Justine Keay (Braddon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I will be saying yes—yes for equality—in the upcoming marriage equality survey and I encourage Braddon electors to do the same. It is important to respect both sides of the debate, which is certainly what I, and I hope others, will do. It is not respectful and it is wrong to conflate marriage equality with other issues and place them on signs, as we have recently seen in the city of Burnie. These signs make wrong and misleading claims and can be hurtful to people in our community. This survey has nothing to do with gender confusion in schools or political correctness. This is a question about marriage and equality—that is it.

But what is also disturbing is that these signs have been illegally placed on public property and power poles, which is an offence in Tasmania that attracts an $8,000 fine for individuals. Those responsible should be ashamed not only of making misleading claims and offending and hurting people but of breaking the law in doing so. I congratulate the Burnie City Council for taking decisive action to remove the illegally placed signs from council land, and I encourage residents who know who illegally placed the signs on Transend power poles to come forward. I encourage both sides to campaign on this survey, but to do so truthfully, respectfully and lawfully.

Talking about signs, I've been amused in recent months by the blue signs in office windows—'Liberals for Regional Australia'—that have popped up around this place. The Liberals are not for regional Australia. Perhaps what they have sniffed is an opportunity to get under the guard of their National Party colleagues. If the National Party was truly a representative for regional Australia, we would've heard from it as one government service after another and one government job after another has been cut from the regions. That has been the case in Tasmania.

Let's look at how Tasmania has been let down. We don't need to look any further than the 2017 budget—not one cent for new infrastructure in regional Tasmania; nothing for the top two infrastructure projects in my region that will grow the economy and grow jobs; nothing for the Cradle Mountain Master Plan, which is the No. 1 infrastructure project for my region and for Tasmania's tourism industry; nothing for the No. 2 priority, which is a shared network of coastal pathways to support small businesses—an active and healthy lifestyle that connects regional towns; and nothing for roads like the Bass Highway, which is a priority for local communities and for road safety in my electorate. This Liberal-National Party coalition government does not stand up for regional Australia. But, then again, no-one knows what it does stand for.