John Alexander (Bennelong, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the Address-in-Reply to Her Excellency the Governor-General. It is an honour to speak again on this matter. My previous address-in-reply was my first speech in this place in October 2010, and I congratulate the new member for Griffith and all my new colleagues who have given their first speech during this debate.

Following the custom adopted by many of my colleagues, I will use this opportunity to provide the parliament with an update on some of the programs I have implemented in Bennelong and also a short review following the results of last September's federal election. In my first speech I said:

Opportunity is the first essential ingredient to achieve success.

… … …

To realise our country’s full potential, every Australian must have the opportunity to compete and earn just reward for their effort and success.

I remain grateful for the opportunities provided to me throughout my life. In this role, as legislators, we are endowed with an important task of ensuring those less fortunate than ourselves are also provided opportunities to succeed in life. It is, therefore, most appropriate that the first local program I will talk about, and also the one I am most proud of, is the Bennelong Gardens Project.

As patron to the disability services organisation Achieve Australia, and also as an ambassador for Lifeline, I developed this project as a way to empower those in our community suffering from debilitating health issues, to give them the opportunity to take ownership over a local venture, with the aim to build it into a rewarding and profitable exercise. The Bennelong Gardens project seeks to utilise unused public land to establish commercial market gardens operated and owned by people with disabilities. Retirees are also invited to participate as a way to facilitate active recreation and social engagement, and to give a new sense of purpose to their lives. For their continuous support of the Bennelong Gardens project, I thank Michael Trail of Social Ventures Australia, Anne Bryce and Sunita Menezes of Achieve Australia, Tristan Harris of Harris Farms, Patrick Soars from Australian Native Landscapes, Sue Dennett of Karonga schools and Martin Wren from Nova Employment. We look forward to receiving support from the New South Wales state government in the form of approving sites that we have identified. No pressure—yesterday would have been just fine!

I entered this parliament on the back of many years as a small business operator, following my father's lifetime of experience in this most difficult but most rewarding of sectors. While distributing ANZAC brochures to local businesses in 2012 in some of our 20 villages, there was a tale of woe being repeated by nearly every business owner. The complaint was: 'These are the toughest times we have ever had to endure.' The dominance of the major retail players had left many in despair, contemplating capitulation. Shortly after my election in 2010, I commenced the Bennelong Village Business initiative, or BVB. This was designed to help local business owners by providing a platform for a collective approach to marketing the unique services they provide to the community. Inspired by Prime Minister Abbott's direct action philosophy, we formed Bennelong Village Businesses to gain a collective power to negotiate on the part of some 350 traders in 20 villages. The first result was a 33 per cent discount for advertising in our local paper, John Booth's The WeeklyTimes. Then more assistance came from Boehringer Ingelheim with marketing and design of our brochures, which were letterbox-dropped throughout the community.

In 2012 I moved a motion in this place for which I was grateful to receive bipartisan support. The motion formally recognised the significant contribution that Australian Chinese have made to our nation's modern multicultural society. The motion noted the strong history of Chinese migration to Australia throughout the past 200 years, and the vibrant festivities and events hosted by the Bennelong Chinese community and enjoyed by people from all cultures in the region. Over the past month, I have been fortunate to attend many community events as part of the lunar New Year, with our strong and vital Chinese and Korean communities coming together to treat us to a magnificent program of celebrations as we farewelled the Year of the Snake and welcomed the Year of the Horse.

One of the local events I developed in early 2011 has become a growing annual celebration. This is the Bennelong Cup Table Tennis competition, which grew out of the Bennelong Schools Table Tennis Program. This program was developed to engage students from a variety of cultural backgrounds through the sport of table tennis. Hyundai generously agreed to sponsor the provision of table-tennis tables and equipment to all 40 schools in the electorate of Bennelong, which has one of the largest Chinese communities in Australia. The Bennelong Cup has become an annual event and sees top table-tennis players from China, Korea, Japan and Australia compete to promote social engagement through their sport.

In September last year, I received a strong vote of support from the people of Bennelong. The support I received from across my electorate is a product of both my ongoing work as a local member and the strong national leadership of Prime Minister Abbott, who leads a united and focused team. Former member for Bennelong and Prime Minister John Howard once said, 'All politics is local.' The people of Bennelong have elected me and this government with a mandate to govern in the best interests of our nation—to provide a safe and secure Australia, to return to the levels of hope, reward and opportunities that we grew accustomed to during the Howard era.

I commit to the good people of Bennelong, from Ermingon to Chatswood West, from North Epping to Meadowbank, from Carlingford to Gladesville and from Eastwood to East Ryde, to continue to serve as a representative for the entire electorate, to work hard for you, for your businesses and for your families. We will face many challenges over the coming years as our economy is put back on track. By working together, we will develop a stronger community and a better future for our next generation.

As every member in this place will agree, elections are gruelling tests of our dedication to the task and to our community whilst trying to balance the needs of our families and those close to us. I was very fortunate to receive an abundance of assistance and tireless dedication from a large team of campaign workers. I have thanked each and every one of them personally but wish to reiterate my appreciation to them on the parliamentary record.

Rob Mitchell (McEwen, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a pleasure to speak in the address-in-reply debate. Back in November 2013, the Governor-General gave her speech for the new government in this parliament. It has now been five long months since that election. Since then, we have seen from the coalition what can only be described as one of the most catastrophic starts to a new government in political history. We have a government that has spent three years opposing everything but standing for nothing. Australian voters are now experiencing a bit of buyer's regret as this government has shown it is not the government Australian people voted for. The honeymoon period that new governments should expect is long since over.

I start by talking about the electorate of McEwen, which I have been re-elected to represent. It is an honour to be standing here, having been given the trust of the many communities who make up the seat of McEwen, and to be the first Labor member to retain McEwen in 25 years since the late, great Peter Cleeland. There are quite a few people who I need to personally thank with regard to my election campaign. Firstly, to my ever-supportive family, Lisa, Rachael, Mum and Dad, Glenda, Sharyn, Meagan, Jessica, Elly, David, Geoff, Belinda, Brooke and Jaya—and I note that, at 16 years old, it was Brooke's first election campaign and she did a fantastic job: your constant support and understanding throughout this period was amazing. I could not have done this without you. To my staff during the election, Josh, Jeni, Gareth, Chris and Hailey: your hard work around the clock, your camaraderie, your intelligence and your humour were invaluable. I also pay tribute to the Labor branch members of McEwen: the ever-reliable Carmel and her wonderful family, who answered Mum's call seven days a week, 24 hours a day, and Santo, Tom, Jon, Gurri, Casey, Stephen, Rex, Pam, Spiro, Stephen, Phil and of course Big Andy, who always made sure the table was empty when he finished.

I would like to especially thank the 300-plus volunteers who helped out during the election campaign and on election day. They took time out of their own lives to help us, to help the cause, and I am truly grateful. I will continue to work tirelessly for the communities of McEwen, ensuring that the trust and the faith they have again placed in me will be entirely justified. The people of McEwen re-elected me as their voice, and I will ensure that that voice is heard.

On 7 September 2013 a shadow was cast over this great country of ours. The Abbott government came into power and, with that, all the futures, hopes and dreams, not to mention the livelihoods of millions of Australians, came into doubt. That fear has become a reality for many families. The coalition government causes great concern for many Australians, particularly those in the seat of McEwen. They are concerned for their jobs, the environment and, more recently, our standing on the international stage. It would be easy to dismiss those concerns if they were not so consistent and happening right across the nation.

We have seen a government come into power on the strength of a few negative three-word slogans but, in reality, they are very far from doing what they promised—which I will talk more about later on. Even in the first few months since coming to power, the Abbott government have delivered nothing but a long line of broken promises and policy backflips. Unfortunately for the people of Australia, we now have a Prime Minister who is opposed to the fair go for all and helping those in our community who are most in need.

For the people of McEwen, their needs are inherent, varied and significant. McEwen is a disparate electorate. Since its creation in 1984, McEwen has straddled the two major political parties. It has always been a very marginal seat due to the wide-ranging demographics. In fact, McEwen has always been one of the most marginal seats in Australia. While it is a predominantly rural electorate in size, containing areas like Kilmore and Seymour, it also contains some of the fastest-growing municipalities in Victoria such as Craigieburn, Sunbury and Mernda. We have a community of over 104,000 people who, under Labor, have seen considerable investment in health care, education, jobs, communications, infrastructure and community facilities. One important point to mention here is that investment of this scale was never delivered during 14 years of continuous Liberal representation.

In the 3½ years that I have been the member for McEwen, Labor has provided almost $30 million in funding for hospitals, health clinics and local health practices. A major example of this is the $9.2million Wallan superclinic, which opened its doors in December 2013. This clinic was one the new government wanted scrapped. With a lack of all-round health services available to those in and around Wallan, the Wallan superclinic now provides a range of health services, such as improved access to general practice consultations, nursing, dietetics, podiatry, speech pathology, occupational therapy, physiotherapy, paediatric, mental health and counselling services. We also invested $4.95 million towards the Macedon Ranges Community Health Facility in Gisborne, under the HHF regional priority round. This was actually opposed by the new government but, now that it is being rolled out, they are suddenly all too keen to claim the glory by getting their picture taken during sod-turning ceremonies. The question is: will they acknowledge that, without a Labor government, the community would not have seen this facility delivered?

We implemented the Building the Education Revolution initiative across all schools in all parts of the electorate. This program delivered crucial and much-wanted science and learning centres, language and learning centres, classrooms, libraries and sporting facilities, along with a hydrotherapy pool for children and those in the wider community with special needs. These investments in jobs, investments in education and investments in our communities have delivered facilities and opportunities for regional communities that no other government before us had ever delivered.

I recall having parents, teachers and members of the wider community tell me of the excitement in watching new facilities being built at their schools for the first time in 30 years. Parents and families had come and spent their weekends participating in working bees to further enhance existing buildings, lifting them towards the standards that the BER buildings had delivered. I was particularly pleased to deliver the $11 million trade training centre across the McEwen electorate. This TTC is a prime example of how public, Catholic and independent schools can collaborate, with their focus being the aspirations of their students and delivering opportunities for country kids—opportunities that they could never receive under Liberal and National governments.

Labor spent hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade roads and infrastructure across McEwen—a prime example being the $525 million spent on the M80 Ring Road upgrade. There is also the $400 million Post Entry Quarantine facility to go ahead in McEwen, which will give us a new and more advanced quarantine facility for this nation—not to mention the hundreds of new jobs that will be delivered.

I look forward to delivering more and more enhanced services in this term of office, but this will also involve the ongoing task of holding this government accountable for the promises they made to the people of McEwen during the 2013 election campaign. This will be no mean feat since, as mentioned, the government have already demonstrated their ability to break promises and undertake extraordinary tactics to turn their backs on the people of Australia. During the election last year, the Liberal Party made dozens of promises to the people of McEwen. Out of the 14 local funding promises for infrastructure, transport and community projects, not one of these promises has been delivered. The community is rightly concerned these promises will not be kept, as they join a long list of Liberal promises never delivered. I have made numerous attempts to contact several members of the Abbott government in order to expedite their funding commitments. To date, I have been inundated with the sound of silence. When not being ignored by the Abbott government, I have received a blatant refusal to follow through on their election promises to the people of McEwen.

Mr Abbott and the Liberals are pulling the plug on the National Broadband Network fibre rollout in my electorate, affecting many communities, like Lancefield, Romsey, Sunbury, Craigieburn, Whittlesea, Eden Park, Wollert, Wallan and Kilmore. The result of this decision is enormous. We will become the electorate of the haves and have-nots, and we have already seen people moving away from the electorate purely because they cannot get broadband access. Children in these areas will not have access to educational resources. Businesses will not have the same connectivity to customers and wholesalers alike. And, without government funding to expand mobile phone coverage in the same areas, communication to and from these communities will be even less. The Abbott government has a responsibility to these communities to ensure they have access to an NBN. I will not rest until every town in McEwen is connected, as it should be, by a national broadband network—not the hotchpotch set-up being touted by this government.

As mentioned earlier, McEwen is one of the fastest-growing electorates in Victoria, and being a rural based electorate means it has constant issues with mobile phone connectivity. It contains three of Australia's major transport routes: the Hume Highway, the Northern Highway and the Calder Highway. As we witnessed with the fires that ravaged our electorate three weeks ago, in an area that is very prone to bushfires and that survived the worst fires in this nation's history, mobile phone reception can mean the difference between life and death. The residents of McEwen rightly want improved mobile phone coverage addressed as a matter of priority.

During the election campaign the Abbott government announced a $100 million investment to expand the mobile coverage footprint and increase competition in regional Australia. The coalition also promised an extra $80 million to expand the mobile network along major transport routes, in small communities and in locations prone to natural disasters. But, even though we have more than met the criteria to receive funding to help address this problem, repeated requests that I and communities have made to government have fallen on deaf ears. In fact, to date, we have not received the courtesy of a reply or a response from the government on whether they will even consider these requests. I know that they hear me loud and clear but, in typical form, they are ignoring the real needs of real Australians.

