Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I use this opportunity of the address-in-reply to highlight some important issues that my area of Redlands has fought for over the last decade, in particular, the acknowledgement that our unique geography and ecology shapes the issues that have focused my population's attention. Over the last three elections, being on the Queensland coast, having Moreton Bay islands off the coast and of course having all the challenges of an outer metropolitan area, you can imagine that the concerns will be primarily around balancing the need for infrastructure and opportunity with preserving our fabulous bayside environment, which is globally unique.

Moreton Bay is a standout area of Ramsar significance with populations of sea turtles, dugongs and migratory birds, not to mention the fishing opportunities. For the last three elections what has been top of the agenda for locals there has been the desire for better health and education services—that is not unfamiliar—and wanting better roads and public transport—that is not unfamiliar either. But, we have had some unique concerns from those who live on our islands—the 7,000 Australians who live on Moreton Bay's islands—including their transport needs to get on and off the islands to work and, of course the right that every South-East Queenslander if not Australian cherishes, the right to be able to wet a line and go fishing without undue government interference. These are the issues that have characterised the last three elections.

We have seen attempts by the previous state Labor government to zone large areas of Moreton Bay on very flimsy evidence. It is a mess that has only now been unpicked by the current LNP government. If there is anyone in this community who cares about the sustainability of fishing areas it is a fisherman, I can assure you. Fishermen know what is going on and see what others are doing. There is a certain support and even peer group pressure around the boat ramps right up and down the Queensland coast. Fishermen have had their rights taken away with the imposition of what are expansive and arbitrary green zones. To highlight just one story, there was a green zone placed down in the southern Moreton Bay area and nobody knew why it was there until we looked at Google Maps. The bureaucrats had obviously seen where the fishing boats were on those maps and they drew little lines around wherever they saw a fishing boat, just in case it was somewhere that might have been a good green zone. We saw investment from the Howard government and now, as a result of this flimsy evidence, future commitments have been made at the state level to garner better evidence about what is sustainable in the biomass of the very delicate ecology in a place like Moreton Bay.

Of course, you cannot live in an area without opportunity and without jobs. You do not want to live in a community where everyone has to leave for work. As is the case with many electorates, nearly half my population has a member of the family jumping in a vehicle or into public transport and leaving the area purely for employment. Providing opportunities in your local area—through employment, promoting population growth and giving people the opportunity to have an education—so that people do not have to leave for substantial periods of their careers is something that everyone who serves in an outer metropolitan seats will have to fight for.

We want to know that we have the best health services in an era when services are centralising to larger tertiary facilities. Increasingly we are seeing a centripetal pressure to bring services at the highest level into just one or two hospitals in cities, and that simply undercuts the political power of local superintendents to keep their staff, and to keep their hospitals well supplied and able to deliver the top-class, world-class care that we know can be achieved but so often is not. Lastly, we have the issue of people movement. We had the impact of the carbon tax and the removal of the diesel rebate. As result of the carbon tax, a full 10 per cent more is being paid by people travelling on and off the islands. The issue was not adequately ventilated but it is a cause of great concern because thousands of people in my electorate live on islands for a variety of reasons but still want to maintain a connection to the real economy. They want to be able to get off those islands when they need to find a job and they want to know that emergency services can get out onto the islands when they are needed as well.

Every one of my six populated islands has a unique characteristic. Of course, North Stradbroke is the most obvious one that comes to mind. I also want to mention Karragarra, Lamb, Macleay, Russell, and Coochiemudlo islands, each of which has their own unique character. History has dealt them a cruel hand, because of what happened in the seventies when these islands were subdivided. It has been joked that we simply dropped a flyscreen on these islands and sold off the blocks with no regard to what was above or below the high tide level, the high watermark. Now we have large populations and relatively low rents, and it is very difficult to sell property. In many cases, the people who most need the services are least able to get them. That will be a long-term challenge for those representing these parts of Moreton Bay. The infrastructure deficit—for instance, none of these islands, which are 8 to 10 kilometres long, are sewered and none of them have adequate public transport facilities on them—creates enormous pressures on these communities and on people who simply want to get to a boat ramp to be able to go and see a doctor or avail themselves of other services that they cannot get on the island.

Lastly, we have the issue of providing a future tertiary facility for this part of South-East Queensland. There is no doubt that we want our universities to be top-class facilities, but we also know increasingly that young families do not want to see their kids drive to the other side of Brisbane just to get basic qualifications on how to service an automobile or how to get a basic trade. If we could keep some sort of critical mass in communities like mine, where young people could finish their grade 10 or their senior qualification without being asked to take three buses and a 1½ hour trip, then surely there must be a public good in that.

Of course, fighting for these priorities is not limited to one side of politics. Both sides of this chamber are going to share these objectives, though they will probably come at them in a different way. Bowman, having been one of those changing-hands seats, has seen some enormous election campaigns over the last three federal elections. In that time, in particular, we have seen huge numbers of volunteers coming out to fight for whatever they believe in. Today I want to acknowledge people who have supported any of the political parties in my area, because they are fighting for what they think is right for the community. Specifically, I want to mention that on our side of politics we rely completely on volunteers—there are no bussed in crowds and there is no-one on union salaries; these are people who give their own time for free because they want better country. To that end, what can you do? All you can do is look after your volunteers as well as you can. I would like to mention a few of them today and then talk about some of their unique contributions during those campaigns.

