Kevin Hogan (Page, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am glad the member for Flynn, who lives near Rockhampton, is here because I am getting to Casino. The Clarence Valley is a wonderful part of the world as well. As I go back further north, we get to the Richmond Valley and come to the beef capital of this country, Casino. The member for Flynn is very jealous of Casino. He is very jealous of Casino for a number of reasons. He is very jealous of the premier cattle in the country we produce. He is very jealous of our meatworks—a wonderful meatworks—which employs over 1,000 people, so that is not to be sneezed at. It is the biggest private employer in our region. He is going to be very jealous of our saleyards too, because one of the projects that I have committed to under one of the Stronger Regions Fund rounds was a redevelopment of the saleyards, the livestock exchange in Casino. A $3½ million dollar investment from the federal government has been matched by the council. That is going to be a wonderful, pre-eminent livestock exchange within the country.

The member has really interrupted me, and it has distracted me, so, while I have gone to that, let us go with the others. There are some other things that we, as a federal government, are looking to deliver for the community in the electorate in that same round of the Stronger Regions Fund. At Ballina there is the marine rescue tower. It has already open, though not officially. The old tower was falling down. The new one is wonderful for the fishing and tourism elements of Ballina. That has been constructed. In Lismore, we are also building the new Lismore Quadrangle, which is going to include a new art gallery. Again, all of these are about job creation and extra commerce. This is going to bring a whole new type of tourist and visitor to the town. That was another commitment we made through the Stronger Regions Fund. Up around Kyogle, at Woodenbong, there is a beautiful dam called Toonumbar Dam. If you come up I will show you where it is, Deputy Speaker. We gave $1 million to reseal the road out there. It is a very popular tourist destination. Then, going back down to the Clarence, which I was talking about earlier, the Harwood sugar mill is a very important employer in the region, and the sugar industry is very important to the lower Clarence. We also gave a commitment there to redevelop and help their logistics.

While I am on that, let us talk about some of the other exciting projects that are going to be happening in my electorate over the next two or three years. First and foremost is one of the biggest regional infrastructure projects in the country, and that is the upgrade of the Pacific Highway. A lot of the remaining sector is south of Ballina, to Woolgoolga. It is about 165 kilometres, and for a lot of that the dual duplication is still to happen. We do the dual duplication for a number of reasons. The first and foremost reason is the decrease in fatalities. The fatalities on the Pacific Highway are now actually at a multidecade low. When you consider the increased traffic that is on that road, that is a wonderful achievement. The achievement has happened because of the dual duplication, and fatalities will fall even further as the section between Woolgoolga and Ballina is finished.

There are some amazing engineering feats as part of this upgrade, including massive rivers to cross, and wetlands and soggy or very soft soils to navigate. At Harwood, which I mentioned earlier—where the sugar mill is—the bridge at the Clarence River is going to look a bit like the gateway bridge. I am sure you have seen that, Deputy Speaker. It is almost a $250 million investment to get over the Clarence River. This is a big engineering feat. At its peak it will probably be employing around 3½ thousand people in that region. That is direct jobs, so when you add in indirect jobs we are talking 6,000 to 7,000 jobs being directly or indirectly created because of that piece of infrastructure. It is going to be wonderful. It is wonderful while it is being built, because of the economic boosts that it brings to our region, and, obviously, post-completion it is going to be great for the economic viability of our region. Transport is going to be much easier, especially for tourism, for example. When the dual duplication got as far south as near Byron Bay, suddenly the tourism influx to our region from Queensland and the Gold Coast exponentiated because people could drive there much more easily. It is going to open up the whole area not just for tourism but for transport and a whole lot of different industries, and there will be a whole lot of benefits from that. It is a very exciting time.

Obviously, like the of rest of the country, I know the NBN is rolling out in 2020. Most of Page will be connected by around this time next year. Wireless has already arrived, which has been a boon to the little villages, but the major centres will be getting fibre-to-the-node in the next 12 to 18 months, which is very exciting.

But there is more to come. With the investments that we make in our region, we are always looking for things that can create jobs and commerce and make our towns more vibrant. There were some very exciting investments that we announced during the campaign and that we will be delivering over the next number of years. There is one at Maclean. Maclean is the Scottish capital of Australia. All the Stobie poles—no, I should not call them 'Stobie poles'; I am giving away my heritage—all the telegraph poles have Scottish tartans on them from the families that settled around the region. It really is a beautiful, picturesque town on the Clarence River, and we are going to give nearly $2 million for the riverside precinct upgrade. That is about turning the town around to face the river again—there are going to be promenades, boardwalks and things where boats can pull in as well, to open that up. It will really help the tourism potential and growth of Maclean and, indeed, the lower Clarence. The old Woolgoolga Surf Life Saving Club is not really up to scratch, so we are going to build a new one, to be built where the marine rescue tower is at Woolgoolga; they will have a new site there. We all know the great work that the Woolgoolga Surf Life Saving Club does, and it is going to be great to deliver on that.

Casino had an old drill hall that was moved there many, many decades ago, and a lot of people who had been preparing to go to war or who were with the Army Reserve or had anything to do with the defence forces had a very emotional attachment to the Casino drill hall. A couple of years ago the defence department decided that the hall was surplus to requirements as it was not being used anymore, and they decided to sell it. Members of the community came to see me and said they thought it was a very important historical and cultural part of the town, and they asked me if they could get the Defence Force not to sell it and to keep it in community hands. It was great to work with the then Minister for Defence and the local council on that. It was a great day when we transferred the ownership of that real estate and that hall to council at a very good price a number of years ago, and now a committee and a group have been formed and we are going to turn the drill hall into a military museum. I also gave some money to redevelop some of the grounds around that with an amphitheatre, and there are some very exciting things happening in what is now going to be a very well-used public space.