In Seymour, in the north-east of McEwen, is the Vietnam Veterans Commemorative Walk, which was developed in honour of the 62,100 personnel who were part of the Australia's Vietnam War effort. Local community members, RSLs and organisations rallied together and created funding for the walk. After years of dedicated hard work by the community, the commemorative walk was unveiled to much emotion and much honour. This walk has enjoyed bipartisan support at the state level, was supported by the Mitchell Shire at the local level and was supported by Labor at the federal level. Unfortunately, in recent months, local serial vandals have desecrated the commemorative walk. These crimes could easily be prevented by enhanced security at the site. Security would have been provided under round 5 of RDAF if the Abbott government had not ripped the funding away. To be clear, it is only the Abbott government that continues not to support this iconic project. For less than the price of one of Mr Abbott's 'women of calibre' $75,000 paid parental leave bonuses, we could have a safe and secure Vietnam Veterans Commemorative Walk—an iconic destination for our much-loved Vietnam vets, their families and tourists alike. That is a kick in the teeth for the local community and the brave returned soldiers.

The government's complete disregard for working Australians can be no more evident than in the loss of thousands of jobs in manufacturing. Since the Abbott government was elected on that sad day in September 2013, over 10,000 direct jobs have been lost in the manufacturing sector. Due to the government's complete ignorance of what manufacturing means to Australia, Ford, Holden and Toyota have decided to shut down their manufacturing arms in Australia. The ramifications of these closures cannot be measured in just numbers. Yes, we have the number of almost 45,000 direct jobs lost. Yes, we have the number of 150,000 indirect jobs lost. Yes, we have the shocking fact that under the Abbott government there is one job lost every three minutes. That is 150,000 people who have been, in the words of the Prime Minister, 'liberated' under this government.

What is the real cost to our community? Around 10,000 people in McEwen work in manufacturing. What about those local businesses who provided supplies to the companies now shutting up shop? What about the families whose standard of living relies on salaries earned in these jobs? What about the emotional and psychological effects on those workers and their families? The costs of these cannot be measured, but hardworking Australians will bear the brunt, with thanks to the Abbott government's policies. To add insult to injury, Mr Abbott and Mr Hockey have the gall to try and blame the workers for the demise of manufacturing.

It is in the Liberal Party's DNA to ensure that they hurt the lowest paid workers in this country. Their sly move to remove penalty rates, overtime, shift work allowance and public holiday pay is simply their way of reintroducing around-the-clock work and lengthening the working day—well, while we're at it, Mr Abbott, why don't we just remove weekends all together? They are creating a huge rising unemployment problem, which will force a race to the bottom on wages and conditions. This simply is the government bringing back Work Choices by stealth.

I firmly believe that Australian workers deserve penalty rates for working extended or unsocial hours. The seat of McEwen represents over 37,000 people who work in industries affected by unsociable hours, such as retail, health care, social work and hospitality, and of course the 10,000-plus who work in manufacturing. While I am mentioning it, a big shout out to the Victorian paramedics in the Code Red campaign for fighting the chaotic and dysfunctional Napthine government to try and get a fair day's pay for the work that they do. The idea that you should have to trade family and home time for nothing is not the Labor way. Whether it is about being able to go to a suburban footy game, see a play, do the kids' sporting circuit or, as many of us know, reduce the backlog of backyard chores when you get home, penalty rates are best protected through a modern award system.

Unlike those opposite, Labor will always stick up for workers' rights and will not trade them away like economic commodities. And we do not believe that 'any boss is better than no boss', as the Prime Minister once said. As the member for McEwen, as a member of the Labor party and as a member of the local community, I will ensure that everyone gets a fair go. In 1996 I attended Labor's campaign launch, and these words of Paul Keating rang true:

We will not adopt the fantastic hypocrisy of modern conservatism which preaches the values of families and communities, while conducting a direct assault on them through reduced wages and conditions and job security.

Those words were true then; those words are true now. This also includes access to Medicare without having to pay a tax simply for being sick. Universal health care is a right, not a privilege. For the thousands of families who are struggling to make ends meet, the additional costs of having a sick child or children could be crippling. It sickens me that the Prime Minister is more than happy to sneakily introduce this sick tax, leaving families having to choose between putting food on the table or taking their sick child to the doctor. My message, our message, to you, Mr Abbott, is: keep your hands off Medicare.

It is Labor governments that built this nation. Medicare, superannuation and, of course, the National Disability Insurance Scheme are some of our proudest achievements. It is Labor governments that built the infrastructure and social capacity that make this country great. It is those opposite who want to tear it down or sell it off. The big question for Australians is what will be left of our great nation once the conservative, morally bankrupt, Tea Party politicians on the other side have torn down and sold off the nation's silverware. Where will that leave us? In conclusion, I would like to reiterate how honoured I am to be re-elected. The Abbott government had best be prepared for a fight if they want to continue to keep turning their backs on the people of McEwen.

Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Minister for Communications) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank Her Excellency the Governor-General for outlining the direction and priorities of our new government: cutting taxes, reducing regulation, redefining the role of government and investing in 21st century broadband, roads and hospitals. If there is a single philosophical thread weaving all of these reforms together, surely it is this: that we on our side of politics believe that the role of government is to enable citizens to do their best, whereas our opponents on the Labor side believe that government's role is to tell citizens what is best. The stark difference that we see again and again through every policy area bears out the importance and the significance of this distinction and the failures of the 'government knows best' approach which were so apparent in the last six years of Labor government. A touchstone of all of that is freedom, a belief in the individual, a belief that citizens, individuals, private businesses, are best able to chart their own destiny.

We see this very clearly in my own portfolio of communications. The rise of the internet, which became commercial, I suppose, 20 years ago and has gathered more and more momentum and more and more coverage, has revolutionised the communications world and the media world. Our laws and regulations and assumptions were all based around a series of platforms: newspapers, magazines, licensed broadcasters in radio and television, subscription television whether on cable or satellite. These great platforms were the only means by which people could communicate to the mass. They were the gatekeepers and they posed huge barriers to competition. Then the internet came along and devastated all of that. It provided a very cost-effective platform for advertising and so undermined significantly, materially, the business model of newspapers, particularly those like the big metropolitan broadsheets of yesteryear which depended on classified advertising. It takes on subscription television. People now can buy the programs, download the programs they want to watch when they want to watch them, from the internet. They do not have to buy a bundled package. Netflix arises to take on all of the cable TV companies in the United States and it has many imitators around the world. So these are revolutionary times.

We have all been very concerned especially about the damage to the newspaper business, not because any of us I hope are so naive as to be filled with a particular affection for newspapers or journalists as a group or proprietors as a group or shareholders of newspapers—all businesses have to deal with the travails of the world and adapt to them. But newspapers and journalists have a very fundamental role to play in our democracy, or I should say journalism does. The work that journalists do in a free media is just as important as any work that we do here in this chamber or in the other place as legislators or that the judiciary do or that the Public Service do in running the country. We cannot be a democracy without a free media. So the concern naturally was that as the resources were drained away from those newspapers which had been the big foundations of journalism so the quality of our democracy would diminish as the quality of journalism and the number of journalists, the resources available to journalism, were diminished too. That has been a matter of very real concern.

What we have also seen with the arrival of the internet is an opening up of competition on a scale that would have previously been unimaginable. If you think back 20 or 30 years, the idea of there being new newspapers to compete with The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Daily Telegraph or the Melbourne Herald Sun was fanciful. Every now and then some rich person would try and start their own newspaper to take on one of the established ones but it was generally a very unsuccessful effort. I am thinking of Lang Hancock in Perth and Robert Holmes a Court for a period. But what the internet has done is lowered the cost of entry into the media market. So at the same time as we have been lamenting the demise of the great beasts of the media jungle we have seen more competition than ever. We have seen The Guardian Online, we have seen The Mail Online. Out here we have seen the paper I launched on Friday, Morry Schwartz's The Saturday Paper, and so many others—a host of them, too many to name.

We had never had more competition and more diversity in our media world than we have today. Yet it is remarkable that under the previous government their obsession was with the technological constructs of the past. They said, 'Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation has the majority share of metropolitan daily newspaper circulation.' So it has had, for nearly 30 years since a Labor government enabled Mr Murdoch to buy the Herald and Weekly Times group. But that share of the total media and information pie represented by newspapers is getting smaller and smaller as more and more competitors come onto the scene. Yet it was precisely at that time—when a media landscape that had been frozen for decades suddenly started to thaw and was open to so much competition—that the Labor government wanted to constrain freedom and regulate the media in a way it had never been regulated before in peacetime.

So there is a fundamental difference between the way I am approaching this portfolio of communications and, indeed, the way the government is approaching this area and the way its Labor predecessor did. Labor believed that the arrival of the internet required more regulation and less freedom. We say that the arrival of the internet enables much more competition and therefore more freedom, and that therefore there is a need for less regulation not more. You could not have a starker difference between our government and its predecessor, and the difference is that we believe in freedom.

I note in passing that some commentators on the conservative or the right-wing side of the political debate have criticised me for launching Morry Schwartz's new paper The Saturday Paper on Friday. They apparently would like me to be—just as Senator Conroy was the minister for left-wing communications or the minister for communications that agree with the Labor Party—the minister for right-wing communications or communications that agree with the Liberal Party. And that is not the case. I am the Minister for Communications. I am the minister that seeks to ensure that we have the freest and most diverse media we can possibly manage. I am the minister that wants to take away the barriers to competition wherever I can so that as many voices can speak out as possible, and whether they are left or right is of no concern to me in my capacity as the Minister for Communications. As the member for Wentworth seeking re-election I may be disappointed if the anti-Liberal forces in the media call for me not to be elected; fair enough—that will be distressing at election time. But, in my ministerial capacity and in my role as the custodian of this vital portfolio in the government, my job is to stand up for freedom. Those who think that this Liberal minister should be like Senator Conroy and seek to persecute or suborn or bully those that do not agree with him have got it completely wrong; they are wrong in principle and they are wrong in practice. Everybody has a vested interest in freedom—everybody. Whether you are on the right or on the left, you have a vital, vested interest in freedom. As I said in one brief comment on the weekend to one of these critics, mangling Bill Clinton: 'It's the democracy, stupid!' It's the democracy—that is what we are committed to.

You see another example of the Labor Party's big-government obsession in their approach to broadband. The fundamental failure and mistake of the previous government—and it was a fundamental one and one that is impossible to reverse at this juncture, regrettably—was to be mad enough, genuinely mad enough, to imagine that the government was the right agency to build a new telecommunications network. It was back to the days of the postmaster-general. Every other comparable country in the world, in approaching the challenge of getting broadband services upgraded, has done this: they have encouraged the private sector to do the job. They have provided judicious subsidies to ensure that people in remote or regional areas got their services upgraded where it otherwise would not be commercial to do so. The virtue of that is that it ensured that the government was up for a certain amount of money—a sum certain. And all of the execution, the construction risk and the business risk was left with the private sector. An excellent example of that—you do not have to look very far—is what John Key did in New Zealand, or, indeed, what the British have done in the UK. There is a very long list.

The craziness of the previous government's policy was, right from the jump, in having the hubris, in defiance of experience both in Australia and everywhere else in the world, to imagine that the government was the best party to do the job. So in Australia, in the socialist paradise of Senator Conroy and Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd, we had a situation where the execution and business risk of this vast project was entirely vested in the government—in the taxpayer, in other words. And the only people that got the cheques, that got the certainty, were in fact the telephone companies, Telstra and Optus, who sold their assets to the government—an extraordinary fundamental failure. So it is no surprise that the project has run late and it has run over budget. Indeed, as Ziggy Switkowski observed just last week, so far the NBN Co has invested $6.4 billion of taxpayers' money and, in its fibre rollout, passed less than two per cent of the country.

The challenge that we have is that we are not in a position to turn back the clock. We are not in a position to undo all of the mistakes the Labor Party has made. So what we have to do is to mitigate the madness and to try to complete the project as quickly and cheaply and hence as affordably as possible. As I said in question time, one of the consequences of the Labor Party's approach of course would have been, had it been persevered with, that broadband prices would have been up to 80 per cent higher. There is no magic in that; there is nothing unusual in that: if you have a massively expensive, overcapitalised government monopoly with no competition to keep it honest, you are going to get very high prices. You do not get cheap prices by overcapitalising a business, especially if it is a monopoly.

I noticed earlier the member for McEwen speaking about his electorate and saying that people had been moving away because of lack of broadband. He should really raise that with his colleagues, because in six years of Labor virtually nothing was done. There was the best part of two million premises without access to broadband in 2007, and there has only been a tiny chip into that in the intervening six years. And then, I might say, with a chutzpah that is quite epic, he went on to complain that there were mobile phone black spots in his electorate. No doubt there are, and that is one of the reasons why the coalition government, the Abbott government, has allocated $100 million to address them—or to address as many as we can with that sum of money. But it is worth noting that in six years of the Labor government not one cent was spent to fix mobile black spots.

It is the same point about regional and remote broadband subsidies. It is the same point that you have areas where there is no mobile phone reception. As we all know, this is by far the biggest complaint—as you would know in particular, Deputy Speaker Scott, from your electorate of Maranoa—and by far the biggest telecommunications concern in rural and regional Australia. In those areas, of course, because of the small population, it is not necessarily economic for the telcos to make the investment, so there is a role for government, but in six years not one cent was spent by Labor on upgrading or addressing mobile phone black spots. But, to date, $6.4 billion has been invested in passing less than two per cent of premises in Australia.

