Greg Mirabella (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr President. I begin by acknowledging my predecessor and yours, the Hon. Scott Ryan. There is broad acknowledgement on all sides that both the former Presiding Officers—Senator Ryan and his colleague, the Hon. Tony Smith—deserve plaudits for their service—exemplary presiding officers both and fine Victorians both. Senator Ryan was only the second Victorian to hold your office, after Sir Magnus Cormack from 1971 to 1974.

I am honoured to have been chosen by the Victorian Division of the Liberal Party to represent Victoria in the Senate. I am privileged to stand here today preparing to do my small part, as we all seek to, in shaping a better future for our country and future generations. The perspective I bring to the task of shaping Australia's future is a consequence of the journey that I have taken to reach this chamber today. That journey has been a little longer and more circuitous than most. On the way, I've been a business manager, a teacher, a soldier, an engineer and a farmer. I have worked in offices, on fishing boats and in classrooms, and early in my life I experienced the struggles and challenges of small business. I've been fortunate to have firsthand experience in a broad range of areas that underpin how the world works: food production, infrastructure, technology and defence of the nation. I've also come to know and believe in certain values which I believe are critical both to an individual's pursuit of happiness and to the flourishing of our nation: a love of family, a commitment to service, self-reliance, endeavour and enterprise. I am imbued with these things, and they are fundamental to the perspective I bring to the parliament.

But on this journey no-one comes into this parliament alone. Each of us had a lot of help to get here. So I have a few acknowledgements. Although I can't name you all, I'm grateful to all the Liberal volunteers who give their time and effort and passion; to our rural membership, who do the miles; and to those special people who select and serve on the party's decision-making bodies. Thank you for your trust. I will name a small, dedicated team who played a critical role in getting me here today: Mike Pountney, Sean Armistead, Jack Cook, Ben Zerbe, Amanda and Rohan Millar and James Radford, and, from further afield, John Polack, Andrew Schuller and the best federal director the Liberal Party never had, Gerry Wheeler.

My four children—Emily, Maddy, Alexandra and Kitty—and my mother, Mary, are here today. Sadly, my father, Tim, passed away two weeks before my selection for this position, and he would be most annoyed with himself for not being here today. Of course, I want to acknowledge and praise my wife, Sophie. She was a member of the House of Representatives for 12 years. Her maiden speech was almost 20 years ago to the day. We are the fourth couple to have both served in the federal parliament, but I am the first husband to follow in the footsteps of his wife, and I am beyond proud to be doing so.

Sophie was an extraordinary representative of the electorate of Indi—energetic, passionate and incomparably hardworking. The fruits of her efforts are still fully evident today, although perhaps not sufficiently recognised. The residents of the Albury-Wodonga region drive on the roads and the freeway that she fought to get built. The people of north-east Victoria attend medical facilities that she fought to get funded, and they use sporting and community facilities that she was instrumental in building. Even before she entered parliament, she was able to work with then Prime Minister John Howard to secure hundreds of defence industry jobs in Benalla and across the river, in Mulwala. After she left the parliament, she was instrumental in securing entitlements to hundreds of workers from Bruck Textiles. In office and out of office, she helped a lot of people. She still has my total admiration for both her work ethic and her commitment to the people of Indi.

For Sophie, the 2013 election was bittersweet, with the coalition's return to power coinciding with the loss of her seat. As shadow industry minister prior to that election, Sophie did much to set the direction for the incoming government's approach to industry policy. There has been much written and said about the challenges that women face here in Canberra. Like many strong and vocal women in public life, Sophie has had to endure an unfair share of prejudice and discrimination that men do not. Her political opponents confected public vilification and then exploited it without shame, and some of these were other women.

Sophie never got to deliver a valedictory, and I'm sure these remarks are hardly a good substitute, but the circumstance of her departure from the parliament was absolutely the catalyst for my decision to step into an active role in politics. If in my time here I can achieve a fraction of what she materially achieved, particularly for the people of regional Victoria, I will have done well.