There are lots more, and I will not go into them all, but they include upgrades to tennis courts at Wooli. Rushforth Park in Grafton is going to get a bit of an upgrade, as is the Woodburn-Evans Head Golf Club. These are very exciting times for Woodburn and, indeed, Broadwater and Wardell and all those places along the current route of the Pacific Highway, because they are beautiful villages on the Richmond River, but they have the Pacific Highway literally teeming straight through the middle of them. With the upgrade, the highway will not be going through these villages and will be a little bit behind them, so these places will become destination points for tourism. The visitors to these places will be different visitors, but they will still come because of the absolutely picturesque places that these villages are. We also gave some money to the Richmond Valley Council to do some pontoons and stuff at Woodburn. Kyogle has an aquatic centre with a great swimming pool set up, and we have given them some money to upgrade that.

There was also a great tragedy in our community around 10 years ago—in fact, it was 10 years ago late last year—when four young men from our community were all killed in one car crash. They were all in the same car, and all were basically from the Lismore region. Our community has been grieving over that issue and is still grieving, so the 10th anniversary last year was very sad for a lot of the people involved. I do not think there was anyone in the region who did not know the boys or know someone who knew those boys or who was associated with those boys very closely. The family and a group have been trying to develop what is called Southern Cross LADS, a driver training facility just out of Lismore. Some of the rules in New South Wales have actually changed because of that accident. The number of people that learner drivers or P-platers can have in their car after a certain hour at night changed because of this accident, and the number of hours that you have to drive as a P-plater to qualify was increased because of the work done by this group and because of that accident. It was also great to give them some money last year to help with developing the Southern Cross LADS driver training facility that will happen as well.

There will be some money for the Coutts Crossing Cougars Football Club as well, and the Wollongbar multisports facility is going to get $500,000. This is a magnificent sporting development that is happening. We have a new deputy speaker here—if you have not been to the region, Deputy Speaker Goodenough, you will have to come over. Wollongbar-Alstonville Plateau—just inland from Ballina, which is a little bit south of Byron Bay—is a plateau that is very rich in alluvial soil and has wonderful panoramic views. They are building a new sporting facility there that is going to be a regional hub. It was great to commit some money there to build a new clubhouse. There is also the Big River Sailing Club on the Clarence, as well as the Yamba marine rescue.

The last one I would just like to mention is the Oakes Oval redevelopment in Lismore. The Oakes Oval is the premier sporting facility in Lismore. It hosts soccer and cricket. Rugby is played on it, as well as a little bit of rugby league. It is going to be redeveloped so that it can cater for AFL as well, with a bit of an oval extension. There is also going to be a great upgrade of the grandstand area, the facilities and the change-room facilities to make it even more of a premier sporting facility than it already is. Again, the focus of all this is to create more commerce and more economic activity so that our regions thrive and can offer more facilities and experiences for the people who come here.

Lastly, I would like to say a couple of things. I would really like to again acknowledge and thank the community who were so generous as to give me the privilege to be their representative again in this parliament. As I said, every day I am grateful for that. It is a great thing for a community to give someone. As I said, I am a community representative first and a political party member second.

I would also like to thank the team. To do this, obviously you need a lot of support around you, and I had a number of people. I would just like to name a few of them: Albert Enzerick, Andrew Gordon, Peter Carlill, Col Humphries, Deb Newton and Fiona Leviny, who, in their own areas, were leaders for me; they did a lot of work to put a lot of the logistics together. Over in Casino there were people like Stan Gricks, Martin Moloney, David Shay, Judy Humphries, and Fran White, and Col Humphries as well did some magnificent and really hard work for me; he put in a lot of hours. I thank them. In Grafton, Denise and Cec Hyde were fantastic, and I thank them very much. But there were really far too many to name.

I would also, obviously, like to acknowledge and thank my office staff: Peter, and Sheree, Jason and Mark, who did a lot of work as well.

Lastly, whenever you do a role like this and you are a community representative, obviously your family are involved. As someone mentioned, in this role, you are the volunteer and your family are the conscripts. I think, in some ways, that is very true—especially in a regional place. We are very public figures in our regional communities when we play these roles. I know that is so with my own family: my wife, Karen, and my children Bridget, Sean and Rosie. I am very proud of my children. I love my wife very much. Everything we do, we try to do together. We do it as a team. We try to be very supportive of everything that we do, in whatever field it may be. Again, an election campaign is certainly a very time-consuming and a very focused thing that we do. I would like to finish this by saying that I love them very much and I am very thankful for their support. They have encouraged me. My wife, Karen, has encouraged me, and my children have been very supportive, and we have taken this journey together.

I have had a number of careers. I have been a school teacher. I have been a bond trader; I traded a multi-billion-dollar portfolio. I have been an investment officer of a super fund. I have done a number of things; some of them, dare I say, paid a lot more than this role, and some of them would appear a little bit, you know, whatever. But I can honestly say that I have never had such a sense of giving and of appreciation for what I do, because, in this role, we have the great gift, because of people that we know or people that we associate with, that we can help people. One of the great joys that I have had is to be able to help people—not so much necessarily in all the things that I just read out there, but to help them with issues that to them are really important; issues which, in the big scheme of things, may not be significant, but which, to them, are very, very important and which it is very important to them to have help to resolve. I have had the benefit of being able to help people in some of these things, and this role has enabled me to do that, and I am very thankful.

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