I have spoken earlier about the other critical issue, but it bears repeating. It is this issue of affordability. It is no good having the best broadband technology in the world, which enables a household of six to engage in simultaneous high-definition interactive cybergaming across the world—there is no point having that—if battlers cannot afford it.

Mr Husic interjecting—

The member for Chifley is interjecting away there because he does not like to know the truth. The truth is that there are many people in his electorate who cannot afford broadband today, and he in his hubris has turned his back on them and supported a broadband policy that will make broadband less affordable than it is today. Forty-one per cent of the least well off households, the lowest income households, the households with the lowest 20 per cent of income in Australia, do not have access to the internet at home. Four per cent of the top 20 per cent do. What do you reckon the difference is? I think it is all about affordability, don't you? You do not have to be a rocket scientist to work that out. And yet, there was Labor—in a manner calculated, inevitably—determined to make broadband less affordable than it already is. That was the inevitable consequence, as night follows day. If you overcapitalise a business and you render it immune from competition, that will result in higher prices. There is no alternative.

And that is the critical objective of our government when it comes to the NBN: to get this project finished, to ensure that people everywhere have access to very fast broadband, using the mix of technologies—in common with all of the other major developed countries: the United States, the UK, Germany, Belgium, France; take your pick—that will ensure that we have a broadband network that is built nearly four years sooner and $32 billion less expensively and, above all, to make it more affordable.

Labor's arrogant indifference to the position of the people that they claim to represent, the least well off Australians, is truly chilling. It really is truly chilling. Labor's policy would result in average broadband prices increasing by $43 a month, increasing by up to 80 per cent a month. That is the fact. They can run around, wave their arms and talk about gigabits and gigabytes. They can do all of that. They can talk about all these things, which most of them do not understand. And yet the bottom line is this, and we all know it, whether we are in big business or little business: you give the Labor Party a project like this to manage and they will make a hash of it. You overcapitalise a government monopoly and you will get higher prices, and the consequence is that a vital service which has been unaffordable for many to date will become unaffordable to many more in the future.

Melissa Parke (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In this debate on the address-in-reply, I would like to make some comments about Australia's investment in its future, specifically its investment in the protection of our environment and biodiversity and its investment in the clean and sustainable industries that should be the basis of economic activity in the decades ahead. Like many people, I am concerned that under this government Australia will turn away from the fundamental understanding that our environment is not something to be considered simply as a resource to be tapped or churned but is in fact the foundation of our future wellbeing in every aspect: social, physical and emotional, as well as economic.

On this point I note the submission the Australian Conservation Foundation has made in relation to the 2014-15 federal government budget. That submission includes reference to the observation from Treasury's Intergenerational report from 2011 that 'few countries have incorporated the potential impact of policies related to environmental issues into the long-term fiscal projections'. Needless to say, Australia is not one of those few countries.

I am concerned that under this government we are already seeing a rapid retreat from the significant gains made by the Labor government when it comes to tackling climate change, improving marine conservation, improving environmental regulation as a whole and supporting renewable energy and energy efficiency. There seems little doubt that the government's role as the custodian of our shared environmental wealth and as the way finder on what should be our path to sustainable economic and social wellbeing is in the process of being abdicated by the coalition. This abdication is occurring across the spectrum of government responsibility. It is occurring when it comes to environmental regulation. It is occurring on the expenditure side when it comes to government support and investment. And it is occurring on the revenue side when it comes to the price on carbon, the introduction of an emissions trading scheme and the receipt of a fair contribution from the profits of resources companies.

Australians understand that if you want to invest in a burgeoning sustainability sector the funds have to exist to make that investment, just as public investment was once made in the creation of our existing stationary energy and distribution infrastructure. Australians understand that if you want to minimise the costs associated with climate change there needs to be structural reform to ensure that carbon emitters are responsible for the costs they have produced.

Why price carbon? The answer is from a first-year economics principle. Pricing the externality is the most efficient way to reduce the externality. As Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund, put it last week, externality has a cost. We can either deal with that cost by putting a price on it and allowing the market and companies to innovate to reduce emissions in the most efficient way for their business, or we can allow the externality to not be priced and emissions to continue. In the latter scenario, the cost will be borne by the government, the taxpayer and, ultimately, all of the community.

People want effective action. They want it to be achieved at least cost and they want it to be paid for by a fair and effective mechanism. The whole rationale of an emissions trading scheme is that the burden of addressing the impact of carbon pollution falls on the polluters, with a corresponding market impetus for business and households alike to reduce carbon emissions.

The Abbott government's Direct Action policy has three massive flaws: firstly, it is quite possible they will not achieve the reduction target of five per cent on 2000 levels by 2020 to which we have committed. In other words, it will fail its basic purpose. Secondly, it will be paid for by the taxpayer, with no contribution from the polluters themselves and no encouragement for polluters to reduce their emissions other than in the form of payments from the taxpayer to do so. And thirdly, it is a matter of common agreement that Direct Action is the most expensive way to seek a reduction in carbon emissions. Prime Minister Abbott has already indicated that if the Direct Action policy costs grow beyond his expectations, which everyone predicts they will, then the target itself will be moderated.

It is instructive to remember the environmental, social and economic task we are engaged in here. The existing reduction targets that form the basis of our commitment are designed to limit the average temperature increase to two degrees over the course of this century. To give a sense of how two degrees of warming—while significant and harmful in itself—is possible to manage while a higher temperature rise is not, I refer to a comment by Professor John Schellnhuber, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, on the difference between two degrees and four degrees of warming. He says:

The difference is human civilisation. A 4 degree C temperature increase probably means a global [population] carrying capacity below 1 billion people.

It is a sobering statement. I am grateful to have encountered it in John Wiseman's excellent essay Climate change: reconnecting politics with reality from the collection Pushing our Luck: ideas for Australian progress.

At this point, it is relevant to note that last week the Climate Change Authority provided its latest update, which recommends that Australia target a minimum 15 per cent reduction. Labor provided for the need to go higher than five per cent. It seems overwhelmingly clear that much higher reductions are essential and should have been committed to before now. It was nearly two years ago that the World Bank, in its Turn Down the Heat report, stated that:

Even with the current mitigation commitments and pledges fully implemented, there is roughly a 20 percent likelihood of exceeding 4°C by 2100. If they are not met, a warming of 4°C could occur as early as the 2060s.

That is why we need to keep the gravity of this issue front and centre of the national policy conversation in Australia.

The former Labor government was both clear and courageous in establishing a mechanism that properly attributed the cost of carbon pollution and properly derived the revenue necessary to support Australia's shift from a high-carbon to a low-carbon economy—from a traditional hydrocarbon energy production profile to a 21st century traditional and renewable energy mix. Unfortunately, the current government is abandoning that project, and I am concerned that the forthcoming budget will be a document of irresponsibility and neglect on that front.

As I said earlier, acting in the long-term interest of the Australian environment—and indeed the global environment, if you consider our oceans and our climate—requires sound economic management. In fact, such action epitomises sound economic management. Spending money to save the environment is not largesse—it is sensible and prudent action. It is taking out insurance for our children and their children. It is easy to cut these programs now. Trim $650 million from the Murray Darling Basin Plan over the forward estimates and perhaps it inflates your budget bottom line. But what is the long-term cost of this?

Consider for a moment what the science is telling us about the impacts of climate change. If no action is taken there will be a cost to government across a range of budgetary areas—roads and infrastructure, health and environment to name just a few. What will this do for the budget bottom line? Pricing carbon allows us to deal with this challenge now while also allowing our economy to grow. It decouples economic growth from pollution. Australia has recorded uninterrupted growth for 22 years and yet last financial year was the first time this occurred without a corresponding increase in pollution.

Many stakeholders with an active advocacy role in this space show the kind of balance and responsibility needed to achieve change: that is, they are prepared to look at where the revenue will come from in order to underwrite the investments needed. The budget submission I mentioned earlier, from the Australian Conservation Foundation, is a perfect example. That submission identifies savings that are nearly ten times the investments that ACF would like to see made in Australia's sustainable future. Of course, that is possible because the creation and encouragement of greater sustainability is not just about policy settings that fund renewable energy, green infrastructure or water resource research. Greater sustainability and resilience can also be pursued or achieved by ensuring that outmoded or unjustified concessions do not persist in relation to activities or practices that run counter to the principles of a sustainable economy.

Almost two years ago the now Treasurer, standing in London, boldly declared the end of the age of entitlement. The largesse of government would come to an end, he said, and Australians, both households and businesses, would need to stand on their own two feet. We were told companies should not look for government subsidies or support. Yet at the same time, they propose to spend billions of taxpayers' dollars subsiding polluters through a faux climate policy, which no expert believes will meet the emissions reductions targets. The viability gap between clean energy and dirty, which was closing but will now yawn wide again, will continue to be defined as much by the outrageous subsidies for hydrocarbon production and consumption as by the withdrawal of support for renewables and energy efficiency.

As the ACF submission points out it is hard to understand, let alone justify, why special and favourable depreciation rules for oil and gas assets were reintroduced in the early 2000s, after they had been removed as a trade-off for the substantial lowering of the company tax rate. The existing fuel tax credit scheme, which cost $6 billion in 2013-14, is currently the government's 14th most expensive program, costing more than federal government spending on schools. The ACF makes the case for reducing and better targeting this massive concession, with savings of two-thirds by 2016-17. There are aviation fuel concessions and counterproductive exemptions to fossil fuel producers through the Energy Security Fund that could also add up to $2 billion to the budget bottom line. It is common sense that, if you want to encourage a diversified and low-emission energy production profile, you go about that task by supporting renewable energy innovation and/or by ensuring that fossil fuel production and consumption is not unduly buoyed by unwarranted and counterproductive—or, if you like, countersustainable—concessions and subsidies.

On that basis, I urge the government to approach the forthcoming budget with the following in mind: first, that Australia's future wellbeing depends at least as much on the health of our environment as on sustainable economic growth; second, that addressing climate change by reducing carbon emissions at a much faster rate is essential and it is urgent; third, that the investment needed to improve resilience and sustainability should be funded from revenue derived by the application of a fair impost on carbon pollution and resource extraction; and, fourth and finally, that progress towards a low-carbon Australia and an Australia that is a leader in renewable energy production and innovation can be hastened by ensuring a level playing field without undue subsidies or concessions for fossil fuels.

I return to the wise words of Mr Wiseman, from the essay I referred to earlier:

The economic growth debate is … best framed not in terms of 'growth' versus 'degrowth' but as a shift in priorities from limitless growth in the consumption of energy and resources to improvement in important social and ecological priorities. In Prosperity without growth: Economics for a finite planet, UK economist Tim Jackson makes a compelling argument that our ability to 'decouple' conventional economic growth from ecological destruction is highly questionable and that our focus must be on a redefinition of prosperity— a vision 'in which it is possible for human beings to flourish, to achieve greater social cohesion, to find higher levels of wellbeing and yet still to reduce their material impact on the environment.'

I know that kind of reframing represents a big change. I know it represents a shift from the current state of play, in which we remain fixed on the idea that growth can and should continue indefinitely—however much basic logic tells us it cannot be so. In a brilliant book entitled A Short History of Progress, Ronald Wright notes the lessons of the past:

That the health of land and water—and of woods, which are the keepers of water—can be the only lasting basis for any civilization's survival and success … If civilisation is to survive it must live on the interest, not the capital of nature.

He goes on to say:

Capitalism lures us onward like the mechanical hare before the greyhounds, insisting that the economy is infinite and sharing therefore is irrelevant. Just enough greyhounds catch a real hare now and then to keep the others running till they drop. In the past, it was only the poor who lost this game, now it is the planet …

Things are moving so fast that inaction itself is one of the biggest mistakes. The 10,000-year experiment of the settled life will stand or fall by what we do, and don't do, now. The reform that is needed is not anti-capitalist, anti-American, or even deep environmentalist; it is simply the transition from short-term to long-term thinking. From recklessness and excess to moderation and the precautionary principle.

The great advantage we have, our best chance for avoiding the fate of past societies, is that we know about those past societies. We can see how and why they went wrong. Homo sapiens has the information to know itself for what it is: an Ice Age hunter only half-evolved towards intelligence; clever but seldom wise.

We are now at the stage when the Easter Islanders could still have halted the senseless cutting and carving, could have gathered the last trees' seeds to plant out of reach of the rats. We have the tools and the means to share resources, clean up pollution, dispense basic health care and birth control, set economic limits in line with natural ones.

If we don't do these things now, while we prosper, we will never be able to do them when times get hard. Our fate will twist out of our hands.

On behalf of my community in Fremantle and communities throughout Australia, I want to be one of the many people who are prepared to have this conversation and to argue the merits of taking a radically different, massively important shift in perspective.

Kelly O'Dwyer (Higgins, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on this address-in-reply. First, I want to acknowledge the great honour and trust that the people of Higgins have placed in me to be their representative, to represent their issues both big and small. It is an honour that I have been granted three times now and I am very, very conscious of the great responsibility that comes with this incredible honour.

