Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

When I'm out talking to people in my community on an ordinary day—not a day when they come to my office, when they're filled with passion or it's the worst day of their life, but an ordinary day when they're just going about their normal life—they say to me quite commonly now that they feel a lack of power. They see decisions being made about their cities—about new buildings going up, traffic issues and a whole stack of things happening around them—and they don't feel they have any control over that anymore. It's like a loss of power. They also talk about how the city itself doesn't work the way it used to. They can walk through the city, from home to the train station, and not see a single person they know. They feel a lack of connection, and they seek that connection again. It's almost as if the city itself has passed its use-by date. They're looking for something else, and they're not getting leadership from government—either federal, state or local—and they don't really know what to do about it.

We are at a time of rapid change at the moment. We really are in the middle of an age change, where the way we did things as societies is profoundly changing, and in many ways we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater. We were, for a time, a place where people lived and worked in the same suburbs. Economies of scale was essentially the way that business prospered. And the economies of scale meant that we built big factories and big organisations in our communities, so we lived and worked in the same suburb as our parents and the kids we went to school with, and that created a sort of social cohesion. So we knew each other. Then the economies of scale grew far too big and made communities their customers and not their workers, and we started to lose that connection that kept us together. We lost full-time work. The baby that we threw out with the bathwater is actually the cohesion—the cohesion that came because we lived and worked in the same suburb, and we lived and worked for the same company for most of our lives. That created that cohesion that made our communities far more effective and supportive than they are now. It also created a flow of information and common understandings and views. So we were better decision-makers back then.

Now we find our communities talking about a lack of power and a lack of cohesion, walking through cities where they know nobody, spending an hour and a half to two hours in traffic every day—so, again, they're not spending that time with family or friends. We really have a lot of work to do to start satisfying our communities and to re-create that cohesion that makes cities worth living in, because it is the human interaction that makes a place worth living in. We see our government, particularly our state government, investing a lot of money in Parramatta at the moment on laneways and alleyways so that people can physically move through their cities. But there's very little attention at all from any level of government on re-establishing the flows of information and the relationship infrastructure that makes our cities worth living in.

But there are answers that our community can work on. When I'm out there, people are talking to me about the things that they want changed. They want their city to work on biodiversity. They want to be better at renewables. They want to be better at transport. They want to work on biodiversity. They want more affordable, secure housing. They want to build the local economy. All of these are the sorts of things that people talk to me about. There are things that we can do as a community right now, because many of the answers that we're looking for are actually out there right now. So if you care about those things—people in my community, I'm talking to you directly now: if you care about biodiversity, local food, housing, jobs for young people, or any of the things that you talk to me about, I'm asking you to email me so that we can start putting together people who share the same concerns.

There are answers out there, and there are answers around the world. We are not the only community in a city that's trying to work out how to be good at being a city now that the structures that cities were based on originally—which are those economies of scale—have disappeared. There are cities all over the world that are trying to work out what you do about public transport, how to re-create a five-minute city so you don't spend an hour and a half travelling to work, how you reconnect to people, how you support young families, and how you bring young people into the city economy. People all over the world are working on those things. It's time, really, for us to get together and share our—

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

Sitting suspended from 17 : 08 to 17 : 53

I want to talk directly to my community now about what we can do to solve some of the challenges that face us as a city. When I'm out talking to my community I find that they're ahead, sometimes a decade ahead, of government in terms of what they want. They want action on recycling, waste reduction, biodiversity, heat sink remediation, transport solutions, housing—all the sorts of things they're not getting leadership on from the government. Business isn't stepping up to solve those issues either, essentially because business and customers can't see each other. I want to run through a few things that I think we can do something about. For people out there in my community who want to participate in this, who want to get stuck into seeing what we can do over the next couple of years, please send me an email, and we'll see if we can get together in the new year.

I want to start with waste reduction and recycling. If I'm in a room and I talk about community composting, usually two or three people will say they want to do it, and yet we don't do it in Parramatta. While we have a 10c recycling scheme, bottles are not being collected in the CBD. Most businesses are telling me that they're putting their PE2 bottles and glass bottles into general waste, and they're going into landfill. We know there's much more we can do. We've tended to privatise our waste collection, so the money goes into big trucks and tip fees when it actually should be going into jobs and smaller-scale locally based recycling.

