equity.

John Cobb (Calare, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It has been several months since the Governor-General gave her speech in this parliament. I am glad to now be able to give my reply. I want to make some remarks about the election result in the electorate of Calare before talking about my vision for Calare and what I hope to achieve with a coalition government controlling the House.

For those who are not familiar with my wonderful electorate, it is the oldest part of modern Australia. It is what Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson saw when they crossed the mountains. Calare has towns and a city older than Brisbane and Melbourne—in fact, older than any capital city in Australia outside of Sydney and Hobart. Calare runs from where you trip over the mountains at Lithgow and that stretches west, all the way out to Forbes and Parkes. Having been the member for Parkes, I feel an incredibly responsibility for and affinity with Parkes. I still have my property in the seat of Parkes, so I feel like western New South Wales is where I belong and what I am responsible to. That is not to take anything away from the member for Parkes, Mark Coulton, and the job he is doing there.

Calare is the engine room of New South Wales. It has agriculture, mining, power generation and forestry. It is where the first serious steel foundry, at Lithgow, and the first serious coal mine in Australia were established. But, like many rural and regional electorates today, it is facing challenges. I will get to those later.

In the 2013 election, I had nine candidates, the highest number I have ever had, against me. I suspect that was because they all realised what a wonderful part of Australia Calare is and they were very keen to represent it, under whatever banner they chose. Despite that, we got the best result we have ever had in Calare. I am only a very small part of that. I have absolute confidence in saying that Calare voters made their decisions in the best interests not only of Calare and their families—as I am sure they did—but also, more broadly, of Australia. I believe the people of Calare knew that only the Liberal-National coalition would actually bring back jobs, bring back industry, bring back productivity and bring back to people a sense of control over their lives and their cost of living.

I cannot thank enough the more than 500 volunteers who manned pre-polling booths, campaign offices and the 90 Calare election day booths and did every job in between—all the things that volunteers do. Time obviously does not allow me to name them; I am not going to try. But I do extend my, Calare's and the parliament's sincere gratitude. You came from every corner of the electorate to champion our cause and it certainly made the difference. It is an absolute pleasure to have represented you over all those years and to represent you now in this parliament.

To my staff members, Caroline, Beth, John, Melissa, Kylie, Bernice, Richard and Ann: you all put your lives on hold and embraced the even longer working hours, unusual requests and stress that go with an election campaign. You are not just an asset to me and my office, the National Party and the government; your knowledge, skills and sincerity are an asset to Calare, the parliament and the people of Australia. I also thank your families and friends, as I obviously thank Lisa and the rest of my own family. Without a family and people to fall back on, it does not work very well. I have the best and I really do thank them for that.

I turn my attention now to my hopes and desires for Calare. In all the years I have been in parliament and had the pleasure, the honour and the agony of fighting for constituents and my electorate—whether out west in Broken Hill or in Lithgow—I do not think I have ever had a stronger passion to do that than I have right now. I say that because I am absolutely committed to ensuring that under a coalition government, a National-Liberal government, Calare gets a fair deal. Calare voted for the coalition because the coalition believes in infrastructure, dams and reducing the cost of living. It does not believe in political correctness at the cost of what people need. I guess it is no surprise to anyone that I wanted to represent agriculture in this government. However, as the saying goes, when one door closes another one opens. I have been given the opportunity to focus more of my energies and time on what is good for Calare and for New South Wales.

Before I get to the vision, I need to give some context and some background. Along with other areas across Australia, our manufacturing and processing sector has been hit with costs and imposts—the carbon tax, increased competition from cheaper overseas goods and various other things. These issues came to the fore in Calare in the last quarter of 2013 and the first months of 2014. We have suffered substantial workforce and industry changes and probably the loss of over 1,100 jobs, continuing over the next couple of years.

I want to speak in some detail about two operations that are part of this change, namely Electrolux and Simplot. One is an American owned family company and the other is a Swiss based company. It is interesting to note that they are not the only foreign companies or processors in that region in my electorate. I can think of three: Devro, who make sausage skins amongst a variety of other things; Nestle; and Mars. Those three companies are all foreign owned and have invested heavily in themselves over the last two, three or four years—and continue to do so—whereas Electrolux and Simplot have not.