The key function and task of our government will be to repair the nation's balance sheet so we again live within our means, as we did during the previous coalition government, the Howard-Costello years. We need to be able to turn the deficits into surpluses and to start repaying the debt so that our children and their children do not inherit a parlous economic situation where they are restricted in the services that are provided to them as a result of the financial mismanagement of their forebears.

One of the critical tasks for us in repairing the national balance sheet will be to encourage business to grow, invest and employ. One of the critical aspects here is to ensure that we have the right productivity-enhancing infrastructure available to us. This brings me to the first point that I wish to raise in the House today, regarding railway crossings in my seat of Higgins and the state of Victoria. While historically Melbourne has benefited from thoughtful planning, there remain 172 level crossings within the metropolitan area, as compared to eight within Sydney. Many of these crossings are positioned on Melbourne's busiest roads, adjacent to major arterials such as the Monash Freeway and the Dandenong Road-Princes Highway. These level crossings cause substantial delays to motorists, road based freight and road based public transport—15 to 40 minutes during peak times—while, at the same time, limiting growth in rail based public transport due to capacity constraints.

The Dandenong railway line currently serves over a million people in south-eastern Melbourne and is considered a key area for future population growth; it also serves industrial and commercial sites through to Dandenong and thereafter the proposed deepwater port of Hastings. Along the Dandenong rail corridor, within Higgins and bordering Chisholm and Hotham, the hands-down, single largest issue facing constituents on a daily basis is level crossings. It influences key decisions: where people will shop, where they will send their children to school and how they will access work.

The 2012 RACV Redspot survey ranks three Higgins level crossings in Victoria's top 10 worst sites for congestion. They are Murrumbeena Road, Murrumbeena, at No. 1; Koornang Road, Carnegie, at No. 4; and Burke Road, Glen Iris, at No. 5. Key stakeholders, including the RACV and the Committee for Melbourne, share the view with me that planning and investment, both public and private, are now required to ensure south-eastern Melbourne continues to grow.

In June 2013, I tabled a petition with 1,151 signatures which drew the attention of the House to the severe congestion caused by the regular closure of the level crossings along the Dandenong railway line and I asked at that time that parliament give greater priority to their removal. In total, there are 21 railway stations and nine level crossings in the electorate of Higgins. They are along the Dandenong railway line; Grange Road, Carnegie; Koornang Road, Carnegie; Murrumbeena Road, Murrumbeena; Poath Road, Hughesdale; along the Glen Waverley line; Glenferrie Road, Kooyong; Toorak Road, Kooyong; Tooronga Road, Malvern; Burke Road, Glen Iris; and High Street, Glen Iris.

The Victorian government's 2011 Infrastructure Australia submission, resubmitted in 2012 for the Nation Building Program, notes that the catchment area of this rail corridor contributed $92 billion in 2007-08, accounting for roughly half of Melbourne's GDP or nine per cent nationally. The Victorian government has sought support from Infrastructure Australia and the previous Commonwealth government for $30 million to enable initial planning and development work for the Dandenong rail upgrade, including the removal of its 12 level crossings, which would have the potential to lift rail passenger capacity by nearly 100 per cent—that is, 11,000 people per hour—and significantly reduce road congestion, as well as $16 million to enable planning for a broad-ranging level-crossing removal program across Melbourne.

In total the Victorian government is spending just over $418 million, but received nothing from the Commonwealth in the 2011-12 and 2012-13 federal budgets for level-crossing removal. I congratulate my state colleagues for focusing on this issue, after the failure of previous Labor governments that squandered the surpluses that they inherited and the GST windfalls that they also inherited—which they did not invest in this productivity-enhancing infrastructure. The Victorian coalition government is in the process of removing 12 level crossings, which is the largest number of level-crossing removals by any Victorian government in the state's history. In particular, I am pleased that the state has commenced planning for the removal of crossings at Burke Road, Glen Iris and Murrumbeena Road, Murrumbeena, both of which are within Higgins. The removal of a level crossing can cost up to $200 million. However, the need for varied solutions to level-crossing removals depends upon site opportunity and constraints as well as the need to explore private sector investment. There is also broad agreement as to the nature of this problem and the need for action. How these projects are to be funded remains less clear. There are varied funding options that should be considered, including private sector involvement—for example, in the development of air rights where appropriate. Importantly, though, the removal of level crossings is as much about road congestion as it is about rail. For this reason, I believe that it is important that Victoria receive its fair share of the infrastructure dollar provided federally through Infrastructure Australia.

The second issue which I wish to raise in the House this afternoon, in the time available to me, also relates to our economy and jobs. It is about job participation and increasing the participation of women, in particular, in the workforce. We know through the reports released by the Grattan Institute that if we can increase female participation in the workplace up to the same level as some of our OECD competitor countries, such as Canada and Germany, we will have an economic gain of up to $25 billion. What is standing in the way of this?

Affordable and flexible child care that is accessible to families is one of the key complaints I hear from constituents in my electorate of Higgins. Higgins is a much sought after area in which to care for and raise children. However, the previous Labor government made it more difficult to get affordable child care and local families are paying the price of the previous Labor government's legacy. Recent Department of Education figures indicate that childcare fees rose an average $70 per week over the six years of the former Labor government. On average, child care now costs over $3,000 a year more than it did before Labor came to power. There can be no doubt about the very real impact that this is having on family budgets. The June quarter 2013 Child care and early learning in summary report comes on the back of a recent review which found new regulations introduced by Labor added $2,000 in operating costs per child per year for an average sized long day care centre.

After speaking with childcare providers in Higgins, many have told me that the extra burden of regulation is unnecessarily forcing up costs and taking valuable time away from looking after the children. These costs are passed on to parents, many of whom query whether it is worth going back to work at all. However, it is not just formal long day care child care that has fared badly under the previous Labor government. I have visited many kindergartens and occasional-care centres in Higgins and spoken at length with families, staff and management regarding the increase in mandatory regulation that impacts directly on staffing, fees and access for families.

I have previously tabled a petition in the parliament with regard to the reduction in Take A Break occasional-care funding and hosted a forum with the Assistant Minister for Infrastructure and Regional Development, in his former role as shadow parliamentary secretary for supporting families, the Hon. Jamie Briggs MP. All this has assisted to inform our understanding of the difficulties faced by the early learning sector and the very urgent need for change.

While our government has already started the process of reducing red tape, these new figures with respect to childcare fees back our decision to task the Productivity Commission to find a way to deliver more affordable, accessible child care in Higgins. All options are on the table and helping women stay in the workforce, or get back into the workforce, is something everyone in this House should support.

I turn to another issue which has been very significant in my electorate of Higgins—that is, community safety. Higgins is an electorate comprised of urban villages. Within those villages, law and order is definitely an issue of concern. In the western suburbs of Prahran, Windsor and South Yarra, which are home to the Chapel Street nightclub precinct, security issues do arise where entertainment and residential areas intersect.

I was particularly pleased when the Prime Minister, the Hon. Tony Abbott, then Leader of the Opposition, and the then Premier, Premier Baillieu, visited Higgins in August of 2012 to see firsthand the concerns of residents and to announce that federal funding for CCTV cameras in the local Chapel Street precinct was part of our $50 million funding for the coalition's Plan for Safer Streets. I was also very pleased to have the support of Inspector Adrian White from the Prahran Police Station, Oskar Cebergs from Chapel Street precinct, Justin Zakis, President, Lara Barry Residents Association, as well as local residents.

In total, $100,000 has been secured to increase security measures in this busy precinct and I am working with local government to ensure its smooth implementation. In addition, following a long and productive dialogue with residents, local businesses and traders in the south-eastern part of my electorate, it became clear that measures to improve security of persons and property would be welcome in the Carnegie area, a popular family-friendly cosmopolitan suburb. As a result, I was able to secure an additional $100,000 for Koornang Road, Carnegie, which has been warmly welcomed by the Carnegie traders and local businesses, along with residents.

While no-one would argue that CCTV and increased lighting will eradicate crime and anti-social behaviour, I believe they will form a deterrent and, if crime occurs, assist Victoria Police in apprehending those responsible.

Since these announcements the Ashburton traders have also expressed some interest in having closed-circuit television cameras in their High Street shopping strip and I am working with them to ascertain whether any future options exist for increased security measures there.

I now turn to an issue which is incredibly close to my heart, a very special organisation in my electorate of Higgins. This organisation does good work not only for those who reside in Higgins but also for those from throughout Victoria. It is aptly named Very Special Kids. It is an eight-bed children's hospice that provides planned and emergency end-of-life care, as well as flexible family support programs, including respite for families with children with life-threatening illnesses.

The organisation was established in 1985 after two local families recognised there was a need to support other families experiencing the loss and grief associated with having a child diagnosed with a life-threatening condition. Throughout this period, it has been championed by the founder and patron, Sister Margaret Noone, AM, and grown under the careful stewardship of a committed and talented board. Very Special Kids is not only Australia's oldest and largest children's hospice but also the only children's hospice in Australia to receive no federal government funding. The other two hospices—Bear Cottage in New South Wales and Hummingbird House in Queensland—receive substantial support from the Commonwealth government.

All Very Special Kids services are offered free-of-charge to families. It has an operating budget of just over $5.6 million per annum, 70 per cent of which is generated through philanthropy, with the remaining 30 per cent provided by the state government. However, in order to increase the occupancy of existing facilities and to increase the services to families in Melbourne and in rural and regional Victoria, Very Special Kids is actively seeking greater government support. The work Very Special Kids undertakes is truly important and difficult. In many ways, it is an organisation with which no family would wish to become familiar, yet so many Victorians are very grateful for the services and support they provide at the most difficult and challenging of times.

Very Special Kids has a very special CEO, Susan Hosking, and it is an organisation for which I have the utmost respect. I intend to do everything that I can humanly do to ensure it receives the support it needs to continue to provide its amazing services, not just to my constituents but to all Victorian families.

In the time remaining, I would like to raise the issue many people raised with me at the mobile office meetings I have held throughout the electorate during my four years as a member of parliament, an issue which I know will be challenging for this government—housing affordability. Higgins is very diverse in nature, with high-density inner-city living in the west and family-friendly suburbs in the east, all within a commutable distance of the Melbourne central business district. Despite some perceptions, it is very diverse in its demography. A third of Higgins residents were born outside Australia. While undoubtedly some people have significant means, Higgins also has a high percentage of people who live in rented accommodation, including nearly 1,000 who live in state housing dwellings. While the median weekly household income is $1,741, the median monthly mortgage repayment is $2,393; and the median price of a home in Carnegie is just under a million dollars at $935,000.

In addition, there are many residents in my electorate between the ages of 20 and 44—higher than the national average. This means that housing affordability remains a real concern for many homebuyers in my electorate. Higgins is a fantastic place to live and raise a family and, not surprisingly, when those children grow up they also wish to live in Higgins, close to their friends and family. I believe that there are things that we can examine, in this place, that can make it easier for people to have confidence in the current marketplace for residential property and to ensure that there is no distortion of the market for residential property.

Finally, it is indeed a great honour to be the member for Higgins and to represent the people of Higgins. I would like to thank all of those people who supported my campaign—in particular all of the volunteers who gave freely of their time. Ours is not a party that is of the union movement; it is a grassroots organisation and people need to give of their time in order for a campaign to be run. I would like to place on record my thanks to all those volunteers, over 800 of them, who helped out with the Higgins campaign, along with the wonderful Liberal Party members in my electorate led by Mark Stretton. I would also like to thank my staff, who every day do a tremendous job for me; my family, who support me no matter what; and especially my husband, John, who is on this wonderful journey with me. I look forward to being able to continue my engagement with the constituents of Higgins representing their issues. I have had, over the last four years, more than 200 mobile office meetings and more than 70 community forums. I pledge that in this term of parliament I will continue that very high engagement.

Mark Butler (Port Adelaide, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Environment, Climate Change and Water) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a pleasure to participate in the address-in-reply debate. I congratulate so many of the members on their addresses, particularly all of the new members who have experienced the privilege, first, of being elected to this place and then, usually in front of their family, friends and new colleagues, giving their first speech. It is a wonderful opportunity for all the new members on both sides of the House.

This address-in-reply is an opportunity for all members to reply to the new government's agenda, as was outlined in Her Excellency's speech in the other place. Usually members of the opposition, the government or the crossbench confront a detailed plan, from the new or re-elected government, of what it plans to do over the course of the ensuing three years to build the nation: to build the nation's prosperity, to build opportunity for its citizens, and to build social and physical infrastructure and the like.

The challenge we have in giving our addresses-in-reply is that the government has outlined precious little by way of a new plan. The limits of the plan outlined by this new government are really defined by what the new government intends to dismantle or to cut, rather than what it intends to build. In policy areas that are particularly close to my heart, the government has outlined very little by way of new plans. I want to address a few of those plans, contrast them with what we were able to achieve over the last few years in government and pose some questions about what this government might intend to do by way of dismantling that.

The first area I would like to address is the area of mental health. This is an area of very longstanding neglect, frankly, by governments of all political persuasions, at state and Commonwealth levels, over many years. All of us supported a process of deinstitutionalisation that would see people living with mental illness who, for many years, had been confined to hospitals for their entire lives often brought out into the community—taken out of the institutions and allowed to live their lives in the community in different Australian cities and regional areas. That was a fantastic policy.