I've said that I've had a few careers. Looking back now on all the things I've been and done, I was most shaped as a soldier—an army engineer, to be precise; a sapper. I can tell you very specifically how I came to be a sapper. When I joined the Army Reserve during university, I trained as an infantryman, but it was during that time that I was fortunate enough to attend a few lectures by our honorary colonel commandant at that time, Sir Edward Dunlop. During these lectures, Weary would talk about his time as a prisoner of war in Singapore and Thailand. He painted a vivid picture of how he and others struggled to run makeshift hospitals to save the lives of their starving and diseased fellow prisoners. He showed us pencil drawings and watercolours made by prisoners at the time, and I recall them clearly. He showed us some of the expedient surgical instruments they devised from bamboo and bone in the jungle in Thailand. During that particular presentation an officer cadet asked him how many lives he thought he'd saved with those instruments, and I remember a portion of his response very well. He said: 'Our medical staff didn't save anywhere near as many lives as the engineers. The engineers did the most amazing things to keep us supplied with fresh water and deal with our waste and build roofs and beds for us. Without the engineers we'd probably all have died of disease and privation.' I was the officer cadet who asked that question, and so he was answering me. These were evocative words, and they made me want to do something useful with my time in the military, so I decided to become an army engineer.

I wasn't studying engineering at the time, but I applied to join the Royal Australian Engineers and so started on a parallel career path. I studied and served, part time and full time, for two decades as a sapper officer. One of the mottos of the engineers is 'Facimus et frangimus'—'We make and we break'. I was fortunate that most of my time as an active sapper was making rather than breaking. I learned how to build structures, roads and bridges. I learned how to purify water, how to prevent disease—the very same things Weary Dunlop talked about. In other words, I learned about all the basic things that a community of people need to live and survive—clean water, shelter and roads—and I've enjoyed my time helping to build that infrastructure for communities here and abroad.

But I'm not just a soldier; I think of myself as a citizen soldier. For more than half my working life, I've worn the flag of my country on my sleeve, but the other half has been spent in civilian clothes. More recently, I've been a farmer. I am a senator for Victoria. I've given myself the additional task of being a champion for regional Victoria. There are more than 21,000 farm businesses in the state, and Victoria has the largest agricultural output of all the states and territories. When I became part of the farming community I discovered that generally farmers are just too busy to advocate for themselves. I know from experience how hard it is to get farmers to stand up in front of a committee or an inquiry or to write a submission. Yet farmers in Victoria are subject to endless new regulations developed by an army of well-paid public servants who assume farmers have plenty of capacity to devote their unpaid time to reviewing and arguing against more and more regulation and to spend more and more time on compliance. It is for this reason that I intend to focus my time in the Senate on championing their issues by working to continue to increase access to health services in rural areas, especially mental health; by fighting for increased investment in rural infrastructure, both road and rail; and through unceasing vigilance on water management.

We are coming to the end of this, the 46th Parliament, which is an odd time to be delivering a first speech to this chamber, but it's also a historic moment to be delivering a first speech, as we approach the end of a difficult but defining two years in the history of our nation. The COVID pandemic has tested many of our institutions, not least the federation itself. It has forced us to consider the extent of our resilience and, some say, even our very sovereignty.

Recent events have reminded us that Australia's strategic situation hasn't changed for 200 years. We are an island nation at the end of a very long maritime supply line. This has critical implications for self-sufficiency, especially in manufacturing, and, of course, security. During these last two years, we've faced shortages of imported goods. This has put our local manufacturing capabilities under the microscope, although empty supermarket shelves are not as critical as shortages of machine or electronic components. To a farmer waiting for a crucial part for a tractor, toilet paper shortages are a mild inconvenience. Our exports, too, have been challenged. China punished our beef and wine trade because of a diplomatic slight. Well, with some difficulty, we've lived with that and found new markets. It remains unclear whether our mutual trade interests with China will prevail over the long term. These imposed interruptions to our trade, incoming and outbound, have exposed the fragility of our supply chains.

I'd like to tell a parable which illustrates the vulnerabilities we must address. We've just had the AdBlue crisis, which threatened to put our trucking fleets off the road. AdBlue is a simple commodity. Most people have never heard of it. It helps reduce harmful emissions from diesel engine exhausts. But what is it? It's just a urea-and-water solution. Urea is not hard to make, but it's one of the many thousands of things that we used to produce but for which there is almost no business case to manufacture locally anymore—until we can't import it, of course. Fortunately, there's a plant in Brisbane that's been able to ramp up its operations to produce urea, but I note that that plant was due to close this year.