Electrolux global announced on 25 October that they would consolidate their Asia-Pacific refrigeration production, directing investment and funds to Thailand, supposedly, to produce fridges and freezers. As a consequence, Orange in Australia will no longer produce fridges. They used to produce 300,000 articles a year, which was about 50 per cent of the Australian market. This is a decision that has an enormous impact on the 578 workers at the plant and the 98 contractors, as well as the families connected to them and the entire community. Thank heavens it is in a place like Orange that can probably—and I say 'probably'—deal with this. The decision was made by the global management, despite repeated requests from me and the newly reinstalled Minister for Industry, Ian Macfarlane—who toured the plant and spoke with local management in October—for time for the government to investigate the situation. I was and I still am bitterly disappointed that Electrolux global management made this decision. Electrolux has European and North American members on its board but no-one from Asia or Australia. Unfortunately for Orange, Electrolux global management had made the decision to have one production centre in South-East Asia, and nothing we could do would have changed that decision.

In a similar situation, another large manufacturer in the region, Simplot, based in Bathurst—as well as Tasmania—have signalled their intention to scale back their operations, and 110 full-time jobs and 24 casuals will go in the next couple of months as the plant moves to one shift per day, focusing on frozen and canned goods and Chiko Rolls. Again, Minister Macfarlane and I requested Simplot to give the new government the appropriate time to look into the situation, but they did not give us that opportunity. While the factory remains, it is a huge blow to those people and their families.

The region is also set to lose a further 300 jobs, as several other businesses have indicated their intention to move. They include rail business Downer EDi, 100 jobs; Centennial in Lithgow, scaling back around 80 positions; and Coalpac in Lithgow, 120 positions. Coalpac went into voluntary receivership, with the bulk of the employees being retrenched last year. And earlier this year EnergyAustralia, the new owners of Mount Piper and Wallerawang power stations near Lithgow, citing a shortage of commercial coal supply and a decline in energy demand—in some ways, I have no doubt, due to the cost of the RET and the incredible effect it is having on coal supplies and coal power—announced that by the end of March Wallerawang will no longer operate. While the 300 jobs there are guaranteed for the next four years, the contractors and suppliers to Wallerawang are certainly not.

We are a tough region and we are a good region and, one way or another, we are going to deal with this. I believe we are one of the few parts of regional Australia with the 'get up and go' and opportunities to replace these losses. How are we going to do it, though? I have always believed that to create jobs you must first create opportunity, and the government must provide opportunity, where it makes commercial sense.

Since I became the member for Calare, after redistributions, I have thought long and hard about what is imperative in Calare—not just due to these productivity losses; it always has been—and that is water storage. The western two-thirds of Calare have a serious water shortage. It is something that I have seen and looked at for the last six or seven years. It has to be addressed. We seem to have a dam phobia in this country, and we have had it for too long. In my electorate we are in desperate need of appropriate water storages. Currently our productivity is under enormous sustainability and expansion pressures due to a lack of reliable water sources and reliable water storage.

The Needles dam proposal is a short-, medium- and long-term solution which would assist with job creation, encourage existing industry expansion and attract new industry. I have been asked on many occasions why there is not a bailout package for our region, given that our job losses proportionally are worse than what is happening to Melbourne and Adelaide with the car industry. But we all know that throwing money does not necessarily solve anything. It does not magically create jobs. You have only got to look at the money that has been thrown at Mitsubishi, Ford, Holden and Toyota, and all of them have gone or will be going.

You have to create the right environment to create jobs. That involves encouraging new industries and the morale of those who would invest in the region, helping those already there to expand and to take on new workers. A new dam will not only create open optimism; it well create the morale, attract new industry and support industries already in our region. It will give them the confidence to plan ahead. Mining, abattoirs, tourism and urban development are all calling for water storage they can depend on. It does not exist now. It will also create some immediate jobs but the long-term goal is to support other jobs that would be created through new or expanded businesses.

