Rowan Ramsey's recent appearances (OpenAustralia.org)
Nuclear Energy Select Committee; Report | Committees | House debates
I will take the interjection, because when we were in government we tried to get this beyond judicial review, but those in the Labor Party and those on the crossbenches of the Senate who knew not...
I will take the interjection, because when we were in government we tried to get this beyond judicial review, but those in the Labor Party and those on the crossbenches of the Senate who knew not what they were talking about refused that position. It's worth noting, member for Moreton, that the department contacted this Indigenous group 180 times to inform them of what was going on and could get no response. They then went to court and said, 'We haven't been consulted.' How pathetic— Mr Perrett interjecting— It was your opposition that did not allow it to pass through the Senate as we intended. Port Augusta has been visited by the member for Fairfax. I met with the representatives of the Port Augusta Council and residents on a number of occasions. Will Shackel bought the Nuclear for Australia travelling roadshow to Port Augusta, and the panel of experts included 2023 Miss America Grace Stanke. She was very warmly received. That panel was very warmly received. Last year, I sent out a flier. I told the people of Port Augusta that as part of the coalition's plans there would be an industrial precinct that would be able to access electricity directly from the power station—not going through the transmission grid and upping the price by more than 50 per cent—the cheapest, cleanest and most reliable form of electricity available in Australia. There would be a flocking of industrial invest into any community that hosted these facilities. With all that information, no wonder we're getting a good result in Port Augusta. When I put out this flyer, I didn't get much response, I have to say. It went to every citizen in Port Augusta, and I rang up a mate to make sure that Australia Post had done the right thing. I said, 'Did you get a flyer from me in the post?' He said, 'Yeah, yeah, the nuclear thing?' I said: 'Yeah. What do you reckon? I haven't had any negative feedback.' He said: 'No. That's because everyone I know reckons it's a bloody good idea and you should get on with it.' That sums it up, I think. Government policies are strangling Australian industry at the moment. We need a change. (Time expired)
I'm pleased that the chair of this committee has joined us in the chamber. He won't like what I'm going to say, but I'm disappointed with the negativity and with the committee comments—that...
I'm pleased that the chair of this committee has joined us in the chamber. He won't like what I'm going to say, but I'm disappointed with the negativity and with the committee comments—that is, the majority of the committee, which was made up entirely of government members—in the interim report. It is curious and depressing how government members form a different view to the rest of the G20 nations. I was just listening to the member for Swan speaking about community license, and it would come as a disappointment to her just how much the community is accepting the view—particularly young Australians—that we need to find a different way to net zero because the pathway we are on is costing us business, wealth and investment all around Australia. The government's net zero by 2025 plan, with impossibly shorter-term targets, target that destination with a renewables-only pathway. Quite frankly, only zealots believe this is close to possible without an alternative to coal baseload generation. The world is choosing nuclear in the mix. Let me go to the South Australian experience. I'm a South Australian. We're very lucky in this parliament—as I've said on many occasions—that we've had South Australia on this electricity pathway for some time. They are the canary in the coalmine. South Australia has a 75 per cent renewable network, and we should say: 'Wahey! That's a really good outcome!' It is better than the next mainland state in Australia by double. South Australia has doubled the amount of renewable electricity put into the grid from the next state. But it's not the only thing we excel at; we have a 50 per cent higher retail price then the next state. The price of electricity is 50 per cent higher in South Australia than it is in New South Wales, and Victoria has a very similar rate. It's like that old saying: 'South Australia is the driest state on the driest continent.' In this particular case, South Australia has the highest electricity price in a country that has some of the highest electricity prices in the world. No wonder our businesses and our industries are struggling. As a matter of proof on this, I use my own build. I'm very happy to do so. I went back recently and pulled out some accounts from just after the election of the Albanese government—from July 2022. My electricity was 28 cents per kilowatt hour. My latest bill is 42! I don't know what the member for Hunter is like with his maths, but I can tell you that's a 50 per cent increase. It's 50 per cent higher now than it was three years ago, and it's bound to get worse, because Victoria is shutting down its coal-fired power stations—it may not be, actually; it's looking for an extension on Loy Yang at the moment—and that's where South Australia is getting it backup from. When the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine—we've heard it all before—that's where South Australia gets its power from. There is an investment in batteries around at the moment, but we know, and this is an important thing for people to understand, that the cost of renewable energy is in the firming. When you begin the journey of firming, it is cheap. It costs virtually nothing. Going from zero to a position of 20 per cent renewable—you just plug into the power station. The coal-fired power station comes in, the gas comes in, and they back it up. It doesn't cost anything. When you get to 50, it starts to hurt. It