The AdBlue incident throws up a number of issues we need to address at a national level. Firstly, the capabilities of our domestic petrochemical industry, both production and storage, are a matter of concern. But we need to look more broadly than that. We need to examine what disruption to globalised supply chains really means for us, whatever the cause.

Urea is made from coal or gas, commodities which were in short supply during this Northern Hemisphere winter—a situation probably exacerbated by all those ships full of Australian coal sitting at anchor in Chinese ports for months. This incident demonstrates the world's reliance on hydrocarbons and coal and how shortages of these commodities still affect most nations at a national level. Consider the European winter energy markets right now. Energy generation is struggling, and the price of Russian gas coming into western Europe has tripled. And, by the way, it is hardly worth asking whether Russia is likely to separate its strategic leverage of military force and supply of gas to Germany.

To start drawing some threads together, here in Australia we need to be examining our national self-reliance. What's the balance between allowing global markets to deliver cheap goods versus critical shortages when supply chains are disrupted? I'd love to see more manufacturing in this country—smart manufacturing. To be able to achieve that we need smart people, great education and training, and capital applied where it's best used. But manufacturing also needs energy—electric energy, cheap and clean energy. It used to be one of our national competitive advantages. Electricity is the single greatest enabler of our modern civilisation to our standard of living. For more than a century we have been burning fossil fuels to generate that energy, and we know we can't keep doing that. Globally we are grappling with a conundrum—a social demand for an accelerated shutdown of coal power and a lack of viable alternatives.

With my farmer's hat on and my engineer's prism, I look at the energy issues, the manufacturing issues and the sovereignty issues, and it's easy to conflate them. Everything connects to everything else. As an engineer, what I've focused on in recent years is how we improve the fundamentals of how we make the world work and how we improve the management of our resources and ecosystems efficiently and cleanly. I'm a farmer. I care for the land and my environment. I look at all the problematic issues: water; clean water; water for agriculture—by the way, even water is becoming a strategic commodity in and between some countries; waste, which is a critical problem everywhere; agriculture; green waste; livestock methane emissions; fertilisers for agriculture; and emissions from industrial processes such as steel production. All these issues are connected. They are connected by the king of elements: carbon. Organic biomass—it's basic chemistry. Reducing atmospheric CO2 is what we want to achieve, but the term 'decarbonising' doesn't actually make sense to a chemist.

The solutions to all our challenges start with energy. The first consideration is that there is a limit to how much intermittent energy we should be putting into our grid. Germany is a salutatory lesson here—a high level of intermittent generation and the most unstable grid with the most expensive electricity in Europe, mainly because of expensive Russian gas from peaking plants. It's worth pointing out, by the way, that households only consume about 20 per cent of all the electricity we generate. The rest goes to commercial and industrial use. For all the rooftop solar we've installed, we still need a lot of spinning base load.

The Prime Minister has said that the path to cleaner energy is in technology, not taxes. I agree. I am a proponent of hydrogen and ammonia as the fuels of the future. We need to be able to produce hydrogen in large quantities cleanly. To make ammonia, you've actually got to make hydrogen first. I believe we will still be relying on biomass, including coal, for some time. But I also believe the future is not burning it; we will be chemically reforming biomass and methane into hydrogen and into ammonia, as already happens. When we work out how to do it while capturing the CO2, we'll be producing clean hydrogen at such a scale that we can put it straight into turbines and make electricity—lots of it—cheaply. It will be a new gas industry, and it will use only a fraction of the biomass we currently burn and will solve a lot of our waste problems at the same time. Is this a fantasy? I don't believe so. Current waste to energy systems are already evolving down this path. Time does not permit me to say as much as I'd like here, particularly to the sceptics, but I will say this: whichever country wins the race to large-scale, clean hydrogen production will win an economic bonanza and will lead the world to a better future. I intend it to be Australia.