The dam in question would be located on the Belubula River called the Needles Gap, near Canowindra. It has a catchment area of an estimated 532 square kilometres into which a significant number of creeks feed and which would become part of an integrated water system with Lake Rowlands and Carcoar Dam. It may create 150 jobs to build it. That is a bonus but it is not the reason to do it. It would give water security to eight local government areas: Bathurst, Blayney, Orange, Cabonne, Cowra, Parkes, Forbes and Grenfell, some of them outside Calare, but that is good—I am great with that. Indirectly the whole region and the lower Lachlan would benefit too because it would not create new irrigation but it would give much greater security to those who already irrigate, because the Lachlan is the least secure irrigation region in New South Wales.

New South Wales Water could undertake a detailed feasibility study, including geotechnical, environmental and design and the economic benefits for the region, which I have had quoted at me, for the cost of $3 million. The timeframe for the feasibility study is less than two years. Hopefully, with an enthusiastic state government, the project could be completed within five years.

The Needles Dam proposal is noted in the federal government dam strategy as the new Carcoar dam and is prioritised in the New South Wales government infrastructure strategy and would now be the leading dam. While the building of the dam obviously far exceeds the initial cost of a feasibility study of $3 million, it would provide governments and stakeholders the opportunity to set in motion the second phase, while reinforcing the morale of the region's workforce and industry. Just the knowledge that it was going to happen would encourage mining to get going. It takes mining at least five years to do their setup as well.

Since I first went out there to talk about this, with all the local mayors totally in support, the feedback has been simply amazing. This has to happen. Calare overwhelmingly voted for the Nationals and the coalition in the recent election. It did so because it knew that only the coalition was committed to more jobs, to more industry, to more production and to a better standard of living. It did so because only the coalition was committed to more infrastructure and to more dams—it had a dam strategy. Calare needs more water for all the above reasons. Calare needs more water storage for now and for the future. Calare needs $3 million at this time so that New South Wales Water can do the study that will make Needles Dam a reality and will also look at the cost benefits. I intend to ensure that the Nationals and the coalition make good for Calare and show the leadership and guts necessary to do what needs to be done.

Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Manufacturing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I begin by thanking the voters of Makin who elected me to represent them in this place. I would not be here were it not for them. Equally, I thank my family, my office team and the many supporters, for without their help I could not have run my re-election campaign. As every member of this place would know, running an election campaign for a federal electorate requires a huge effort. I am most grateful for the work of all the people who in some way assisted me. I also acknowledge the many candidates who stood for office in the 2013 election and in turn provided voters with choice. It is part of the strength of Australia's democratic system of government.

The election resulted in a change of government. As a result, several of my colleagues whom I had worked alongside in the last parliament were not re-elected. I place on record my appreciation of their service as members of parliament. They were all hardworking MPs who, I believe, had served their electorates well, but for reasons mainly beyond their control they lost their seats. Such is the nature of Australian politics where the focus is too often and too much on the political leaders of the day. I particularly acknowledge the service in this place of my South Australian colleague Steve Georganas, who diligently represented the Hindmarsh electorate for three terms. He was a hardworking local member who served his electorate well. I also acknowledge the many colleagues who voluntarily retired at the 2013 election or, in the case of the former member for Griffith, who retired shortly after the September election. I will miss their friendship and their experience. Having said that, I also congratulate other members of this place who were re-elected in September or were elected for the first time.

This parliament forms the centre of our democracy, our rights and our freedom, but in truth we are only as free as our laws allow us to be. The role of this parliament is, however, to ensure that those laws fairly balance the rights of individuals with the rights of the collective society we are all a part of. One of our important responsibilities as MPs is, therefore, to ensure the independence and impartiality of this parliament.

Regrettably, in its first months in government the Abbott government has treated this parliament with arrogance and contempt,

making a mockery of question time with ministers refusing to answer questions or avoiding answers, removing supplementary questions from question time, limiting opportunities for members to speak in adjournment debates and private members' motions and, as we have seen, gagging debates on important legislation at a time when the legislative program is very light. Restricting parliament's ability to do its work is a direct attack on our democracy.

