Dick Adams (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a great pleasure to take this opportunity to speak in the address-in-reply debate and to thank the people of Lyons for re-electing me for the sixth time and again putting their trust in me. It is always an honour and a humbling feeling when you are re-elected. I feel that they have renewed my contract again and I am very grateful to be here and to be a part of a government. I started my political career here as part of the Keating government and I am pleased to be back now. There is a great deal that I want to do and that I was able to get pledged from the party during the last election campaign. I look forward to that. I will address some of those things later in this address.

We needed a fresh start, and the Labor government with Kevin Rudd at the helm will give us the opportunity to build back Australia’s reputation as a lucky and also a tolerant country. The opening of parliament this time actually meant something. I am pleased that we are at last recognising the rightful place of the Indigenous people of Australia.

It is not going to be easy, with the economies around us suffering pretty turbulent times at this period in history. We are looking at how we can ease the pressure on mortgages and on those people that are affected by rising bank interest rates. We are considering other models of housing tenures and housing design to deal with one of the big issues facing us at the moment. I believe there are many opportunities to refigure how we think about housing. We can certainly help people much more, and technology has helped us to some degree. We need to help our states in that task with innovation and ideas. I am sure we can do that.

The big issue of climate change is one that we need to deal with, and that is firmly on the agenda. There was an exciting development the other day in my electorate with drying coal—not that I have that much coal in my electorate. There is a small coalmine with about 100 employees, the only coalmine in Tasmania.

At the Beaconsfield goldmine, which is also in my electorate and which people will remember from the tragedy we had and the long rescue of two miners, there is a shaft being used for a technique to dry Victorian brown coal, which is a very damp coal. They believe that they can take 30 to 40 per cent of the moisture out of that, which changes the whole emission trading argument and helps in that area enormously. I understand that the Victorian coal is very similar to the coal in India, so there are opportunities to use this technology and in exporting coal from Victoria, which I think has never happened before. So those opportunities exist, along with lots more on climate change. I am looking forward to the debate on the forest industry, which I believe will come into its own in that regard.

Dealing with the ever-increasing petrol prices is difficult, but we now have the Petrol Commissioner on the deck and I understand that the price watch will be in place towards the end of this year.

Health is another area that desperately needs an overhaul. There is a perception that we are tied to old ways of dealing with sickness, but I believe that new technologies can take us in new directions. We need to take some responsibility for our own health and we need to make sure that that message goes out. We need to sell prevention and wellness, and we need to put some money into that area. We saw the minister answering questions today about binge drinking, how that is a health issue and how we need to make changes in taxes in that area. I feel technology means that we should have people’s medical histories on a memory stick that we carry around our neck or on our car keys. The fact that we have not solved that one is a bit of an indictment of the industry and the professions involved. If somebody gets taken into hospital and there is no access to the history from the GP’s computer, it is really a problem that all the tests and scans have to be done straightaway again rather than use electronic records. We are a long way behind where we should be in that sort of thinking.

We are moving that way and we need to move away from the simplistic stuff of going to the doctor and getting a handful of pills, and we need to get away from some of the queues in our hospitals. We have to be brave enough to do that and we have to be brave enough to take on something new and something different. There are many choices these days and we have to open our minds, make some choices and opt for directions about the future. I think we are going to do that and some of us will endeavour to help push in that direction.

In the past few years we have dedicated time to finding some of the answers on drought and helping develop better and more sustainable water systems. I have done some work on our committees, and it has been pretty frustrating effort in some regards. I would like to pay tribute to Professor Peter Cullen, a founding member of the Wentworth group. Peter came to the parliament on many occasions and I met him at committee hearings when he gave evidence to us and also during meetings on water in different parts of the country. As we all do, with people moving around this country at airports, we would exchange half an hour of discussion about relevant topics, especially water. I believe Peter understood the land in Australia very well and he knew and was concerned for farming communities. He knew that their concerns did not have to be in conflict with ecological concerns.

I was very sorry to hear that he passed away recently. He will be sorely missed in the debates and discussions, as will his input. Despite his science background, he had the knack of being able to get his message across very simply and succinctly to people with non-science backgrounds. I think he understood the relationships between the land and water—that is, water storage and the problems of preserving water and recycling water—and how to come up with new ideas to help our very dry continent, especially in times of drought. He also believed in keeping farming communities sustainable in Australia by working hard to find new ways and new directions. I send my condolences to his family. He will be remembered very fondly by all of us here in parliament who knew him.

