Glenn Sterle (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last Saturday evening I had the pleasure of attending a very special celebration in Perth. It was the 30th anniversary of KEYS: The Moving Solution's operations in Western Australia—and may I put on the record that Nick D'Adamo, the managing director, and his lovely wife have been personal friends of my wife and I for 45 years. I'm happy to have seen a family business flourish as it has.

Nick came to me as a young 20-year-old and started in the transport industry. His background was as a mechanic. Nick came on as my co-driver, my offsider, running through the Pilbara and the Kimberley in an old cab-over 1418 with no air-conditioning. Nick then bought his own truck and became a very successful operator as an owner-driver. He then branched other with other dear friends Matt and June Gill and took over Keys Brothers Removals and turned it from a little outfit that was going nowhere into a very successful transport and removal business. Good on you, Nick and Janine and Matt and June. Well done!

I'd like to place on record my congratulations not only to the D'Adamos and the Gills but to the entire team at KEYS for their professionalism and dedication to the WA community. To this day, there are still a few of the old drivers left who we were drivers together with at Ridgeway, and it's great to see the old faces.

Trust me when I say that working as a removalist is hard work. I know. That's how I got my start in the transport industry. Professional removal companies know that their role isn't just about moving goods and possessions from one residence to another, whether around the corner or around the globe; it's about helping individuals and families start anew and embrace new opportunities. A removal company that is truly professional, as KEYS is, knows the degree of trust placed in them by people at what can be a very stressful time. That's what makes the team at KEYS so special: they make sure that any move is as smooth and as stress-free as possible.

Congratulations to everyone at KEYS in WA on reaching that special 30th anniversary milestone, and let's hope there may be many more decades of success ahead. To show the respect that KEYS and the team have, there were not only the employees, the teams and owner-drivers but also, importantly, clients and past employees of theirs. It was truly a family evening. Well done, Nick. Well done, Matt. As I said, may there be many, many more.

I want to turn now to a different subject. It would be remiss of me to not spend a couple of minutes talking about what happened in WA a couple of weekends ago. I'd like to congratulate my good friend Roger Cook, the Premier of Western Australia, on his superb election result on 8 March. Roger's win is the ultimate proof that good and decent people can succeed in politics. Roger and his team won a third consecutive four-year term in a landslide, making WA Labor the first party to win a third term in Western Australia since 1989. The third consecutive landslide victory since winning government in 2017 is truly remarkable and is due to Roger's dedication to our community and his bold vision for our state, the great state of Western Australia.

WA Labor now holds 46 seats in the Legislative Assembly, compared to the seven seats won by the WA Liberals and the six won by the National Party. We have 46; the coalition has 13. The seven seats that the Liberals now hold mean that they can reclaim the official opposition status. Personally, I'm struggling to work out who is the bigger electoral asset for WA Labor: the new leader of the opposition, Basil Zempilas, or the former leader of the Nationals, Shane Love. Mr Zempilas has already said that his election to the Liberal Party leadership is a reset. Surely, the first priority for Mr Zempilas and his ragtag team must be to address the WA Liberals' disastrous candidate selection. Make no mistake: the WA division is still in the grip of the religious right. You only have to look at their candidate selection in Albany—not to say anything about the Kimberley one who was disendorsed. The WA election result was a resounding endorsement of our Premier, Roger Cook, and his powerful vision for our state.