Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Whatever it is, I am pleased. As you know, Madam Deputy Speaker, this job has its ups and downs. We are all privileged to represent the areas we know and love. It warms my heart to see new colleagues from far and wide sitting in this chamber with me, including the member for Dobell, who has returned to this place. I am particularly honoured to be joined by the new members for Eden-Monaro, Corio, Maribyrnong and Isaacs. Equally, I welcome other new members to this place, and I welcome the return of my good friend Senator Jacinta Collins to the Senate yesterday and the imminent addition of my longstanding friend David Feeney, who won the third place in the Victorian Senate vote.

Mike Kelly, the new member for Eden-Monaro, is a former head of army legal and a full colonel and holds a PhD in international law. As he has already demonstrated, he will be an adornment to this place as parliamentary secretary to the honourable member for Hunter. Richard Marles, the former assistant secretary of the ACTU—an institution that has campaigned tirelessly against laws that until so recently those opposite seemed to be doing an hourly volte-face on—is as bright and decent a person as you will meet and the people of Geelong are very lucky to have him as their representative. I am sure he will go on to great things in this place.

Bill Shorten, the President of the Victorian Branch of the ALP and formerly state and national secretary of this country’s oldest union, the AWU, is known by many not just for his years of standing up for workers all over Australia but particularly for his role and that of his union amidst the Beaconsfield mining disaster. Bill’s incredible role during that disaster was a surprise to some people. It was no surprise to me as someone who has known him since he was at university. He is currently in the role of Parliamentary Secretary for Disabilities and Children’s Services and I am sure that great future roles await him.

Mark Dreyfus not only is a brilliant Queen’s Counsel but a more capable person I do not think you could meet, particularly to chair the House Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs. He will also have an extremely bright future in this place.

Senator Jacinta Collins, who served in the Senate from 1995 to 2005, has returned once more to ably serve the people of Victoria. Jacinta is the former national industrial officer of the union whose members I proudly serve, the great Shop, Distributive and Allied Employee’s Union, or SDA for short, and was most recently in her Senate term the shadow minister for children and youth.

David Feeney, the Assistant National Secretary of the ALP and former Victorian state secretary, enters the Senate on 1 July also as a senator for Victoria. David is a tremendously talented individual and will no doubt contribute to debate in the other place with his trademark wit and encyclopaedic knowledge. Like all of those I have mentioned, David is a measure of the wealth of talent we have in the Labor Party, not least in Victoria. We were blessed at the election with a wonderful team of people contesting seats in both the House and the Senate.

Just as this house is enriched by the addition of such talented and passionate parliamentarians, it is poorer for the loss of my good friend the member for Swan, Kim Wilkie. A tireless servant of the people of Swan, Kim could be seen most mornings here after a bike ride effortlessly carting his bike around the corridors of this house. He was one of the finest and hardest working individuals I have known in this place and he served with distinction on parliamentary committees, including the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties. I wish him well for the future. It is the nature of politics, particularly with respect to legislative elections, that someone wins them and unfortunately someone does not. Many good people from all sides of politics are no longer in this place or will soon leave. I thank them, whatever their affiliation, for their contributions to this great institution and service to this country.

On an unambiguously happy note, I have recently notched up my own special achievement, which coincidentally took place in the first 100 days of the government. I married my partner of more than a decade, the delightful Amanda Mendes Da Costa, several hundred metres from where I stand, on Sunday, 24 February. This gave Amanda and me the tremendous joy of not just formally recognising our union but doing so in a traditional Jewish ceremony in the hallowed halls of our parliament. This happy event served as a powerful reminder, if I ever needed one, that this nation has given me and my forebears so much. Think of the immeasurably stark contrast between a state that actively persecutes you because of your family and because of who you are and what you believe in, and a state that welcomes and encourages diversity, a state whose parliament you proudly serve and where the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister, cabinet ministers, colleagues, friends and family can celebrate your union and identity in parliament. This is one of the many reasons why I can say without a shadow of a doubt that I will never be short of reasons why I am proud to be an Australian.

I was first elected to this place a decade ago. The expression is, ‘Time flies when you are having fun.’ I can only say that I have relished the challenges and opportunities of representing such a diverse, rewarding and engaging electorate over this period. In my maiden speech, I spoke of Melbourne Ports being an electorate where some people struggled to find their next meal while others almost next door struggled to make their next million. It remains much the same today, with probably even stronger contrasts.