So we've got a lot to do there. We also have the issue of biodiversity. Again, I know many people in my community who would love to see us play our role in the preservation of Australia's biodiversity. Strangely enough, our cities were built in some of the most fertile places in the world. They were built around good water sources, and in their day they were probably some of our most biodiverse communities. Yet we've let them degrade. You can't have the sugar glider colony up in North Parramatta unless you have insects that fly through, and they come from our gardens. We used to have native cherries in the Cumberland Plain, and no-one's been able to figure out how to propagate one recently, because they grow parasitically between two different kinds of eucalypts. If someone out there can figure out how to do it, we would love to see those come back. From what I can see, Parramatta City Council doesn't have a footpath plantings policy. So we've got a lot of work to do as a community if we really want to start building our biodiversity again and re-establishing the wonderful plant and animal life of the Cumberland Plain.

And heat sink remediation is something we know we have to do. In Western Sydney we suffer incredibly hot days, much hotter than the rest of Sydney, and we really must do something about it. There are two Western Sydney streets that are one kilometre apart, but last summer Galloway Street in North Parramatta experienced five days of temperatures above 40 degrees while Daking Street, which is a short walk further north, had 13 days above 40 degrees. In fact, Daking is the hottest street in the City of Parramatta, and the difference is trees. About 30 per cent of Galloway Street is covered by trees, while Daking Street has only 10 per cent cover. So trees can make a difference, as can the colour of surfaces and a whole range of other things that we know we can do because the science is out there on this.

So, if anyone wants to be involved in any of those things—waste reduction, recycling, biodiversity, heat sink remediation or even greater sharing in the sharing economy of second-hand, reused and fighting for the right to repair, as our Bower is in Parramatta—please send us an email and we'll see if we can get together in the early year and see what we can do.

I also want to talk to my community about transport. We're in the geographic centre of Sydney, but many of us spend one to two hours a day travelling to and from work. At Wentworthville station, when I'm standing there, people tell me they leave home to get to the station before seven o'clock, because if you arrive at the station after seven you can't get a parking space. So they drive two or three kilometres to the station and park, leave their kids and go to the city at least an hour earlier than they otherwise would. We also have people now leaving home an hour earlier than they used to. I know a person who was telling me that they used to be able to leave home at 7.15 to get into the city in time for work and now they have to leave home at 6.15. And we already have traffic jams on and off the freeway at 6.30 in the morning because people are starting to travel earlier in order to avoid the traffic because peak hour is now lasting several hours instead of the short time it used to, decades ago. This means people aren't spending time with their families. It means they're going into the city and going to the gym there, rather than using the local gym where they know local people, and they're not getting home in time to have dinner with their families.

So not only are individuals losing precious time and spending it doing something that is useless to anybody but also people are losing that capacity to mix, associate and form connections before and after work with their friends and their neighbours or with their family. It's a very serious matter. But, again, you can already see the answers starting to emerge. If you really start looking around you can see the beginnings of the answers. So how about—just as an idea—we see if we can find groups of people who have common problems. Let's see if we can find even 20 people who live in that medium-density area on Parramatta Road who go to Wentworthville station before 7 am and have a second car only because they drive to the station. That's the only reason they have one; otherwise, they wouldn't. There'd be somewhere between $5,000 and $7,000 in savings if they didn't have that car in order to go to the station. Let's see if we can get groups of people to sit down and see if we can work out other answers.

You can already see Uber beginning to start work on booking group cars. You can actually see those solutions beginning to emerge. Anybody from my Sri Lankan and Indian community who comes from a remote village will tell you they've been doing it with school taxis for years. They've had groups of parents who get together and book taxis or 12-seater buses between them. You can see groups of people further west who have hired buses between them, and the bus comes and picks them up in the morning and takes them into the city in the bus lane. We have bus on demand up in some of the new areas of Rouse Hill. There are also electric bikes. There are answers to this—a whole range of answers, if you start looking at small groups of people to find answers. So let's see what we can come up with. I spoke to someone in the transport industry about this, recently, and they said, 'But you can't scale it.' I'm going to make this point: not everything scales up. A lot of the solutions that communities have actually scale out. Hairdressers didn't scale up; they scaled out.