The difficulty was that the quid pro quo, the follow-up from that policy, was supposed to be greater investment in community based mental health services so that those Australians would be able to receive good levels of support, find employment and stable housing, ensure they had strong peer and family relationships and take up all of the opportunities that Australian citizens have in front of them. As I said, governments of all political persuasions—particularly at state level, given that states have had responsibility for this policy area generally—

failed in delivering that quid pro quo. This led, firstly and most importantly, to very significant disability and profound disadvantage for hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens and their families. It also eventually led to a very significant level of community unease about the degree to which we were letting down those fellow citizens.

This unease really found its shape in Patrick McGorry being made the Australian of the Year in 2010. That year, with a whole range of other supports, Professor McGorry was able to shine a spotlight onto those issues associated with mental health at a national level that they simply had not had shone on them before. It did not happen overnight. A whole range of great organisations and individuals had done extraordinary work in previous years—beyondblue, along with many individuals, had done fantastic work. But Professor McGorry was able, in an election year, to bring a spotlight to these community failures for which we all bore responsibility.

For the first time in Australian political history the two alternative Prime Ministers, the current Prime Minister and former Prime Minister Julia Gillard, actually talked about mental health in a federal political campaign. It was a wonderful thing. I commend the Liberal Party for bringing a very substantial mental health policy to that 2010 campaign. Ultimately, when we formed government, I was made the first ever mental health minister at a national level. I then undertook a range of direct consultations all around the country—in regional areas and in capital cities—with consumers, people living with mental illness, their family members and their carers about what it was they wanted from a mental health reform package.

In 2011 we were able to deliver the largest-ever mental health reform package in Commonwealth history. It covered a whole range of different age cohorts, a whole range of different needs—many of them medical and many of them non-medical—many of them related to housing and employment and other social supports. We brought in a whole range of reforms, building on previous years, to deliver youth-specific mental health services, through the headspace model in particular, that had been started under the previous Howard government. We built upon that over the past few years. There were also services to deal with the first episodes of psychosis, which are often experienced by young people in their late teens or their early twenties—a model particularly pioneered by Professor McGorry.

We were able to bring into place new services to support families with very young children experiencing mental health difficulties. It is not often understood that fully 25 per cent of all mental health disorders emerge before the age of 12, often even before the age of five. Early intervention to support those kids, and particularly to support their families, is critically important if those kids are to be able to get back on the rails and embrace all of the opportunities that Australia has to offer—schooling, post-school education and training, and then adult lives. So again those were very wonderful reforms we were able to bring into place.

We were also able to respond to the requests that carers and consumers gave to me, as I was travelling around the country, for much better integration between the different types of services that people living with severe and persistent mental illness need. Often they are not just medical services; they relate to their need to find stable housing, to find avenues into employment and to be able to build good peer and family relationships. Those sorts of living skills, as well, were all brought together into a program known as Partners in Recovery.

I hope that this new government will continue with a range of those reforms, as we did with the range of reforms that came under the Howard government—and I will talk soon about headspace—but we have heard very little from the Liberal Party since their 2010 election policy. I hope that we will hear more into the future.

Another area on which the new government has said precious little is the area of aged care. I know from talking to members across the chamber, whether it is in this chamber or outside, everyone understands how critical a policy area aged care is; both because of the growing demand that we are going to see in the system in the future as the population ages, but also because there are emerging differences in the preferences that older Australians have for their aged-care services. There are some new needs that are emerging, and I talk particularly about the growing prevalence of dementia.

We inherited, when we came to government in 2007, a position that had not changed much in the 11 years of the Howard government, not for want of trying. Prime Minister Howard had tried on two occasions to get substantial reform of the aged-care system through—in 1997 and in 2004—and he was not successful. So we inherited a system that was largely put in place, firstly, by the Hawke government in the mid-1980s, and then reformed by the Keating government in the early 1990s to bring in some Commonwealth funded home-care arrangements.

We had put in place a Productivity Commission inquiry that took place at the same time they were inquiring into a national disability insurance scheme, and we received a report from the Productivity Commission at about the same time they published the NDIS report as well. Both reports are excellent and pay great tribute to the social policy expertise of the Productivity Commission.

At the same time, it is important to recognise that the aged-care sector had become much better organised, in terms of dealing with its own internal differences and then presenting a united front to parliamentarians and the community about what they wanted from aged-care reform. A lot of the difficulty that Prime Minister Howard got into in 1997 and 2004 reflected the fact that the aged-care sector itself was not united about what it wanted from reform. I think people in the parliament and people in the community were entitled to say: 'Well, if the aged-care sector cannot say what they want, why should we take a leap of faith into that unknown?' They learnt from that; they formed the National Aged Care Alliance, and they were able to work through their differences and present two important documents—first the NACA blueprint and then the NACA vision—about what they wanted from aged-care reform. NACA covered aged-care providers; the big church and charitable providers; private sector for-profit providers; the big consumer groups, like the Council on the Ageing, Alzheimer's Australia, Legacy and many others; aged-care staff; clinicians; and pretty much anyone with an interest in the aged-care sector. These were very good reports and they certainly assisted me and other government members in responding to the Productivity Commission report.

After we received the report, I talked to literally thousands of older Australians in dozens of forums around the country, in capital cities and in many regional communities as well, to hear from them what they wanted from aged-care reform. Many of these were general forums where people came along. A number of them were specific forums for people living with dementia and their families, and they were incredibly powerful opportunities for me to hear from them about the failures of so many different elements of our health system—the hospital sector, the primary care sector and the aged-care sector—to respond to and support the particular needs of the tens and tens of thousands of Australians who are living with dementia now.

We came up with a comprehensive package to respond to the Productivity Commission report in the 2012 budget. It really does transform the nature of our aged-care system. It starts to bring to the centre of the system the need for people to live in their own home for as long as possible. If there was a single message I heard from older Australians during that period, it was that they did not want the aged-care system to be about nursing homes—although they wanted to know there was a good nursing home system there to fall back on if they needed it—they wanted aged care to be focused on supporting them to stay in their own home for as long as possible and, if at all possible, for the remainder of their lives. Our package significantly lifts the number of home-care packages and home support packages that older Australians are able to receive in their own home.

We also brought a new level of transparency and robustness to the way in which the residential care or nursing home sector works, particularly around the question of what accommodation charges some older Australians will have to pay to get into those nursing homes. We heard terrible stories about people being charged arbitrary figures that would run into the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars as bonds to enter aged-care facilities, with no requirement on the provider at all to justify why a figure of $500,000 or $600,000 or $700,000 or even $800,000 needed to be paid to gain entry to an aged-care facility. We have brought much more robustness. I understand the government will keep in place the Aged Care Financing Authority, which puts providers to proof about what they are charging older Australians and why. I think that will very significantly lift the confidence that older Australians and their families have in the residential care sector.

I am particularly proud of the elements of the reform package that respond to the needs of people living with dementia. I want to pay particular tribute to Alzheimer's Australia. This is an organisation that has been providing wonderful support for many, many years to Australians affected by this condition. It lifted its game incredibly with a public campaign that caught people's attention in this parliament and across the Australian community—across the cities, across the regions. It really captured the imagination of so many Australians about the need to come to grips with what I think will be one of the two major epidemics for Australia in the 21st century, and that is dementia.

The numbers of people living with dementia, if we do not find a cure for this condition, will double every 20 years, reaching a million people by 2050 or so. As I said earlier in my address, neither our health system nor our aged-care system is well equipped to deal with those particular needs. To be frank, and without apology, the elements of the reform package that we adopted in this area largely come from the Fight Dementia Campaign that Alzheimer's Australia developed and talked about to parliamentarians across both sides of this chamber in the months leading up to the budget in 2012. I hope that the new government will support those elements of the aged-care reform package. I commend the new government for taking to the election campaign we just had a policy to provide additional funding for research into Alzheimer's. I think that is an important step in building on our reforms in this area, but again I cannot stress enough how important it is to shine a spotlight on the need of the health and aged-care sectors to respond to the needs of people living with Alzheimer's.

One element of the reform package where I think the government and the opposition part company is around issues associated with our workforce. The one change that we have seen to the reform package from the new government is to take $1.1 billion out of a program that was intended to start to lift the wages of aged-care workers. This is a very significant challenge, party politics aside. Aged-care providers are already having difficulty attracting and then retaining quality aged-care staff because of the low wages that they are paid. We currently have 350,000 workers in the aged-care sector. We are going to need about a million aged-care workers by 2050, to the point where one in 20 workers in Australia will be an aged-care worker. If we do not lift their wages, we simply will not get there. The position that we outlined in the reform package around wages reflected exactly the position that the aged-care sector had entirely signed up to in the National Aged Care Alliance blueprint. I am very disappointed that the new government has decided to turn its back on that element and particularly disappointed because I have not heard anything from the new government about what it intends to do to improve recruitment and retention of staff performing some of the most important work that our community has.

In the few minutes I have left, I want to say a few things about the wonderful community that I have the privilege of representing. This is my third election as the member for Port Adelaide. My two predecessors, Mick Young and Rod Sawford, both achieved seven elections, so I am a very long way short of those two very significant members for Port Adelaide. But it really is a privilege to serve the community. The community is made up of a number of different bits: the traditional port of Adelaide; the Lefevre Peninsula; the north-western suburbs, where I live; and then, beyond the salt pans, the northern suburbs, which have wonderful traditions and a wonderful culture. This is a community that is deeply tribal and has very high expectations—I know, from going to street corner meetings, shopping centres and footy clubs—of its members of parliament, whether they be members of this parliament or of the state parliament. I am acutely conscious every day I go to work of the high expectations that my community has of me.

They have achieved very big benefits from the last six years of the Rudd and Gillard governments. I have seen, from the time I started going to high schools in the area—because my kids are still at primary school I had not been to a high school since I was at high school—the capital upgrades that have been achieved over the last few years. When I started going to the high schools in my community, some of them only had one computer for every eight children. The changes that they have seen in the last several years have been extraordinary. There are trades training centres and community infrastructure. We saw part of the Rudd government's response to the global financial crisis bring new sporting and community facilities that are being used every day and every week. We have seen Water Proofing the West, which is a wonderful stormwater-recycling project. I know that those opposite do not see a role for the Commonwealth in urban stormwater, but this has been a wonderful project to do urban stormwater-recycling in that area.

In closing, I want to thank the vast number of supporters that we all need if we are going to get to this position and be a member of the federal parliament. Party members and party supporters again came out in force through the whole of the last three years, which were often very difficult years for members of the Labor Party, I can tell you. They came out time and time again, including in the election campaign, and supported me. For that, I am extremely grateful. They will now be working hard again, in the state election campaign over the next couple of weeks. There were so many other volunteers—not party members and not even people who would consider themselves ongoing party supporters—who also were willing to come out and give me support: well-wishers who would just say a good word to you in the shopping centre or at the footy club and make you lift your step when you might be feeling a bit exhausted. I had extraordinary officers, headed by Karen Grogan in the ministerial office and Julie Duncan in the electoral office, for whom again I am incredibly grateful. But without family and without friends—particularly without my wife, Suzanne, and my children, Ellie and Isaac—to come home to every now and then, when we have finally left and I can get back to Adelaide, this would not be worth doing. It is a wonderful privilege to be a member of this parliament. It is a wonderful privilege to represent Port Adelaide, and I am looking forward to the next three years.

Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Finance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

'The Murrumbidgee's winding waters light the lives of Wagga's sturdy breed. Like hope eternal its waters bright flow on as our undying creed.' There is a message for all of us in the opening lines to the school song of St Michael's Regional High School at Wagga Wagga. The school served the Catholic and wider community well from 1873 until its closure in 2003. It was a boys school, and it was my school, from 1977 to 1980. I loved almost every minute of it. Whether or not you attended what was a Christian Brothers institution, there is some resonance of St Michael's song to those who live along the mighty Murrumbidgee or who rely on its life-giving water. Riverina people are a sturdy breed. They have had to be in the past; they will certainly have to be in the future.

Murrumbidgee, from the language of the original custodians of the land, the Wiradjuri people, means 'big water'. The intrepid explorer, Captain Charles Sturt, after whom the Wagga Wagga campus of that remarkable university takes its name, went on his epic journey of discovery along the Murrumbidgee in 1830. Sturt and his party were often forced to carry their whaleboat on their shoulders rather than the easier and preferable option of rowing it down the river. That is because the river back then sometimes did not run—and sometimes it flooded. The greenies and the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists will probably dispute that, but it is true.

Whilst it is important that South Australia's water supply is secure and that the river environment is given due consideration, it is also imperative that the farmers and irrigation communities of the Riverina be allowed to continue what they have done on behalf of the nation for more than 100 years. The original Murray-Darling Basin Plan was stopped in its tracks in late 2010 by the loud and united voice of those marvellous people of Griffith and the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area. They rallied in their thousands. They burnt copies of the daft draft. They forced the government to change course. People power won the day. Common sense won over rank stupidity.

On Thursday last week the New South Wales government, having held out for a better and fairer deal, finally signed the agreement with the Commonwealth. The plan is not perfect. No agreement on water would ever receive wholehearted endorsement by all stakeholders. Mark Twain is attributed as saying that whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting over, and he was right of course.