I, for one, welcomed the Prime Minister’s injunction, incumbent upon Labor MPs upon the election of this government, that they should visit the less fortunate in their communities, particularly homeless centres. Around the corner from my office, in Grey Street, is the Sacred Heart Mission, an organisation that I have had a great deal of involvement with during my time as the member for Melbourne Ports. The mission and its saintly staff—I would describe them that way—tirelessly cater for an ever-increasing number of needy locals while a street away you will find cavernous, beautiful Victorian mansions reflective of this disparity. The mission itself caters, on Boxing Day, for some 600 people in their dining room so that people who are in less fortunate circumstances eat something healthy—in fact, have something to eat at all—on that day.

Most of us have thankfully moved on from the old era of class warfare; however, I firmly believe that we should not allow entire sections of the community to fall by the wayside in a time of ever-increasing, visible prosperity. We should not punish those amongst us who have been blessed with opportunity and those of us who have worked hard to attain a lifestyle of our choosing. We should, however, ensure that this remains an egalitarian society—a land of opportunity whose shores have become renowned for that egalitarianism. I commend the Prime Minister for his timely focus on this issue, after many years of coalition indifference.

It is not always the case that there are opportunities in our society, with a growing gap between rich and poor. Housing affordability is a growing concern to millions of Australians, whether they are in a nuclear family or not. Anyone who is working hard to pay off their own home and own their slice of the increasingly expensive Australian dream knows full well that the ‘she’ll be right’ mentality of the Howard government—they were the greatest friends of inflation, as the Treasurer said today—which derided inflation and the growing pressure on interest rates as a mere fantasy, affects most of us in one way or another. Most of us in this place—indeed, many people of the average age of most parliamentarians—have been hit less hard than some. But all of us know someone who has been affected by the dramatic increases in the average price of houses, not to mention the Peter Pan-like Never-Never Land low interest rate promises of the former Prime Minister. I do not need to be told of the political value of flying the flag on this issue; I have two children who will be faced with this issue in the not-too-distant future, as will countless young Australians. Many of the things that we do in this place have little impact on the world at large, but thankfully many do. I hope in this 42nd Parliament we will be able to do our best to improve the affordability of housing. I am confident that the first budget of the Rudd government brought down yesterday will help achieve that aim.

To be able to continue in government in this role of advancing the interests of all your constituents is of particular satisfaction, especially for those of us who have only known opposition during our elected lives. In the long years of opposition we adhered to the core values of our party and protected the interests of working families, something we will strive to do in government. The coalition, by contrast, seem determined to eat their young and their middle-aged. If the member for Wentworth succeeds in his preparation of his Nelson hors d’oeuvres—accompanied by a fine glass of Henschke, no doubt—it will be a doubly auspicious 2008. Let them continue to abandon their policies that they claim to be essential to this nation. Not only did they spend hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers’ hard-earned money on their own misguided social experiments, they disowned a core belief the moment it was tested, re-embraced it and then disowned it once more.

One wonders what other conservative fixtures will become non-core—not least the Leader of the Opposition, particularly after the member for Wentworth recently repeatedly ruled out ruling out a leadership challenge—quite a mouthful! While those opposite continue to bicker, and the figures who used to ridicule the Labor Party for its own soul searching at times treat the parliament with contempt, it is time that we wondered about the future of the member for Higgins. It is a shame that his genuine desire to lead did not lead him, first, to have the guts to challenge for the leadership of his own party, then face an election and put his cards on the table—something both the member for Bennelong and the member for Griffith had the character and determination to do. Instead, as he and his colleagues busy themselves with anything from reading job ads to playing golf, we will get on with the business of delivering better and greater opportunities for ordinary Australians.

On the issue of the most expensive and short-lived social experiment in the history of the Commonwealth, the Frankenstein-like Work Choices legislation: anecdotes about this legislation are too familiar for any fan of Yes, Prime Minister to make use of. We could do a lot of point-scoring on this issue but, despite the views of the current Deputy Leader of the Opposition, I am sure the plans for such legislation will not rise from the dead. Those opposite failed in their scare campaign targeting unions and many of my parliamentary colleagues as something akin to ‘Reds under the beds’. It is very funny to think of Richard Marles and Bill Shorten in that context.