Bowman was arguably Australia's first electorate to apply an expansive use of highways and byways to run political campaigning even outside of the election cycle. It did not matter whether it was after an election or before an election, people were on the sides of the roads holding signs. This was something that was usually only done by an MP after they had won a seat and they held a little thankyou sign for one morning and then went and had brunch somewhere. In Bowman, what happened three elections ago was that key geographic areas in the electorate became areas where there were rallies—people with signs and handmade messages campaigning for both sides of the political fence. Once one side started doing it, the other was compelled to reciprocate. This drew out people, part of the massive commuter movement into Brisbane every day, to have their political say. That was a major victory in getting people mobilised. People like Peter Read, Judy Ann Zacka, Denis Bowman, Barry and Shay Murphy, Troy Brown, Fred and Gloria Olssen, Mike and Pam Sammut, Judie Hallisee and Maddi Arthurs all who got out and got involved in that kind of activity.

On one side you have the grunt and the brawn, and on the other side you have the technology. We have had to keep up with the increasing use of social media and various forms of telecommunications to reach out to people who normally do not read flyers. One of the ways that this has been done, as we will all remember, was the 2004 'robocalls', where messages were pushed through to thousands of homes around my electorate as one of two or three areas piloted in that election. It caused enormous surprise at the time but has now become routine and commonplace and, if anything, is now being superseded by other technologies, all of which have been pioneered in my seat. Moving from 'robocalls' were 'spidercalls' where, within hours, a voice can be recorded for about 30 seconds and then transmitted to the community, to nominated phone numbers, the following day. This made campaigns much more responsive than had been dreamed of before, when we were predominantly printing off flyers and hoping people plucked them out of their letterboxes and read them. We know that people do not do that and we know that is not a great way to reach locals.

More recently, SMS technology has allowed 'ninja calls' to actually divert from a person's handset and go straight to voicemail. This allows people to listen to a pre-recorded message without being interrupted at the time of that phone call coming in. This new technology is also likely to see more widespread use. Then, pioneered in Bowman also, was the use of a small device that allows us to SMS mobile phone numbers in aggregate and be able to target information according to age, geography and the issue that people care about. So, for the first time, we can see genuinely tailored efforts to reach out to young people with a particular concern, to mothers of a particular age or a particular geography and to older people, who care about different issues entirely, without bothering the rest of the population. A good example of this has been the fishing issue, where a large amount of information has been transmitted using social and SMS communication.

Obviously, Facebook is occupying more and more of the time of everyone in here. I see Facebook being used more widely. I see it sitting on people's screens during question time. I am glad it is still within the standing orders to have a peek at what your constituents are saying while you are in this chamber. We now have a budget set aside to specifically reach out to our constituents using social media. Bowman is the only seat in this place that absolutely rigorously focuses its social media time line on locals. You cannot be on that page unless we verify you as coming from the community. I think that really generates a local conversation. When you feel you can talk with locals, when it is your neighbour or the people down the street or in the neighbouring suburb who are going to be engaging you, it is far different to having a fan page that pulls in the entire nation, where you have trolls coming from all over the place who will often flame your point of view for no good reason other than that that is what they do almost as a full-time profession. So I think keeping it local has made a massive difference. Finally, we have tried to utilise billboard technology more. Again, that is commonplace now but was not five or 10 years ago. For the first time this year, we are actually using solar powered illumination of billboards where billboards were not illuminated.

I also recognise those who worked outside and campaigned: Paul Field, who has been a long-term campaigner and previously a councillor for the Redland area, Leena Brooks, Shaun Edwards, Mark Neville, Paul Branagan, Suzi Foster, Gordon Somes, Peter Johnson, Rod MacDonald, Jess Holzworth and the tireless Ed Barclay, who would pull up in his company ute on his way to work and spend half an hour on the side of the road on those long, four-hour sessions, effectively just standing on a busy, stinking-hot corner, waving to constituents and hoping that one or two of them would pull over and have a chat to you about what they care most about. The other great push was taking a few people into licensed facilities at 10 o'clock at night, doing some non-profit work and having a chance to meet people under the age of 21, who almost never get to meet a politician. Reaching out to those people is absolutely critical if you are going to improve your net preference above zero with an age group that is typically quite sceptical, if not hostile, towards politicians.

I also recognise Luke and Jack Hughes, Ian Stephens, Adrienne Verco, John Colvin, Alan Mikkelsen, Kirsty Heigan, Ed O'Driscoll, Thomas Neville, Matt Herbert, Chris and Cam Leafe—it was Cameron who pioneered the SMS Arduino device, as it is called, imported from the US, that allows high-speed SMS communication to large numbers of people and provides logs of their responses—Peter Lapp, Dan Jarvis, James Jiminez, Bill Dingli, and of course Louise Peters. To them I say: it does not really matter which party you support, but in this great and thriving democracy it is great that Australians can still come out in a seat that matters, fight for what they believe in, and be part of a peaceful democratic process which Australia is proud of.

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