I will always defend the rights of family farmers to have access to water to grow the fibre and food to clothe and feed our people and many others besides. When I came to this place in my first term I said my motto is that I shall not be silent when I ought to speak. Throughout my first term in this place that principle was tested many times, but I am proud to say that I stuck with it. I am proud of what I was able to achieve for the Wagga Wagga and Griffith base hospitals.

Wagga Wagga Base Hospital, which was first opened in 1963, has long been waiting for an upgrade. Successive New South Wales governments promised funding would come, but it was not until the New South Wales coalition came to government that the New South Wales state government started taking the project seriously. I am proud that the 2011-12 federal budget found $55.1 million for Wagga Wagga Base Hospital and the project is not only well underway but ahead of schedule.

Had it not been for a chance run-in at the Brisbane airport with Nicola Roxon, the former health minister, within weeks of the May 2011 budget, Wagga Wagga might well have missed out again. The minister was until that time mistakenly of the view that the project had been fully funded by the state government. Minister Roxon was willing to listen to my lobbying and found the Wagga Wagga Base Hospital the necessary funds. I am pleased to say that construction of the hospital is well underway. She also listened to my plea to give Ungarie flood assistance after Humbug Creek almost swept the village away on 4 March 2012.

I am also proud of the health funding boosts to the communities of Griffith and Hillston in the west and north-west of my Riverina electorate. The $11.3 million in funding in the 2012-13 budget for the Griffith community hospital was described by one of its chief proponents, John Casella, as 'good health, good for education and a real boost for our area', which has been hard hit in recent years. It was a delight of mine to inform the then Mayor of Griffith City Council, Mike Neville, of the project's success. He told me the news was 'just fantastic'. My good friend Adrian Piccoli, the member for Murrumbidgee in New South Wales and education minister, said it was 'the best political news he had ever heard'. This funding was complemented by the announcement that the multipurpose service at Hillston was also funded to the tune of $6 million.

The productive farming areas of Griffith and Hillston were both placed under considerable pressure as a result of uncertainty with future water availability at the time and the health announcements in those two areas were greeted with delight and surprise. As I have stressed in this place before, it is incumbent upon all of us never to forget the people who send us here and to stand up for them in this place always. For me, standing up for the people and being a voice for those who do not have one is why I ran for parliament in the first place and it is what drives me to come into this place again and again determined to represent the Riverina, a Federation seat, to the very best of my ability.

There is no denying that the 43rd Parliament was a roller-coaster ride for all in this place. It was the first minority government since that of John Curtin in 1941. It was a government that brought with it some of the worst debt, some of the biggest broken promises and a carbon tax that the Prime Minister promised would never be part of a government she led. Amongst this the Murray-Darling Basin Plan discussions were raging. Throughout the purpose-built irrigation areas in my electorate, which are rich with many cultures and have an abundance of produce upon which this nation relies, the Murray-Darling Basin Plan caused much angst. I will never forget the day I went to Griffith to attend the largest public rally. It was Thursday, 15 December 2011. At the Yoogali Club on Mackay Avenue in Griffith there were 14,000 passionate people there to fight for their water rights and their future.

It was a bad plan and the irrigators, the growers, the producers and the small business people all knew it. They knew what a devastating impact a bad plan such as that would have had on the purpose-built irrigation communities throughout the basin. There with me was my good friend and Nationals colleague Senator Fiona Nash, who is now the Assistant Minister for Health, and the opposition leader and now Prime Minister. They were there to listen, to care and to stand up for what was right. The then water minister, Tony Burke, the member for Watson, was there too. While we will never agree on the Basin Plan or on water rights, I do acknowledge that it took guts for him to turn up and, in the mist of all that passion and angst, stand and tell the then government's story.

The Murray-Darling Basin Plan was a threat to the people of my electorate and the basin. When I ran for parliament in 2010 I made it clear that I would be their voice in parliament, and I followed through on that, moving a motion to disallow the passage of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan through parliament. It was important to me and to the people of my electorate that I kept my word. Whatever the disallowance motion may have meant in this place—and my motion to disallow was defeated 95 to five—it meant a lot to the irrigators and producers of the Riverina to have a local member stand up for them, cross the floor and do what was right. Moving the disallowance motion has also meant that I as the local member can walk along Banna Avenue, Griffith's main street, and the main streets of many irrigation areas in my electorate and look farmers and people in the eye and tell them I did my best and I helped bring about a promise to cap buybacks at 1,500 gigalitres. The confirmation of this from my colleague Senator Simon Birmingham means that certainty has come to the irrigators of my electorate and they can plan their harvest with renewed confidence.

I am proud to be serving the government as Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Finance, Senator Mathias Cormann. I am relishing the challenge of my portfolio responsibilities. I thank Rachel Thompson, Brett Chant, Julianne Hyland and Carl Fitzpatrick for their work in my office in this role.

In the context of everything that government does, it is not surprising that from time to time the design or administration of Commonwealth regulation results in inequitable, unintentional or anomalous outcomes. That is why we have discretionary compensation mechanisms—act of grace payments and the scope to waive debts owed to the Commonwealth—for which I have responsibility. It is my hope that with fewer and better-designed regulations and a risk based approach to their administration we will see better outcomes for citizens and less need to resort to discretionary measures such as act of grace payments.

The Productivity Commission noted last year that those regulators with the best relationship with small businesses were those that took a risk based approach to regulation. The Commonwealth has come a long way in improving its approach to risk management since Comcover was established in 1998, but there is still much more to be done. One of my priorities is to promote a more mature approach to risk management within the Commonwealth, an approach that encourages officials to place risk management at the heart of everything that they do. This will apply as much to my own responsibilities in managing the administration of non-defence property portfolio as to anywhere else.

The reforms of the Hawke-Keating era were a response to a fundamental problem: the world had changed but government processes had not. Decades on, we face the same challenge. International trade and commerce, advances in technology, medical breakthroughs—all of these and more are changing the way Australians do business and the way we live. When faced with this challenge, the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government committed the fiscal equivalent of mortgaging the house to buy ice cream, as someone put it to me last week. The pleasure of short-term consumption has melted away, leaving us with a bucket load of debt. It is a big bucket, too.

Unlike those who preceded us, we are up to this challenge. The Commission of Audit is a crucial step in the process of considering the role of government. What is the government doing that people could reasonably be expected to do for themselves? Are the things we are spending money on worth the taxes needed to pay for them? Where is the government getting in the way of innovation and enterprise? What we need are reforms that will lift productivity and living standards into the future. Crucial to this process will be bipartisan support, the kind of bipartisan support that Hawke and Keating were able to rely on in pushing through their reform agenda. My invitation to those opposite is to work with us or risk being on the wrong side of history.

The incidence of mental illness and the high rate of suicide in regional Australia remains one of the least understood health crises facing our nation. Although the reasons why suicide is higher in rural and remote areas are not fully understood, we do know that suicide is roughly 30 per cent higher in regional and remote Australia. That is a huge challenge for our times. Indigenous Australians, young men under 24 years of age, men aged over 60 and farmers are particular population sub-groups considered to be at risk when it comes to suicide. Mental illness and suicide are felt especially severely in rural areas, where people are overrepresented in the statistics. There is nobody living in a country town today who has not been personally touched by suicide. How sad is that? It is the silent epidemic of our time. Minister Nash has done an outstanding job for rural health since she was appointed Assistant Minister for Health, and I commend her ongoing stewardship of this important portfolio.

As most would appreciate, life in the Australian bush can be harsh. It can mean hard work in often difficult environments. Farming and related industries can often be at the mercy of unpredictable weather. We are a land of flooding rains and long droughts. An entire year of production could be wiped out in the blink of an eye. External market forces and unfavourable currency can also put additional pressures on farming communities and families.

Even in the face of those adversities, it is difficult to reconcile higher rates of suicide in rural communities when these same communities consistently report higher levels of social cohesion than in major cities. People in rural areas are close-knit. They are friends; they are mates. People feel safer, there is more volunteerism and the social connections are greater in the bush. Wagga Wagga, my hometown, was recently judged the most family friendly city in Australia. These are the enduring strengths of our regions and these are also the very protective factors that can help fight the effects of depression and mental illness; yet the actual experience in the bush could not be more different.

Although the evidence from the millennium drought indicates that there was no increase in farmer suicides between 2001 and 2007 due to the drought, we know that there was a concerted effort by all governments to provide counselling and mental health services targeted towards various at-risk groups in drought prone areas during this difficult period. People from the bush are made of tough stuff, and when things start to become difficult they often try to tough it out, to not seek help, to fix their own problems. The fear of failure is a particularly strong motivator in the bush. It is this attitude, particularly among men, which makes it harder to identify when someone might be under more stress than normal, suffering from depression or perhaps even contemplating taking their own life. Despite widespread public awareness and education campaigns over many years, the stigma and shame associated with mental illness still exist to this day.

A lack of adequate services in rural and remote areas might account for some of the rural-specific suicide rate, and I know that all sides of this chamber have a commitment to providing services wherever they are needed. Indeed, I remain hopeful that this government will be able to deliver a headspace youth mental health centre in the Murrumbidgee, as I know many in my community would like to see. But dealing with mental illness is not just purely a health or psychological condition that requires medical help. While services do exist, we recognise that not every person suffering from mental illness will access them. Every community, therefore, has a responsibility to ensure that we are looking out for each other, that as resilient as we are no person can carry their burdens alone for too long. We do need to build resilience and to promote positivity.

The time has come for us as a community to shine a light on this unyielding tragedy that unfolds every week in households, farms and towns across our nation. We need to be able to discuss suicide and depression without the shame and stigma. Families need to be frank and honest with each other about the welfare of a family member, if they are concerned. Friends need to be extra vigilant about what their peers are going through. My message to rural communities is that there is no shame in raising mental health issues, there is no shame in being concerned for one another and there is certainly no shame in seeking help if and when we need it. Every person lost to suicide is an unnecessary and avoidable loss, and everyone has a role to play when it comes to suicide prevention.

I am humbled to have been returned as the federal member for Riverina and to have the opportunity to continue working for the people of the Riverina in the new Abbott-Truss government. I am thankful to the people of the Riverina for placing their faith and trust in me to be their voice again. My 2013 campaign director, Wes Fang of Wagga Wagga, is a loyal friend and confidant. Wes—the father of two young boys and he is expecting the arrival of another child in the coming weeks—worked tirelessly, day and night, for the campaign. There was nothing which was too much work for Wes. He spent hours stuffing envelopes, putting up corflutes, coordinating with the campaign committee and organising campaign events, all with a young family at home. Wes did all this in the midst of starting a small business, caring for his terminally ill father, Tom—may he rest in peace—and building a new home. I am very grateful to Wes for his hard work and dedication. I would like to publicly thank Wes and wish him and his wife, Nat Snyman, and their boys, Caspar and Atticus, all the best for the new arrival on the way.

My campaign committee was full of hardworking local volunteers—decent, compassionate and determined country people who did what was needed to get the job done. For many on my campaign committee elections are a familiar get-together of friends doing what the campaign needs, often late at night, packing booth boxes and distributing corflutes around the 61,435 square kilometres of the Riverina electorate. They did their job, because on election day we won every one of the more than 100 polling booths in the Riverina. Despite the cold and late nights, these volunteers got stuck in and did the job—as country people always do.

I thank Richard and Gretchen Sleeman of San Isidore whose constant help and support saw every booth across an electorate the size of Tasmania manned, with corflutes distributed, minutes taken at meetings and campaign coordination assured. There was no stopping Gretchen Sleeman—she is such a spirited community-minded person who worked day and night to make sure The Nationals had someone at every booth. Richard, amongst his commitments with many other organisations, made sure corflutes were ready, booth boxes were packed and people were informed. I thank them both immensely.

My indefatigable campaign committee had many people from many communities who would meet weekly to work through what the campaign needed. In addition to the people mentioned, there were the Hon. Rick Bull of Holbrook, Anna and John Dennis of Collingullie, Councillor Pam Halliburton and Margaret Hill of Junee, Barney Hyams of Batlow, Dominic Hopkinson, my wife Catherine, Zac Lederhose, Joanne McLennan, Barbara Parnell, Ange Smit, Robert and Lesley Vennell, and Anabel Williams—all of Wagga Wagga. They are all hard workers, they are all friends and I thank them very much.

I wish to also thank my wonderful predecessor Kay Hull for her ongoing and unwavering support, Ben Franklin for all that he has done and continues to do on behalf of the NSW Nationals, and Temora mayor Councillor Rick Firman for his counsel, his friendship and, at times, his humour.

I thank my staff in Wagga Wagga and Griffith who work hard every day to serve the people of the Riverina—not just those who vote Nationals but all the people of the Riverina. In Wagga Wagga Anabel Williams, Melissa Irvine, Anna Duggan, Dom Hopkinson, Kerrianne Malone, Ange Smit, Marney Johnstone, Helena Adamcewicz, Georgie Hutchinson and Jess Glynn have all worked for me at some point during my first term and I thank them for their efforts.