I want to make a comment about the 'Voices of' candidates set to contest the federal election. Why do I mention this here? Because these Voices candidates cite lack of action on climate change as their major platform. They say they're independents who aren't really a political party. Really? They look and sound like one. They even have a senate candidate preaching the need for transparency in politics, while denying scrutiny of themselves. I share the concern of many about a hung federal election result. These Voices candidates are very well schooled in avoiding answering the question as to who they would support to form government, but there is, of course, no doubt. They are all contesting only against coalition members. The notion that any of them would support the coalition is absurd. They are, therefore, the voices for Labor.

I am gravely concerned at how a Labor-Greens-Voices coalition would accelerate climate action, ban coal and shut down more base-load generation. This country is already at the point where we do not need more intermittent generation. I've already referred to Germany. Is that the nirvana where these Voices people might take us: to a fragile grid, unaffordable energy and blackouts? Australians most definitely don't want that.

Australia has the resources to become a leader in hydrogen energy, and in so doing we will at once be enabling cheaper energy, more manufacturing and greater self-reliance. If we can reap this harvest, we will improve our ability to better fund education, health and aged care. But to achieve this we really need to knock down a few silos and recast some of the business of government. Trade, energy, industry and security are interdependent in this context. It is a first-order challenge for the future: better applying policy and public funds to address our sovereign self-sufficiency in ways which actually contribute to prosperity.

On my final theme of security, defence and foreign policy, I will confine my comments. First, in regard to the manner in which we equip the ADF, I know firsthand how lengthy and convoluted our acquisition processes are. We must improve them. Changes in technology are occurring at 21st century speed, but our decision processes still seem stuck in the last century. Several months ago, the government announced the choice of new artillery equipment. That's great, but I recollect that project, Land 17, was entered into the defence capability program during my time working in force development in 2005—that was nearly 17 years ago.

The defence minister is rightly taking a more rigorous approach to this problem, and I applaud him. He was right to recognise a bad decision on our new submarines. He is also right to project an increased defence budget for coming years. We cannot provide credible protection to our maritime supply lines and our region if we don't.

As an additional note about the role of the ADF, in recent times we've seen the ADF employed on civil defence tasks with the recent horror summer bushfires and support to COVID operations being cases in point. As a citizen soldier, I support this. There's been discussion in recent days about whether the ADF is a standby workforce. No, it isn't. The mission of the ADF is to protect Australia and its interests and, to me personally, that mission absolutely includes civil defence operations.

As a soldier, I've commanded army support to bushfire operations under the defence aid to the civil community system. I once watched people in a town not far from where I live now who had been surrounded by fires for weeks come out into the street and cheer and cry when the big green trucks rolled through, towing bulldozers and carrying 100 sappers with chainsaws. I have never felt so proud of wearing my uniform as I did that day when these people told me that they knew that now everything was going to be alright. The Prime Minister knew of their plight and he sent them. We weren't a backup workforce; we were soldiers. We were there to protect them and their homes, and we did. I support any measures to equip and prepare elements of the ADF to provide this kind of support for the future as a matter of course. On a final note on defence matters, and certainly not of least importance, I intend to do what I can to better support veterans. We need to do a lot better than we've done in recent years.

To draw to a conclusion, I've already laboured the point that events of the last two years have shone the spotlight on a range of issues that go to the heart of Australia's wellbeing. I've drawn the thread: self-reliance, energy, manufacturing, security. One of the most important lessons that I have learned in my various careers is that lessons are too often not well learned, especially at a bureaucratic and political level. The bushfire inquiries are an outstanding example. Defence equipment acquisitions are another. Pandemic lessons need to be not just learned but embedded and protected—the health lessons and the economic and social lessons.

This is a time when we need to be striving to make sure that we do not forget the lessons of today. This is a time when we need to be making considered and informed decisions about Australia's ability to prosper as a free and self-determining nation. I want my four beautiful daughters to inherit a nation and a world which is in better shape than my generation found it. I hope to bring my particular perspectives to bear on policy and public debate to help achieve this. It's the farmer's job to feed the nation, it's the engineer's job to build all that makes it work and it's the soldier's job to protect the people. It does not occur to me for a moment that these do not remain my tasks, even as I serve from this place. Thank you, Mr President.