Kevin Hogan (Page, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

One of the great privileges that many of us in this room have as members of parliament is that we meet a lot of people in our community. We have lots of people come to see us and therefore we meet lots of different groups of people who represent a lot of different people in our community in different ways. Two groups I have seen in the last seven or eight weeks have asked me to report that we met and what topics we spoke about, which I am going to do today.

The first group was the Richmond Valley Ratepayers and Residents Association. I met four or five of their members of their group, which is obviously a large group. They asked me to touch on the subjects that we talked about: they did not feel that we should bail out large car companies when we are in so much debt; they felt that we had a mandate to get rid of the carbon tax and they thought the Labor Party did too and that should be passing; they felt that the way that the Speaker, Ms Bishop, was being spoken to was very inappropriate in parliament; this was a while ago—they said that that long-term unemployed should be made to undertake Work for the Dole schemes as well, which is interesting given what happened last week; and they also felt that the ABC was biased for a publicly funded organisation.

Probably about a week or two after that I met a delegation that had marched against the Abbott government. They also wanted to raise issues with me. It was wonderful to meet them. They spoke about their beliefs and what they felt about the government. They have very passionate and strongly-held beliefs—I certainly acknowledge that. They brought up two issues. One was asylum seekers: they felt very deeply about detention centres and the whole way the asylum seeker issue is being dealt with.

Obviously, I think at the end of the day we wanted the same result in the sense that no-one wants detention centres. They would be very happy that we have shut down eight or nine of them already and obviously with our border policies we would hope that there would be none, like there weren't at the end of the Howard government, and that we will be taking refugees from refugee camps throughout the world.

The other issue that they brought up was climate change. They spoke very strongly about the carbon tax. We obviously had to agree to disagree on that one. I spoke about Direct Action and our plans to combat climate change, even though they felt very strongly about the carbon tax. I acknowledge both these wonderful groups in our community who represent different views, as our community has. It was wonderful to hear them and listen to them and acknowledge our meetings in parliament.