In Griffith, I thank Doris Bertollo, a stalwart of the Riverina electorate office who has worked in that role in Griffith for more than 25 years. After having worked for both Noel Hicks and Kay Hull before me, there is nothing Doris does not know about the Riverina or the immigration portfolio. Jess, Ange, Kerrianne and Anabel have all had a baby within the past 18 months or are due within the coming weeks—I am not quite sure what that says about my electorate office. I wish them and their families all the best with their new arrivals.

I am blessed with a loving and supportive family. My wife, Catherine, and I have spent 27 years together—she has put up with a lot—building a life for ourselves and our three lovely children. To see Georgina, Alexander and Nicholas grow into strong, intelligent, purposeful adults has been one of the great joys of our life together. So I am especially keen to ensure that government does what it can to help support families. If we have strong families we have stronger and more resilient communities. We should recognise the role of the family unit in providing people with a sense of belonging and as the foundation for people within communities to be socially connected with each other.

In closing, I restate my full commitment to serving the people of the Riverina. It is a wonderful electorate that stretches from the eastern side of Mount Kosciuszko—as Simon Crean described it, the high point of Australian politics—right through to many kilometres past Roto, which is past Hillston, the last big community. I do not take my responsibilities lightly and I will always fight for the interests of the people of the Riverina. I am extremely pleased that I am part of the Abbott-Truss government—not only do we have to fix the budget issues but also we are setting about putting Australia onto a sound economic footing so that we can meet the challenges of the future. There will be many challenges—challenges with water, challenges with border security and challenges for the economy—but we are up to the task. The Australian people gave us the mandate to carry out our reform agenda and we will do that with purpose, dedication and maturity.

Kate Ellis (Adelaide, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I begin my contribution to this address-in-reply debate by thanking the very good people of Adelaide for returning me to this place once more, and I put on the record my gratitude for their support and for the faith they have placed in me. Of course that is something that none of us should take lightly, and we know that it is our job to work each and every day to make sure we repay their faith in us. Whilst this address-in-reply debate is an opportunity for the government to outline what they seek to achieve over the course of this parliament, it is also an opportunity for each and every one of us to outline our priorities and the key issues we will be seeking to pursue. My absolute No. 1 priority is to stand up strongly for the people of Adelaide. For almost 10 years now I have come to this place and tried to make sure that I represent honestly and forcefully their views and their opinions, and I look forward to continuing to do that over the course of the next three years.

Before talking about some of the issues and some of the views that the people of Adelaide have asked that I bring forward to this place, I would like to thank a few people for assisting me to be here. Of course there is the Adelaide community. I have now run in four federal election campaigns, and never before have I seen the kind of support from local community members that we saw during the course of the last campaign. It was remarkable to have people who had not come through the ranks of the Labor Party or any political party, but who were working out in the community, ringing the office and saying they wanted to help. We had people dropping off supplies to feed our volunteers. One remarkable community member, having heard me on radio, knew that I was unwell and the next day they brought a get-well pack, which included honey and lemon and all sorts of remedies, to get me through.

Julie Collins (Franklin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Development and Local Government) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Did it work?

Kate Ellis (Adelaide, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am here, Julie, so it must have been highly effective. To all of these people, I say thank you. I would also like to thank my amazing staff, who worked day and night throughout the campaign, as they do throughout the term to ensure that we can carry on in this role. One of the consequences that is sadly inevitable in moving from government to opposition is that you do downsize those staff considerably, but we have a saying, 'Once a member of team Ellis, always member of team Ellis.' I know that they will always be there and I will always show my gratitude for having the absolute best staff members, best campaign committee members and best support that anyone could ask for. To all of them, I say thank you.

Now the job is to make sure that we stand up strongly for the people of Adelaide. Sadly, there is already evidence that there is going to be much to stand up against. I am really proud that we have managed to deliver record levels of investment and results to the Adelaide community over the last few years, but we have seen in the early stages of this Abbott government that they are a North Shore Sydney government who have never shown any interest whatsoever in South Australia or, particularly, in fighting for South Australian jobs. Already, just months in, we have seen the Holden closure and the thousands of local families who will be affected by that.

I will also place on the record today my thoughts for the Qantas workers who were delivered the incredibly bad news of 5,000 job cuts just last week. I know that many of those Qantas workers are residents of the seat of Adelaide. I have visited and spoken to them about their concerns about a lack of job security. I would like to say that I will absolutely use this parliament to ensure that we pursue a plan to get them back to work and to turn around the statistics which we have now seen showing that, since this government was elected, there has been one job lost every three minutes. That is unacceptable to my local community and it is unacceptable for our nation.

We have seen an emphasis by the Prime Minister, by the Treasurer and by others on Sydney, particularly North Shore Sydney. It is my job to make sure that South Australia is not overlooked. It is my job to make sure that the residents of Adelaide are not overlooked, and there are many key issues which are at stake. At the last election we already saw a number of issues to which we pledged funds for the Adelaide community which have so far not been matched and honoured by the government. I talk about things like the Women & Children's Hospital Foundation's funding for a feasibility study to look into increasing their research capacity, something that I would think that every South Australian should stand up and fight for and support.

Also in the local community there are things like new lighting and upgrades to the club facilities at the Broadview Football Club. This is a club that has gone through hard times. This is a club that has worked through those hard times and has massively expanded to see that the Broadview Football Club is now offering sport, entertainment and a community hub, and it has huge numbers of junior players coming through. We want to make sure that we are not turning away people who are engaging in a healthy pursuit on the weekends because the facilities are not there to support them. It is shameful that the incoming health and sports minister has said that they will not be matching just $120,000 for the Broadview Football Club.

One of the areas of my electorate for which I have a particular soft spot is Kilburn. The good people of Kilburn have worked long and hard and have too often have been overlooked by governments of all persuasions at all levels. These are people who have worked hard, have largely have come through public housing, have too much pollution in their area and have a lack of community facilities. Yet, when Kilburn Primary School was closed down several years ago, I launched a campaign to ensure that that space would be used for the local community, that there would not be more heavy industry moving into the area and that we would have a place where the community could come together. I was so incredibly proud to be able to announce $1 million in funding to build a sporting complex at the Kilburn Primary School site. It would be the new home of the West Adelaide Football Club, but, perhaps more importantly, it would also be open to community use.

Kilburn is one of the areas in the community that I represent where the demographics have changed hugely. They have an ever-growing Afghan community, who are pretty handy on the soccer field, I have to say, but are looking for a place to train and to play. There are also members of the Sudanese community moving into the area who are very keen to ensure that there is some place provided for sporting facilities and a facility where people can meet one another and come together as a community regardless of their background. Sadly, the Abbott government have failed to match this commitment too.

The situation of the Victoria Park grandstand is perhaps the most shocking. An area has been redeveloped around Victoria Park so that it can host a number of different community and sporting events. We pledged $62,000 for disability access at that grandstand. That is something that I would expect every member of this parliament would support, but, shockingly, $62,000 has now been ripped off of them so that this disability access will not be able to go ahead and so that these community events will not be able to be attended by all members of our community. It is on issues like these and so many more that it will be my role to stand up for the Adelaide community.

One issue that I particularly want to touch on, noting the minister who is at the table today—Minister Briggs—is the issue of the South Road upgrade. The assistant minister may know that this is a particular pet project. It is a big project. It is an incredibly important project for both Adelaide and South Australia. It is a project that was estimated to cost $896 million to upgrade South Road between Torrens Road and the River Torrens. It is a project which the former Labor federal government struck a deal with the state government on a fifty-fifty funding commitment so that this project could commence. This project did actually commence. There have been properties that have already been acquired. There was work that had already commenced. There is a site office that is up and running that had conducted community consultations. There was actually work happening on the ground to ensure that this became a very long overdue reality.

Even this year alone, it is an issue that I can say I have heard about at countless street corner meetings—that the residents are absolutely furious. Not only has this project now been brought to a stop but the residents in the local area actually received a flyer in their letterboxes during the election campaign saying, 'If you vote for the Liberal Party we will upgrade South Road to the western suburbs.' This was to the very residents who had fought for the Torrens to Torrens upgrade—not just for years but for decades—only to then learn that indeed the progress on that project would be stopped.

But I am hoping that there will soon be good news on this front. This is where I look towards the assistant minister. I was delighted on the weekend when I read The Weekend Australianwhich does not always bring me delight, I should say! But I was particularly delighted to read this article, 'Tony Abbott eyes $5 billion for new road funding'. I note that the assistant minister said:

Infrastructure is already a major commitment of the federal government and I think you’ll see an even greater commitment, because there is a great need to lift our national productivity.

Now, I do not always agree with the assistant minister sitting at the table—

Jamie Briggs (Mayo, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Infrastructure and Regional Development) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You never do!

Kate Ellis (Adelaide, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

But on this particular occasion, I say to him that if he wants to prove the point that this is not a government that is only focused on North Shore Sydney, that this is not a government that has absolutely and totally overlooked South Australia, then there is no reason why this funding, which is apparently on its way, will not ensure that the Torrens to Torrens road upgrade of South Road gets back underway and that we see this project delivered for the community that I am so proud to represent.

We know that the economic case stacks up. We know that there is far more policy rationale for doing this than the Darlington upgrade, which politics has persuaded the government to prioritise instead. We know that it is long overdue and we know that it will not just benefit South Road; it will not just benefit those who are using it as a corridor—the trucks and the like—but it will actually benefit the whole area. All the studies have shown that it will decrease massively the amount of traffic which is utilising Churchill Road and a number of other areas.

So whether it is on fighting for the South Road upgrade or whether it is on fighting for the funding which the Abbott government has already stripped away from the Adelaide community, I am delighted to be here to fight for those residents and to make sure that we continue to see real results.

Of course, I have been given a task on top of just looking after the people of Adelaide, and that is to serve as Labor's shadow minister for education and early childhood. They are two areas that I am deeply passionate about; in fact, the area of education was the very area which inspired me to look towards politics, knowing that education has the power to transform individual lives more than any other area of investment. It is a job that I take on with quite a sense of responsibility because I am incredibly proud of the huge amount of progress that we made in the education area under the Rudd and Gillard governments.

This was an area that was transformed. We saw new policies come into place: a national curriculum, which had been talked about for so long, finally became a reality; we could shine a light on school performance through national testing and making results available through accountability at a school level; and, importantly, we undertook the biggest review of the Australian school education system in over 40 years, under the panel led by David Gonski. Throughout that process, we had those opposite saying: 'There is no problem. There is no equity issue in Australian schools. There is nothing to see here; the funding model is not broken.' But, of course, the Australian public knew better. The Australian public sees the overwhelming evidence that there is far too big a gap between those schools which are high performing and those schools which are struggling, that this is a gap which is increasing.

There is far too big a gap between the performance of a student who is enrolled at a metropolitan school and one who happens to live in country Australia. There are far too many huge equity gaps in the Australian education system, and the Australian public know that, because whether you are a student, a teacher or a parent you see each and every day what is happening in our school system.

We saw on almost the eve of the election those opposite finally recognising that this was a critically important issue to the Australian public. So what did they do? They had a total reversal of policy, where they came out and declared that they had seen the light—they, too, agreed that we needed to see these school reforms. And in what has already been shown to be absolutely the biggest fraud committed on the Australian public, we now see that that was just not the case. They stood up—and not just on one occasion but time and time again—like the now Prime Minister, talking about how he was on a 'unity ticket' with Labor when it came to school funding, and the now education minister, saying:

You can vote Liberal or Labor and you'll get exactly the same amount of funding for your school.

He said, 'Well, we've said that we will adopt the new school funding model from 1 January next year for the next four years. So, it yes, we've accepted that there is a new school funding model.' The Prime Minister also said:

So, we will honour the agreements that Labor has entered into. We will match the offers that Labor has made.

The minister also said, 'Funding will be the same under the coalition as under the Labor Party.'

What is truly shameful from this government is that they stood at polling booths around Australia saying this. They had posters, 'Your school will receive the same amount of funding under Liberal or Labor.' But we already know that that is absolutely not true, and it was a sham that they tried to pull on the Australian public. It is our job on this side of the House to say: 'We will not give up on these reforms. We know that our school system is too important to let those opposite just throw away all of the progress that has been made.' But what we will also do is to point out, each and every day, to those who still come in here crying about broken promises on carbon tax, that every pamphlet they sent out to their communities and every sign in a polling booth about school funding has been shown to be utterly false in the most disgusting attempt to trick the Australian public that I think we have probably ever seen.

We now know that there is a huge difference in the amount of funding that schools will get under this government. What we were talking about under Labor's Gonski reforms would see $14.65 billion in additional funding flowing to Australian schools. Under the model put forward by those opposite, that figure is just $2.8 billion. Worse than that, those opposite, who claimed that there would be 'no difference in the amount of funding that your school would get', have then come in and said, 'Actually, we're going to throw away all of the conditions that were placed on state governments.' Even though our reforms had finally changed a system that saw too many state governments cutting funding to schools, not keeping up with indexation and not making co-contributions for additional federal funds, those opposite have come in and said, 'Yes, we'll send out a no-strings-attached blank cheque to the state governments but we will do absolutely nothing to stop them from cutting from their school education budgets the same amount in additional money that they're getting—or, indeed, more.' The government have said that they will do nothing to require state governments to put in co-contributions for the dollars in federal funding that they have received, which shows that there is absolutely no way that any member of the government, any of those opposite, can repeat the promises that they made at polling booths on election day. We have seen it from the Prime Minister. We have seen it from the education minister. They can no longer say, 'Your school will receive the same amount of funding under us,' as the school would have under the Labor Party, because they know that it was a sham the entire time.