The Liberal Party spent obscene amounts of this nation’s treasure on advertising, pushed by their national secretariat and road-tested by Crosby Textor. They did this, in itself a repugnant thing. The money that all of us gave to government as part of the social contract to which we all subscribe they spent on flogging a dead horse—plainly scandalous. The Work Choices legislation tore fairness and flexibility from workers, ensured bargaining power was not remotely even but was vested predominantly in employers and, strangely for an item on a Tory to-do list, created an army of bureaucrats, agencies and regulators. This was the towering Everest of legislative farce. Had it been more farcical, it would have deserved a place in Monty Python’s repertoire alongside the dead parrot sketch. As we move forward with fairness and consign AWAs to the dustbin of history, we take great satisfaction knowing that ordinary people will be all the more secure in planning their working futures.

One of the enduring challenges of this country and indeed of all countries in the years ahead is the threat of climate change. In his first official act as Prime Minister, the member for Griffith demonstrated the commitment of this government to take decisive action and show leadership in combating climate change. Ratification of the Kyoto protocol was an essential first step in bringing Australia into line with the scientific consensus, as well as that of the broader international community, that this is something that needs to be seriously combated. Australia may well have been meeting its Kyoto commitments, but these were uniquely generous targets negotiated by the previous government as a kind of sovereign equivalent of a get-out-of-jail card—apologies to Parker Brothers, Madam Deputy Speaker, but that is the way it was. Yes, we got a good deal, but at what price? We obtained a short-term benefit by squandering the opportunity to use our resources and our good offices to deal with this problem at the earliest opportunity, making it all the harder for our children to tackle the problem. There must be no more environmental window-dressing in place of real action to tackle climate change.

I have no doubt that it will be difficult for us to do our part—this time, to genuinely carry our weight in reducing emissions. President Kennedy said, speaking of the space program, ‘We do these things not because they are easy; we do these things because they are hard.’ Essentially, things which are easy to do would have been done, and many things which are tough are all the more worth while for being so. There would be no debate if there had always been a broad consensus in the political and diplomatic arenas on the clear problems in this area and a clear solution.

This has also forced Australia to show leadership in this area. Australia enjoys close ties with nations which, like the Howard government, eschewed the Kyoto framework, as well as with developing countries who understandably have qualms over the impact that dramatic cuts in emissions would have on their expanding, energy-hungry economies. The former have concerns over the cost of emission cuts and insist that the latter, not least in consideration of the current size of emissions and projected increases thereof, should not be exempt. The latter type of countries maintain, understandably, that it is unfair that they should forgo the essential elixirs of the Industrial Revolution and fossil fuels, and they look askance at agreements that do not include several of the world’s richest and most polluting countries. This is understandable but, at the same time, is a potential catch 22 that affects us all.

Agreement must be reached and soon. It is simply not feasible to continue along an exponentially increasing emissions path. Whatever gratitude we have to the inventor of the internal combustion engine, we cannot continue down this path. There needs to be a balance struck between the environment and economic enfranchisement of the billions of the world’s poor. If you live in the Ganges Delta and have been lifted out of poverty, no amount of money is going to be of any use to you if you and several millions of your neighbours find yourselves up the proverbial creek without a paddle.

Climate change and the issues that surround it are the most common issues that my constituents express concerns over. I receive emails and letters on a daily basis demonstrating the degree of concern within the community. I have spoken on this issue of climate change repeatedly during my parliamentary career, including before it was fashionable to do so. If I am ever fashionable, it is usually fashionably late. We will continue to show leadership at home on this issue and we will continue to work at building a consensus abroad. Again in my view it is a no-brainer. We can stick our heads in the sand, hope the issue will go away and pretend it will not affect us. We will probably be long gone by the time the 2050 emission targets are realised, but my children will be around, as will many of our younger constituents and the children and grandchildren of others. We have no choice other than to confront this issue head on if we want our country and our planet to remain as livable as we would have them be. It is a moral, political and economic imperative and one the Australian Labor Party is fully seized of.

I commend this government to the House and I am especially proud of some of the challenges that I outlined at the beginning of my remarks that were outlined in the budget, particularly as they affect the good citizens of Melbourne Ports.

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