There are a lot of things that we do in our communities—services that are provided within our communities by small business and microbusinesses, in some cases—that did not scale into big companies, because they're based on human relationships and human relationships have a natural size. So let's see what we can do here. Let's see if we can create some little jobs for people. Let's see if we can create a bit of work for people who would welcome the opportunity to do a couple of hours every morning, five days a week, and take away cost and inconvenience for a range of people. Let's see what we can come up with. On that matter, let's see if we can find ways to work from home. Let's see if we can get some gigabit speeds. I know a couple of businesses that have paid a lot of money to get it. Let's see if we can create some spaces where people can do their work, two days a week or one day a week, without going into town. Let's reduce the number of people who need to do it. Let's just get on with it and see what we can work out.

Similarly, I'd like to talk about affordable and secure housing. The median property price over the last year ran at about $1 million for a house in Parramatta and $600,000 for units. It's out of range for the vast majority of people in Parramatta. And it's certainly beyond the capacity of anyone graduating from university now with a debt. It's completely out of range. But, again, around the world, there are a lot of different models—land trusts, cooperative housing, movable housing, all sorts of options—out there. We have at the University of Western Sydney a woman called Louise—Dr Louise—who's one of the world's experts in this. So we have the knowledge about how to do it in our community. It's not necessarily looking for something that will work for everyone, that will solve a housing crisis or an issue for a million people, but seeing if we can solve it for some. Let's see how many ways we can look at this. How many ways are there to put housing together so that it is affordable?

I'll point out that there was a cooperative housing project in Annandale recently. It was about 65 units. They sold 10 on the commercial market for about $600,000 each, but the co-op owners got them for $110,000 a unit. It's a one-bedroom funky unit in Annandale, the city fringe, for $110,000. It is actually doable. There are countries in the world where co-op housing is up to 60 per cent of housing. Let's see what we can work out. Again, if any of the people in my community are interested in that, send me an email. Let's get a group of us together and see what we can come up with.

There's also a lot of work to be done in developing industries in Western Sydney. I'm quite fascinated myself with the whole idea of 'agribis'. We know that the big agricultural companies now are seriously looking at vertical farms in our cities. We have, by the way, in most cities, about 13 parking spaces for each car. We know that as we start moving towards shared cars and driverless cars we won't be using those car parks, nor will we necessarily be using those high-rise office buildings, because the nature of work will change. So we know that big agribis is looking seriously at how they move into cities to avoid some of their freight costs.

I live in a place with the most diverse community in the country. My Kenyan community thinks we're nutty because we've just discovered kale whereas they've grown it for millennia. They can't believe what we do with it, but they've been eating it for millennia. We have African heirloom vegetables that are grown in our backyards. We have a market for methi, baby fenugreek, which you can buy in shops everywhere. We have an incredible range of Asian vegetables as well.

We shouldn't be waiting for big agribis to come in and decide they're going to move their large farms into Parramatta. We should start developing our own. Already, some of the big hydroponics companies that manufacture hydroponic equipment are starting to understand that smaller units in cities, close to where the market is, are better for fresh greens, for example. Anyone who knows what fresh greens are like if you grow them yourself will know that they last two or three weeks in the fridge, but if you buy them at a big supermarket you are lucky to get a day. So there are real advantages. If you are interested in this, I urge you to get in touch and we will get stuck into it in the new year.

Rick Wilson (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We will suspend for a short period as a quorum has been called for in the House of Representatives.

Sitting suspended from 18:05 to 18:09

Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to talk directly to my community again about things we can do in our local community that will help us be better at being a city. I know there are a lot of people in my city who are unhappy with some of the changes that they're seeing. I know there are a whole stack of people—like me, for example—who see the kids riding their bicycles with the food delivery on their back. While we like getting food delivered, we're not really prepared to have food delivered in a system that rips off the drivers, so I've spoken to a few people and said, 'Why can't we, as a community, get together and try and work out whether we can develop a cooperative food delivery service that actually works with local restaurants?' Those things are locally based; it's not one of those services where you have to zip off to, say, Penrith. Delivery is based within the Parramatta region, so it's actually possible for us to do what other countries are calling 'online to offline' and change our online systems back to a local focus. That's just one example of the things we can do.