The Governor-General's address on 12 November outlined the Abbott government's agenda for the 44th Parliament. What is notable about the address is not what it spells out but what it does not. As voters are very quickly finding out, the Abbott government has much more in store for them than what the Prime Minister told them in the lead-up to the election. Of course, the government's defence will predictably be to blame the previous government. Even that is already beginning to wear thin with the voters with whom I speak. I will also comment briefly on the government's claim to have a mandate for all that they want to do. I do not accept the mandate argument.

Firstly, the government only received 45.5 per cent of the public vote. That in turn means that 54.5 per cent of the Australian people voted against the government—in other words, more than half of the Australian voters did not support this government. Secondly, the election, as is the case with all elections, was not a referendum on one single issue. Voters made the choice that they did for a multitude of reasons. Again, that is always the case, always has been and always will be. What we have seen from the Abbott government, however, in its first five months in office is a government that takes from low-income Australians and gives to high-income earners, a government that wants to balance its budget on the back of low-income earners, a government that has turned its back on the environment and a government that has turned its back on South Australia. If time permits, I will address each of those points.

As a South Australian, I will begin with how the Abbott government has turned its back on South Australia. I know just how important the river Murray and Holden are to South Australians. Yet, in its first weeks in government, the Abbott government capped water buybacks to 1,500 gigalitres, deferred over $600 million of buybacks and walked away from the Labor government's commitment to return an additional 450 gigalitres of water to the river Murray system. Restoring and securing the health of the Murray was a painstaking process. Being at the end of the system, it was particularly important for South Australians. Under Labor, we finally reached a national agreement. It was not an easy process, yet in a matter of weeks all of that good work was being undone by the Abbott government while South Australian Liberals both in this place and in the South Australian parliament remained silent. The fact is that South Australia is once again being rolled by the eastern states and the South Australian Liberal members of this government have gone to water, just as they did when it came to Holden.

The Abbott government had been warned for months by former Holden executive Mike Devereux that any cuts in government assistance to the auto industry would result in the closure of Holden and with it the loss of several thousand jobs in South Australia alone. For South Australia, it also meant a $1 billion plus hit to the state economy and that recovery for the state would take years. Secondly, there are no immediate jobs for those workers to transition to and, to add insult to injury, the Abbott government came up with a pitiful $60 million of national assistance funding—not just for South Australia; this is the total for the nation as a result of the hit on the auto industry. Again, where were the voices of South Australian Liberals in this place or the voice of the South Australia Liberal opposition leader Steven Marshall? Again, they remained silent whilst the people in South Australia, including hundreds of small businesses whom they elected to represent them, were being ignored by the Abbott government.

No amount of protesting by the Abbott government or South Australian Liberals that Holden was always going to close will change the fact that the Abbott government made no effort to keep Holden in Australia. Instead, they did the opposite, cutting water assistance by $500 million and then ordering a Productivity Commission inquiry after making it clear that there would be no further financial assistance to the industry. By all accounts, the Prime Minister not even once picked up the phone to speak to GM executives about Holden's future in Australia prior to GM making its decision to close. The Abbott government simply did not care about car workers or their families, just as it did nothing to secure the jobs of workers at Toyota, SPC Ardmona, Electrolux, Qantas, Simplot, Peabody, Caterpillar or Rio Tinto jobs in Gove. In fact, 63,000 jobs have been lost since the Abbott government was elected, predominantly in the manufacturing sector.

As shadow parliamentary secretary for manufacturing, I take a particular interest in those jobs and Australia's manufacturing sector. Even with the loss of jobs in manufacturing over recent decades, I do not accept that Australia does not have a future or that we should put up the white flag on manufacturing. In recent years, the most damaging hits to manufacturing have not come from workers' wages that the Abbott government seeks to blame but from globalisation and the oversupply of products arising from the global financial crisis, a high Australian dollar, loopholes in free trade agreements and high levels of government assistance in competing countries. Nor do I believe that Australia can be a secure First World economy without a strong manufacturing sector. Over the months ahead, I will be working with my colleagues and talking to manufacturers around Australia about the most effective ways the government can secure Australia's manufacturing industries. If other advanced countries are able to maintain a profitable manufacturing sector, there is no reason why Australia, with so many natural advantages, cannot equally do so.

