Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I listened with interest to Senator Murray’s very careful and erudite presentation, as most of his contributions are. But I have one comment in relation to his last comment: I wish. The thought that a Labor staffer writing in a paper would suggest that a Labor government would do as he suggests is pretty well contrary to the experience we have seen with federal Labor governments. Indeed, Senator Murray, if you look around any of the states at the moment you will see some appointments to judicial office which are only made because of the question of who is known and not what is known. My state of Queensland has provided some fairly good and high-profile examples of how the Queensland government has appointed members of the magistracy more, it would seem, because of their membership or association with the Labor Party than for their judicial merit. History has shown that their judicial merit is not always particularly useful.

Today in my presentation to this debate on matters of public interest I want to reflect on what a wonderful place Australia is. One of the great things about going overseas is that you always have a better appreciation of Australia when you come back home. Our country is a wealthy country with a magnificent people, if I might use that term. The geography and the scenery—the natural attributes of this country—leave most other continents of the world behind. Look around this country. We have magnificent beaches, forests, snowfields, harbours, rivers and inland parts of Australia. It is a magnificent country. It is so wealthy. Our people are perhaps our greatest wealth, but there is a lot of natural wealth here and a lot of wealth that has come from the land. What we have produced in ideas and in things that have been manufactured over our history have shown that Australia is really a great place to be and a very lucky country.

But it is a sad fact—and I am not sure what can be done about this—that there really are two major classes of Australians. There are Australians who live in areas of this country where they have access to everything—to hospitals, taxis, trains, lawyers, decent roads, theatre, sporting events, cultural activities; anything that a person living in this modern world might want is available to some Australians. There are the other Australians who do not have the same sort of access to the amenities of life. Of course, the divide is between those Australians who live in the capital cities and perhaps even some of the major provincial cities and those who live in country Australia distantly removed from those capital or major provincial cities.

As one who lives in a country town in Australia, I do not know that I would want to change my position at all. In the many times I am forced to go to Sydney, I love the bustle and the hustle and love having a look at the harbour, but I would hate to live there. The traffic getting to and from work would simply drive me crazy. But there are many amenities that country people do without simply because of the geography of the nation. It is something that I think governments have to strive to address. It is always going to be difficult to address politically, because the mere numbers require that in the capital cities where there are lots of people you get lots of members of parliament who want to do the very best for their own people and they are the people who make up governments. People not in the major centres of population do not have the same voice in state or federal parliaments as those in the more populated areas. That means that it is difficult for parliamentarians who represent the more remote parts of the country to get their message across.

Having been in this parliament in the time of the previous Labor government and under our government, it is quite clear that our government has paid a lot more attention to people in the country and has tried to be fairer with the way that the largesse and benefits of this nation have been divided. In the Labor days, of course, it simply went to the majority in the capital cities. Not only did Labor do things which suited the capital cities but they were very quick to take away benefits or wealth from country areas because it did not really affect the city people but it gave them a good feeling.

An example that springs to mind in relation to that particular matter is the ‘environmental’ legislation that former Senator Richardson, the then minister for the environment in the Hawke and Keating governments, brought in about the harvesting of native forests. There were—and Senator McLucas will remember this—people in many towns in Far North Queensland, up where Senator McLucas comes from, who were simply thrown out of work at the time not for any sensible environmental reason but simply because it gave people in the cities a good feeling to say, ‘Look, we’re saving the rainforests,’ although they had never seen them.

Rainforests had been logged for over 100 years but people in the cities thought they were pristine rainforests and they had to be saved. It did not matter about all the jobs in country Australia that were thrown overboard. It did not matter about the communities that were almost devastated by that and are only now, 20 years later, starting to recover. The Labor people in the city did not understand that you could have a sustainable forestry industry in these areas and you could have tourism—and that indeed happened. I remember going back in those days to the little town of Ravenshoe, which Senator McLucas would know well.