My agenda in Tasmania will include some of these water issues, such as trying to ensure that our water is used efficiently and sensibly and also that many of the small towns in my electorate finally receive good supplies of drinking water. In this day and age, access to drinking water should be a priority, and I believe that the state government in Tasmania is now moving towards providing that. To have a well-managed supply, it recently set up through legislation three bodies to take control of water and sewerage in our regions. That will of course also help people to develop skills and keep skilled people in the water industry, and possibly we have been lacking the level of professionalism and skills to keep up that infrastructure. Of course, the people making decisions to spend money on infrastructure in local government areas want to make sure that infrastructure can meet the current needs and the future needs of those areas. In my electorate, where we have finally got private investment, we do not have the infrastructure and that delays things by two or three years, which means that you could possibly lose some of that tourism investment money that comes along.

We need to ensure that irrigation and water management in other areas is affordable and sustainable so that we can be more innovative in land management and farming production. In the area in which I grew up, the Cressy area, we hope to run a pipeline from Poatina as far as Oaklands. This, I am sure, is going to open up the area to much more production and more opportunities. With the pressure on the Murray-Darling region, which produces over 55 per cent of the fruit and vegetables of Australia, I think other areas of Australia have a great opportunity to take over some of that role, because I do not believe that that region will be able to continue to do what it has done in the past. And the state government is on board with that. We have about $240 million from the state and federal governments to put in this infrastructure, which will give us great opportunities.

Another pledge from the Hobart region, coming out into the electorate of Lyons—

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

As I was saying, there will be great opportunities in my electorate if we can get right some of the water and irrigation programs and make sure we use water and land in a very sustainable way. I pointed out some grey water initiatives coming out of the bottom end of my electorate from the city of Clarence, which is part of the city of Greater Hobart, and from the Coal River Valley, where we have grey water going to seed production and irrigation dripped onto the stone fruit orchards. That is a great way of utilising that grey water, and it is a more productive use of it than if it were put into the Derwent River. But using water better means that we have to look at farming practices in a whole new way. We have to help farmers who want to make the changes and want to continue on the land with research and funding so that we can continue to provide the food and fibre for our country.

Australia has always been innovative, and we have some of the best farmers in the world. But, when one gets hit by the sorts of cyclical changes that prevent people from carrying out their traditional land use, we need to help them change and go in different directions. A lot of them want to do that and they need help to do it. We have to look for solutions and new ways to solve these old problems. There are a lot of opportunities. A lot of people have done some work, and I am sure we in the good electorate of Lyons are going to do more. It will be a part of our role in government to make sure that these people have the tools and the resources to make those changes. I am sure the new Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, Minister Burke, is going to assist and lead us in that way.

I think Jeff Kennett had the right approach—and it is not often that I would quote him or agree with him. I see him occasionally in Tasmania now that he is President of the Hawthorn Football Club, and they play a lot of their AFL games in Launceston. In commenting on Ticki Fullerton’s book Watershed, on the politics in the history of water and what we should really be concentrating on, he said:

It’s not just about making sure you have water flows down rivers that have to be changed. It’s all embracing. It’s about rainfall, it’s about collection, its about storage, it’s about distribution, it’s about pricing, it’s about recycling, it’s about avoiding waste, evaporation, seepage. It’s about money, capital investment. But as much as about capital investments, it’s about people’s understanding to better utilize what we’ve already got.

I cannot think of a better way of putting it. We have to take on board that there is not just one simple answer—there is not a silver bullet that can solve all these problems. There are a lot of fundamental changes to our land use and our water practices that we have to get into.

I would also like to thank a lot of people involved in my campaign who helped me enormously: my campaign manager, Peter Kearney, and his wife Di; my good friend Tom Greenwood, who came down from Queensland for the duration of the campaign and whose only thanks was to get a speeding ticket; John Pym from Sydney, who became quite an expert at reading the betting tips—and, of course, I was always in front on the bookies so I knew I was okay. There is no better reader of the numbers than the bookmakers. I want to thank Richard Bolst and his wife, Sheryl, for putting up with some very difficult requests at times; Jock Chalmers for continuing to renew my image in the advertising stakes and working through all those issues; and my staff, who had to get on with all the other work while I was out shaking hands—in the north, Ian Gabites, Eve Lewis and Leeann Loosmore and, in the south, Deb Carnes, Jess Dallas and Lauren Browning. All of them kept the office functioning as the constituents’ queries continued. Those queries did not go away just because there was an election. People still needed to be dealt with. Without these friends and work colleagues life would be very much harder.

To my stepson J.J., John James, who was not around to drive me around this election, as he was in other parts of the world: I missed you, mate. To my partner, Dee, who I could not operate without: thank you very much. To my daughter, Kellie: thank you for your support and love. My grand-daughter Esther, who had not long had a birthday, was able to turn ‘Happy Birthday’ into ‘happy election day’. That was by waving a Kevin 07 flag most of the night. That was a lovely occasion. I congratulate my new parliamentary colleagues, and I wish them all the best: Julie Collins and Jodie Campbell and Catryna Bilyk in the Senate. Of course, my good friend Sid Sidebottom is back where he belongs, in the seat of Braddon. I am sure that they will be here for the long haul.

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