We also heard that there would be no cuts to education, yet we have seen $1 billion stripped from the trade-training centres program—because, at a time when we are losing jobs, at a time when we are seeing youth unemployment, those opposite think it is a smart idea to cut the very programs that were put in place to skill young Australians. And now there are alarm bells ringing about the Youth Connections program, a program that was put in place to help young Australians who are at risk of being disengaged and falling out of our education or employment systems to stay engaged. There are huge question marks about whether those opposite are just going to cut another program.

I say to all members of this House: it is our responsibility to fight against the youth unemployment figures that we are seeing in this nation. Now, I do not claim that there is one silver bullet that is going to turn that around—and those opposite are being dishonest if they claim that there is—but I do say that you do not keep a single young person in employment by cutting the programs that are already in place to try and support them. There is absolutely no rationale for that. On this cut and on a range of other cuts, I am proud to be here in the parliament representing the very good voters of Adelaide, and I pledge to work my hardest each and every day to do just that.

Jamie Briggs (Mayo, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Infrastructure and Regional Development) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate and it is the privilege of all of us who are elected to this place that we get the opportunity to do so. I should say, as the member for Adelaide leaves the chamber, that she should be very happy with the new government's decision in respect of South Road, because we will, as the Prime Minister said in October last year, deliver a north-south corridor in South Australia and help build the productive capacity of our state within a decade. We have said time and time again that we will do both the Darlington and the Torrens-to-Torrens projects because they are both important projects.

As I said at the start, it is an absolute honour and privilege to be in this place. This is the third occasion I have had the opportunity to make this address. Actually, technically, it is the second, because the first time, as I was the child of a by-election, my maiden speech was on a bill. But it is a real privilege to be here again, and I thank the people of Mayo for delivering a very solid result for me and the Liberal Party on 7 September. I can report to the House that we had a swing to the Liberal Party of 5.22 per cent in my electorate, which puts me into the semi-marginal area of 62½ per cent, so I am very pleased with that. I did not quite get to Alexander Downer's best result in Mayo, but we will keep working away at that.

We only lost at one booth, which was at Bridgewater, by seven votes, and we know that Tim Booval, who was in charge of that booth, was responsible for that! And I wish him a happy birthday for tomorrow. We had some great results in the new areas of McLaren Vale, McLaren Flat and Willunga, which we had inherited from—and she will not thank me for saying this—the member for Kingston, who had lost those areas in a redistribution. The member for Kingston is actually a very hardworking member and much underrated in this place, in my view, and I think that was one of the reasons that we had an 11.4 per cent swing in McLaren Vale, a 15.3 per cent swing in McLaren Flat and an 11.7 per cent swing in Willunga.

So it was a great result and it was a result based on, I think, a lot of hard work on issues that were important to my electorate. The first and overwhelming issue was that people wanted to change the government, and they did. That was terrific because that gave us the opportunity to implement our plan for Australia, to ensure that we are stronger and more prosperous than we would have been down the path the Labor Party was taking us.

But locally there were some important issues as well which I would like to deal with. Firstly, the most contentious issue in my electorate in the last three years was certainly the former government's decision to break an election promise following the 2010 election and put a detention facility at Inverbrackie without consulting the community first, breaking a commitment not to have more onshore detention facilities. That decision caused a lot of community resentment, a lot of community anger, around Woodside and Oakbank, and those parts of the Adelaide Hills, particularly the fact that they had never been consulted. They had never been asked by the former government whether this was something they would support. It was a commitment of ours at the election, a commitment that will be fulfilled in the very near future, that we will close that facility's operations because it is not an appropriate way to deal with the border security issue that the minister for immigration is so magnificently handling. So we look forward to that announcement. There have been some people, particularly some Adelaide Hills councillors who are certainly not of the Liberal persuasion, or even of the Labor persuasion, who constantly make claims that the centre retains community support and therefore should remain open.

The now minister for immigration and I put a very clear proposition to the electorate prior to the last election that we would close it if we won the election. The swing towards the Liberal Party in the booths most related to this centre, at Woodside and Oakbank—great Australians—was nine per cent in Woodside and nine per cent in Oakbank. Those members of the Adelaide Hills Council—who really should focus on delivering services to those of us who pay rates rather than focusing on federal politics and continuing to make these false claims—should look to what their voters actually said. There will be an opportunity in November when the council elections come up for those voters to send exactly the same message to some of those councillors.

An issue which I have fought for consistently since being pre-selected and since being elected to this place and which I will continually advocate for—and be proudly standing there when we have turned the first sod, as, ironically, the minister responsible—is the second interchange at Bald Hills Road off the South Eastern Freeway to cater for the growth in Mount Barker. Alexander Downer, when he was the member for Mayo, made a commitment in the 2007 election campaign that the federal government would contribute funding towards it. Mark Goldsworthy, the state member for Kavel, said the same in 2006 and 2010 and is saying the same in 2014. I made that commitment in the by-election in 2008 and 2010 and in 2013 we committed $16 million towards the project. I am happy to report to the House that, after being ignored for four years, the state Labor government, who opened up all the land around Mount Barker for development but failed to invest in the infrastructure, and Minister Koutsantonis, to his credit—and I do not think I have ever used those words in the same sentence before—have announced at the last minute that the Labor Party, if they are re-elected in a week and a half's time, which I truly hope does not happen, will fund the project.

So the people of Mount Barker and the people of Mayo know that, no matter who wins the state election, this project will be delivered. I will proudly be standing there later this year when we turn that first sod and we make sure that this project is delivered cheaply, efficiently and quickly, in line with our agenda to deliver more infrastructure to make Australia more prosperous and more productive. This is a very important piece of infrastructure. It will help alleviate the concerns of residents about the increased growth in our region after the state Labor Party decided to open up our region for that growth without investing in the necessary infrastructure. This is a small step to ensuring that the increased number of people who are living in Mount Barker and its surrounds have access to the freeway in a safe and efficient way. At the moment there is one exit to the freeway from Adelaide Road and it has become a constant bottleneck as the community has grown. It is not safe. We are in a bushfire zone in the Adelaide Hills, and one exit from a major town is far from safe. Having a second exit and entrance will make the town more efficient and much move liveable for the residents of Mount Barker. It is a huge win.

While there has been some misreporting in the local papers about what was offered by the state government, it is a proud achievement that I am extraordinarily proud to be part of. We have committed to this project and we will see this project through. I very much look forward to this road being built. Hopefully, after the 2016 election, if I am returned—I do intend to nominate again—I will be able to stand here and say that it is now delivered, open and operating, unless something gets dramatically in the way of that. That is, I think, the No. 1 commitment that I have pursued.

The second commitment that I have pursued is the swimming pool on the south coast—the Fleurieu aquatic centre. It is an issue which has raised some controversy in recent times. I committed to this project when I first ran in the by-election and I committed again in 2010. In this election we took the correct position to ensure that we were not making commitments that we could not fund, and there was some question about the commitment. But, given the decision the Deputy Prime Minister and I made to allow the uncontracted rounds 2, 3 and 4 of the RDA funds to be spent, the Fleurieu aquatic centre will also go ahead, and we look forward in the very, very near future to signing that contract and getting that project underway for the people of the south coast.

Kangaroo Island, a beautiful part of my electorate, is an area that has great opportunity. It also has some challenges—as do many island communities across our country—because of the cost of freight and the cost of getting to the island. It is the jewel in the crown of South Australia and also of our country. About 60 per cent of overseas tourists who visit South Australia do so for the specific purpose of visiting KI. Our plan to abolish the carbon tax and to take regulatory pressure off business will help KI prosper, but we will also work very closely with the Mayor of Kangaroo Island, Jayne Bates—who does an outstanding job—to see what we can do in addition to ensure that the infrastructure needs are met on Kangaroo Island so that they can take advantage of all their strengths.

One issue that is bedevilling them—an issue that I have long had concerns about—is the blue gum forests. The MIS program from some time ago shows that when governments intervene to try to create industries and markets, it inevitably has consequences which are long and painful. There is no better example than the locked up productive land on Kangaroo Island, which could be farmed and used for much better purposes. It is destroying the community of Parndana, and we do need to try to find a solution to this. It is not easy but it needs to happen because Kangaroo Island is a jewel in our crown. Because of the fertile soils and the climate, food production on the island is a real strength, and the blue gums are inhibiting that. It came from bad policy. It is still bad and getting worse and we need to fix it.

Another very proud achievement—and something which was the issue of my by-election—is in respect of the Murray-Darling Basin. It is something that I—as someone who grew up on the river, in Mildura, and who has been involved in this issue for a very long time—passionately believe we needed to address. When I was in John Howard's office, there was the groundbreaking plan to address the crisis in the Murray-Darling Basin. It has taken too long to get to this point where we can come to an agreement that we need to ensure that we can be as productive as possible in the basin but that we have a healthy basin. It is a terrific achievement of the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for the Environment, Simon Birmingham, to finally bring all the parties together—all the states—last week to sign up to the intergovernmental agreement and put those reforms in place, which will ensure that the deal that was done during the last term of parliament is locked away and achieved. I must mention Henry Jones, who is suffering from some health issues at the moment. He is a fisherman at Clayton and has fought day in and day out for years for this result. He will see the result and, I think, sit back with an element of pride. He deserves to have an element of pride, because he worked so hard, as did so many South Australians. It is a great achievement, particularly for Senator Birmingham, and I congratulate him on what he has done in that respect.

One of the commitments I made in the preselection for Mayo back in 2008 was that I would introduce a mobile electorate office to get around my electorate. It is a large electorate with diverse communities—the communities of Yankalilla, Victor Harbor and the Lower Lakes, out north to the Eden Valley and Springton, right through to the Adelaide Hills, where I live and continually show that I cannot ride a bike properly, and Kangaroo Island. So it is not easy for constituents to get to my office in Mount Barker, so I committed that we would get out and get around. During the last term I visited over 160 communities with my mobile electorate office, providing the opportunity for local residents to come and see me to raise issues. As I am sure all members of parliament in this place know, even if people do not always agree with you—or, indeed, often agree with you—they appreciate the opportunity to raise issues about Australia, politics, the economy, their jobs, their health care, their education and what have you. The fact that they get the chance to talk to their local member and that we live in a country where we can advertise that we will be somewhere and we have no fear of advertising that and we are not held up in our office constantly is another example, I think, of what a wonderful country we have. People are nearly always polite and respectful even if they are not always in full agreement, and we will do our best to convince those who do not necessarily agree with our perspective. I think getting around is an important thing that we do in my electorate, and I will continue to do it as much as I can—obviously with the additional responsibilities.

Following the election, it was a privilege, an honour and a shock to get a phone call from the Prime Minister inviting me to join the executive of the government. It is a humbling thing to be part of a ministry and to be one of the leaders of the government in driving our agenda through. I am constantly aware that this is a job which is not a right; it is an absolute privilege. We need to work at it every day to ensure that we are doing as well as we can to achieve the aims of the government. In infrastructure, as I said very early, we have bold plans. We have hard and difficult decisions to make to ensure we get our plans done, but we will get them done. We will invest in building our productive capacity. We will invest in ensuring that Australia can do better than we are doing today and that small business, medium business and large business can compete as well as they possibly can. We do not believe in government by chequebook; we believe in government giving all Australians the opportunity to achieve their best. I think the Prime Minister has been outstanding in delivering this message since we came to government. I think that, as time goes on, he will be seen as one of our best prime ministers. He has all the capacity to deliver for Australia. Australians respect Tony Abbott because he is a good man with strong values and strong beliefs and he will pursue those for the good of our country. I fundamentally believe that.

In conclusion, I should acknowledge a few people. We would not be here without volunteers. They are the geniuses of us all, and without them we would not be elected. David Hall is first among equals in that respect. He goes out of his way. He lives in Victor Harbor and runs a manufacturing business which is doing better every day, and he travels and gives up his own time, often with very little thanks. He is a great man, and I thank him so much for what he has done. We would not have been able to do it without Marg Westmore, and my state counterpart Mark Goldsworthy could not do it without Marg Westmore either. She is a treasure extraordinaire. I acknowledge Richard Munro, who ran the campaign and was the genius behind the Briggs Bus, an innovation which will continue—that will be back in a campaign; don't you worry about that—and Bryan Reid for all he has done as well. There are many others whom I do not have the opportunity to thank in the time remaining. I do want to acknowledge Brian Dohse, though. He sadly passed away the day after I had my thank-you drinks in December. He was a great man and we will remember Brian for a long time to come.

I must thank my staff—because that is what they have written on my piece of paper! They were terrific. I had no changes in my staff in the whole of the last three years. I think it is a really important part of a political office to ensure that you have a consistent group, and I thank them very much for what they have done. They have a bigger task now with more people on board. Laura, Amy, David, Amelia and Rhiannon—and I am going to forget someone now—are terrific people and they have done a great amount of work for me. So with those remarks I again thank the people of Mayo for re-electing me to this place. Avril is the other one, and she will kill me for that! I seek leave to continue my remarks at another time.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.