What is of real concern and should be of concern to Australian families is that since coming to office the Abbott government's true agenda is quickly emerging, and the government's austerity measures are focused on working families, low-income earners and welfare recipients. The Abbott government has already cut the schoolkids bonus to 1.3 million Australian families; it is worth an average of $1,200 to each family. It has cut superannuation tax breaks worth up to $500 to some 3.6 million low-income earners. It has cut small business tax breaks, including the instant asset write-off of up to $6,500, tax loss carryback provisions of up to $1 million and up to $5,000 for motor vehicle tax write-offs to small businesses. The Abbott government has even taken back $4.5 million in grants made to not-for-profit community groups to which the previous Labor government had allocated funding.

These groups return far more in value to the Australian community than the grants that they receive from government. This is penny-pinching at its worst. There is no doubt in my mind that the government's Commission of Audit is nothing more than an excuse for further cruel cuts in the May budget. Commissions of audit have been standard practice of conservative state and federal governments in this country for the past 20 years. We know that the government wants to sell off Medibank Private and impose a Medicare co-payment on people who rely on bulk-billing. Again, low-income earners and pensioners will be hit the hardest.

Of course, the Abbott government will deny any such thoughts until after the Western Australian Senate election, just as they did in the lead-up to the Griffith by-election. The government and the Treasurer talk about the end of the age of entitlement but that only applies to low-income Australians whilst high-income earners, like BHP and Rio Tinto, are rewarded with tax cuts. For the years ending June 2012 and June 2013, I understand that BHP and Rio Tinto made a combined pre-tax profit of around $82 billion and an after-tax profit of $55 billion. If the age of entitlement is over, let us see what the Abbott government does in May to mining rebates such as the oil and gas tax concessions, worth around $1.2 million over the coming year; the accelerated depreciation for oil and gas assets, costing $450 million this coming year; and the $1 billion-plus fuel tax credits program, of which the mining sector are major beneficiaries.

The Abbott government's agenda is becoming very clear—that is, to balance the budget on the back of low-income earners and welfare recipients, to raise taxes that mainly affect those already struggling the most, to cut health and education spending and to reduce workers' entitlements by blaming them for the nation's woes whilst corporate CEOs and other executives continue to receive excessive salary packages. The member for Swan articulated these points very well. The philosophies and the agenda of this government are clear and becoming even more so each day. The problem is that these policies will have an adverse effect on the Australian economy, on economic growth and on job creation within our country. These policies will hurt many of the people I represent and Australians right around the country.

Contrary to the rhetoric of this government that seeks to blame the previous Labor government for all its woes and in turn run the narrative that it is doing what it has to do in order to restore this nation's economy and balance the budget, the government inherited an economy in pretty good shape. Economists around the world had described the economy as being in pretty good shape, and the member for Swan articulated this point well. The economy had a AAA credit rating from all three major credit rating agencies, relatively low inflation, low unemployment and relatively low debt and deficit by international standards. We will not hear this from the government over the coming months in the excuses for why it needs to do what it is going to do—that is, attack low-income earners, wage earners and welfare recipients. Those policies will have an adverse effect on the people who elected me to this place and whom I represent. Those policies will also have an adverse effect on the 2.7 million small businesses in this country.

This government continuously claims that it represents small businesses, but in reality when you analyse its policies it does nothing for small businesses. The best example I can think of is before us right now, with the government turning its back on the auto industry. In turn, who will be one of the major losers from that? Thousands of small businesses around the country. I was elected to this place by people who want me to stand up against those kinds of cuts, people who do not want to see education spending cuts, people who do not want to see health spending cuts, people who want to see our environment protected and people who do not want to see their working conditions further eroded. They took a strong stand on working conditions in 2007. People in this country work hard and do it tough, but they are not prepared to wear the responsibility for policies that this government wants to implement and which are going to make their lives even tougher.