Mal Brough (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to address two subjects tonight. The first one is the very disappointing report that was spoken to today by the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, on Closing the Gap. I think anybody who read that report or heard about it today would be more than disappointed, because the aspirations of our nation unfortunately are not being met. I want to draw the attention of the House to just one issue. We all talk about school attendance and how important it is. We all know that and we all accept that. In any life, black or white, if you do not have an education, you limit your opportunities. In remote communities, you have got to ask yourself why children do not go to school. There are many facets. We all say to our own children: 'Go to school. Get a good education, because it will lead to a job, which will lead to a good, solid, secure outcome for you. You might go into an apprenticeship. You might go on to university. You might go on to TAFE.' But in these remote communities there is an element missing which takes away the purpose for which we get an education—because an education is not a means in itself; it is a means to an end, and the end is to have an employment potential. But, in these communities, they are without an economic base. These remote communities are without an economy. They have no freehold. They have no free enterprise. You can have a community of 3,000 people, as you might have in Wadeye. In a community like that in any typical country town, you would have cafes, you would have motor vehicle repair shops, you would have a myriad of small and micro businesses. But, because of land tenure issues, it does not happen.

The point I want to raise tonight is that this is the elephant in the room. Why would a child go to school and get an education—when they want to live where they have been brought up, on their land, for which they have a great affinity—if there are only a handful of government-sponsored jobs there? Until we acknowledge that, face that and deal with it, we are going to condemn these people to a dream that is beyond their reach. I would ask every member of this place to reflect upon that, to visit these communities, to understand the depth of despair when you do not have a future because there are no jobs within the community in which you choose to live.

I would also like to talk, on a more positive note, about a local issue. The local issue is something that is changing the world. I believe that the Treasurer might have spoken to the cabinet about this issue, according to the papers recently, and it is to do with digitisation. For those who do not know, Uber is a different way of travelling, a different way of moving around. It is but one example. Just to put into context how the world is changing: Uber is where a person with their own car basically operates like a cab driver, but without the licence. It is clean, it is efficient and it works. It is also flexible and it gives people an income. People thought that it would close down the cab industry. From the statistics in America, in individual cities, Uber is now taking three times as much as the entire cab industry. In other words, it is not only disrupting; it is changing the way in which we operate.

On the Sunshine Coast, I and a bunch of businesspeople—Mal Pratt, Tony Riddle and Glenn Ferguson—are working together as a team to create our own start-up organisation. By going to Sydney recently, we met with Fishburners, Telstra and Google, and, with the help of a lot of good people, we are going to give young people an opportunity on the Sunshine Coast to be able to be disrupt in the way that Uber has around the world and perhaps create billion-dollar industries from the Sunshine Coast. This is the future. It is going to change much of the way we do business in Australia and around the world. You can start from nothing, from virtually nowhere, and in no time have turnover in the hundreds of millions of dollars and be affecting the way we do business around the world. But it starts with good people, like the ones I have mentioned, putting their heart, soul, money, effort, experience and life in business to the test, creating something on the Sunshine Coast so people of all ages, young and old, can take their ideas from an embryonic stage into fruition and, in doing so, create the wealth the Sunshine Coast needs and the opportunities the world demands—changing the world from the Sunshine Coast.