We can also start talking to each other about the shortage of NDIS services in Parramatta and whether we, as a community, can start working together to build the skill base and the businesses that operate locally and serve the local community, and then either scale up or scale out, as so many businesses do. For people who want to work with our community on developing local projects, we have a great need to improve our capacity to do it. I've been talking to a number of people recently about impact investing and the opportunity to tap into a completely new source of funds to achieve things in the community which provide a benefit to third parties. They either reduce cost to someone or improve revenue for someone else, so the system in which you're working isn't closed, but there is an overall benefit. The system is called impact investing. It was originally created by a guy called Les Hemm who worked for Tony Blair several years ago. The G8 had a task force for a number of years. There's an impact investing task force within the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. Most Western countries are doing it. The G20 has a task force. There's literally about $500 billion in funds around the world looking for projects.

It's an incredibly interesting source of new funds. The government tried it with the Try, Test and Learn Fund—their $120 million fund that was aimed at reducing long-term welfare costs. My understanding is that the government hasn't spent that yet, even though it should have been well and truly spent by now. This is essentially money chasing really good ideas that help communities function better—again, quite often for the benefit of other taxpayers. So, if you're one of those people who would like to get involved in how that works and become an expert, call my office, because we can do some forums on it. There are very good organisations in Australia, including a peak body that knows this system very well. It's not hard to get your head around the concept; it is quite hard to get your head around how it works. So, if you're interested, get in touch. I'd love to do some forums on it next year, and you could even help me do it. There's lots of stuff we can do as a community, and we really can't wait for government because, quite frankly, they're 10 years behind. So let's just get on with it and get done what we can, and hopefully the government will catch up eventually.

Terri Butler (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for the Environment and Water) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It's been a very strange day here in the Australian parliament, of course. We've seen the really unedifying spectacle of a Prime Minister coming into the chamber to say that he will not be taking any action in relation to a minister with a criminal investigation hanging over his head. I think that most Australians would be quite gobsmacked that the Prime Minister—who is responsible for ministerial standards—is taking this quite remarkable step of saying: 'Nothing to see here. There might be a New South Wales police strike force—Strike Force Garrad—investigating this minister, but I'm just going to take no action whatsoever.' I think that's weak, and I think it's a real indictment of this government. There are a couple of things I think you need to have in order to be Prime Minister: you've got to have guts and you've got to have principles. And this Prime Minister has just demonstrated that he has neither. So it's an odd day to be standing up to give a speech in the address-in-reply debate, because, traditionally, the address-in-reply debate is an opportunity to reflect on the election and the term ahead. Here we are, six months or so into the term, and Australians are rightly looking at this government and saying: 'Well, what do you stand for? If you don't stand for integrity, if you don't stand for upholding standards, what actually does this government stand for?'

It's fair to say, particularly at the moment, given some of the very concerning and serious weather we've been facing and some of the stresses in our communities that we've been facing, that Australians are worried and they're looking for leadership. The droughts and the bushfires we've recently experienced have left communities reeling. Australians from the bush to the city are anxious about what those conditions mean for the future, especially given the widespread acknowledgement that climate change will mean the severity and frequency of wild weather will increase. And that's not just my view. If you read the drought coordinator's report that the government recently released quite belatedly—the drought coordinator's report was provided to them several months ago, but they released it only a couple of weeks ago—the drought coordinator talks squarely about the importance of climate change in the changing patterns of weather and in the increased severity and frequency of drought in Australia. And that's one of the reasons why he says that we need to have a national drought strategy. It's not just ad hoc announcements from the Commonwealth. He lays out a very clear road map for putting together a drought strategy. Our side of politics has been reaching out to the government to say, 'Let's get together, let's work across the parliament—bipartisan, non-partisan, get together people from the crossbench as well—to work on how we can come up with a national drought strategy based on the very solid grounding that the drought coordinator has provided.'

After years of neglect under the Liberals and Nationals, it's very clear that serious environmental damage is now threatening our unique, Australian way of life. Environmental destruction, from the bush to the beach and beyond, is putting hundreds of thousands of jobs at risk—in tourism, in agriculture and in natural resources. And Australians will not stand by and watch while the koala, the platypus and other species are put at risk. We won't let the reef be devastated. We won't let our rivers dry up or our oceans fill with plastic pollution without a fight.

I'm sure, Deputy Speaker Gillespie, like so many Australians, you've been watching with concern the plight of the koalas in the bushfire season we've just had. Today, of course, we've had the very sad news that Lewis—the koala that became famous because he was saved by a woman who took off her shirt, ran into a fire and wrapped him up to get him out safely—has died from the injuries that he suffered in that bushfire. Of course that's one animal of one species in one location, but Australians are seeing this as emblematic of concerns that we have about animal life, biodiversity and the environment.

Labor will stand shoulder to shoulder with our fellow Australians to save our precious natural environment and our Australian way of life, just like we did when facing the great environmental challenges of the past. Labor will always put science and on-the-ground local knowledge at the heart of decision-making. I will return to some of the issues in my portfolio shortly, but first I'd like to make some remarks about my electorate and my constituents.

Representing the south side is a very great honour, and it's also a very great pleasure. It's a wonderful electorate that I have in Griffith. It's a beautiful place along the river in Brisbane. It has some of the country's best icons like the Gabba, the Story Bridge and the South Bank. It has amazing restaurants, amazing culture and, most importantly, amazing people. And I'm so grateful that my community re-elected me in May this year. Working hard for my community is a privilege, and I feel the weight of that privilege every single day. I will continue to be a strong voice for the south side.

Locally, the community faces a range of issues: overdevelopment, traffic congestion, the pressures on public transport, the pressures on bicycle infrastructure—the need for all of those things that can make our city work better. They're all related. Also related is the increasing pressure on schools, on local parks and on local health services by the increasing population density in my electorate of Griffith. I want to call on the government right now, in developing the South East Queensland City Deal, to make sure that these issues—which really are posing serious challenges to the lifestyles of people living in the inner south—are taken into account.

In a similar vein, I want to talk about the Bulimba Barracks. In a way it's an overdevelopment question, because there's been a fight about what should happen with the land, but it's also a question about whether the government is paying enough attention to our area. There've been some deeply concerning issues that have emerged at the Bulimba Barracks. The barracks has a proud history in our community. It represents service, it represents honour and it stands as a living memory of the sacrifice that Australians from far and wide have made for our great country, but, instead of treating this site with the reverence it deserves, the government has been very slow to respond to findings of contamination—including PFAS. As people would know, the federal government has been working on the sale of the barracks for its entire time in office. The site has now been sold to overseas developers, and the sale will be settled in five or six months time. Our local southside Labor team—me, state MP Di Farmer, local councillor Kara Cook and former councillor Shayne Sutton—fought the federal government's approach to this site from the start, demanding a fair go and also a real say for our community. From the moment it went on the chopping block, we fought tooth and nail, side by side with our community, to get a master plan for the site, because without one this sale would have led to terrible outcomes for the community. It's a peninsula area. The roads in and out are already congested. It's really important that there isn't rampant overdevelopment on the site. We got the master plan, which will mean less of a development footprint and less of a traffic burden, but we've had an ongoing struggle to get the government to face up to the contamination issues at the site. Those issues were reported to the government more than a year ago, in August 2018, but it seems to have taken no remedial action since that time—one of the ministers confirmed as much in a letter to me recently—and nor is there any real indication that the government will take any action between now and when the sale is settled in five or six months time.

As I said, PFAS is present on the barracks site. It's a chemical capable of causing cancer, according to many jurisdictions around the world. It's been found to be present on a lot of Defence sites around Australia. The former Prime Minister announced a package of measures to, allegedly, investigate it and clean it up. There's no evidence that that's been done in our community at the barracks site. It's a disgrace. It's been reported that up to 40,000 people are joining a class action in Australia against PFAS contamination, spearheaded by Erin Brockovich—I'm sure you remember the movie, Deputy Speaker. In relation to the contamination that's been found on this particular site, about 200 of the site's neighbours in Bulimba have signed my online petition, calling on the government to rectify the contaminants on the site. The government has sat on its hands, despite my calls for some action in relation to PFAS. It's outrageous to think that the federal government can abrogate its responsibility to ensure a proper and thorough clean-up of a site that has been contaminated over generations, particularly when there is potential for run-off from the site, from the contaminants on the land. Also, the government's own documents are telling it that there are contaminants sitting in sediment in stormwater drains that run to the Brisbane River. It's just not good enough.

Speaking of things not being good enough, I want to mention the government's neglect of another Defence related property: the former Red Cross Hall, a property owned by the Commonwealth, which is right across the road from a veterans' hospital, Greenslopes Private Hospital—

David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

A quorum has been called in the House, for those of you on quorum duty. I think we will have to suspend, if you have to leave.

Sitting suspended from 18:23 to 18:31

It being 6.31 pm, the debate is interrupted in accordance with standing order 192B. The debate is adjourned and resumption of the debate will be made an order of day for the next sitting.