was the lowering of cost when energy was abundant that closed down the coal-fired power station in Port Augusta. A power station that used to be able to sell energy at a profit all of the time became a power station that could sell energy at a profit only some of the time. In fact, that place could run at a profit for fewer than 70 days a year, but it had to operate all the time. In the end, it became a liability. They closed it down, and the price of our power spiked in South Australia quite dramatically. It has not come down since. My bill that I was telling you about has had a 50 per cent increase in the last three years. I was at a fish processor in Port Lincoln quite recently, and they shared their electricity bills with me. Despite the fact they'd covered the roof with solar panels, they'd had more than a 50 per cent increase. They use bucketloads of electricity because they have giant freezers there to chill and freeze the fish. I haven't spoken to them, but I bet they're very excited about the $150 rebate that came through the budget yesterday! They'd be even less excited, even marginally, about the scrapping of the instant asset tax write-offs. The problem with renewables is this cost of firming. When this committee was established, I criticised it's narrow scope in a speech. It was then, and it remains, a lynch mob—a platform for antinuclear zealots that was always intended to find the government's renewable-only policies were the best pathway, despite clear evidence from many people in the inquiry. I haven't had the opportunity to read every page yet, but I can certainly find evidence of disputing opinion. One of the sections in this report calls for social licence, and the committee went to every site that the coalition has nominated as a possible site for nuclear generation. I think the member for Hunter would've been disappointed with the protest crowd at Port Augusta when he got there. They weren't exactly manning the barricades out there with their placards, were they? There were a couple of people who were opposed who gave evidence; I can report that they were left over from an earlier nuclear war about the siting of the National Radioactive Waste Management Facility, where one of the sites suggested was the Flinders Ranges. Despite the fact that they live nowhere near Port Augusta, they came down for the hearing on that particular issue. It shows the government's complete fear of anything that looks like nuclear. We had a community in Australia—Kimba, my hometown—that had stuck its hand up to host the National Radioactive Waste Management Facility and was keen to do so, with more than 62 per cent of the population in favour of it. It had been through both houses of the parliament, and then, when an Indigenous organisation raised an objection—an objection that would, in fact, have been easily overruled—the government ran for cover. Here we are now, three years later— and we still have no answer for where the waste— from Lucas Heights is going to go when that facility is full. ARPANSA has warned that it will be full in some sections by 2029. This government has no plan.
Budget | Constituency Statements | House debates
We had a budget last night, and I am reminded of Maggie Thatcher's famous words: The trouble with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money. It's quite clear that this...
We had a budget last night, and I am reminded of Maggie Thatcher's famous words: The trouble with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money. It's quite clear that this government has run out of other people's money, otherwise why would we be having a $27 billion deficit this year? A division having been called in the House of Representatives— Sitting suspended from 09:36 to 09:46 There is $42 billion next year, $35 billion the year after, then $37 billion and $36 billion—in fact, by 2029, the Australian government will owe $1,233,000,000,000. I didn't have a stutter then; it's a thousand, thousand million dollars. In this budget, they're throwing money around like drunken sailors, buying votes from every squeaky wheel in the pack. There's an extension to the electricity rebate. The Treasurer himself said that electricity prices are coming down. Well, if they're coming down, why on earth do we have to subsidise them? A $5 tax cut in 15 months time will go a long way! This is in a time when, over the last three years, we've had an eight per cent fall in living standards in Australia, which is by far the greatest fall in the OECD. I saw a graph the other day, and the next country down that line has had just over a two per cent fall in living standards. Australia has had a 10 per cent fall. Instructively, Greece tops the bill with an almost 10 per cent increase in living standards, because they were forced to take tough measures with their budget some years ago during the financial crisis. They're reaping the dividends today. It will be good for students to have their HECS debts lowered, but that's $16 billion and it's off budget. The principle of an off-budget expenditure is that a government has an asset to sell. What are they going to sell—their students? I'm pleased to see money in the budget for the Whyalla steelmaking works, but it's off budget. The government are giving a company money, but the government has nothing to sell. It should not be off budget. This is smoke and mirrors. I'll remind you of the housing future fund. The government borrowed $10 billion and put it in the bank. It reaps the interest and somehow thinks that's creating wealth. Across Australia, we've lost businesses which are struggling. We've lost the $20,000 instant tax write-off. When I look at country areas, there is nothing for the childcare deserts. There are three days of subsidised child care for all Australians except for where you don't have a childcare centre, which is around 40 per cent of my electorate. There is nothing for the Local Roads and Community Infrastructure Program or the Stronger Regions Fund. But there is something: I was wrong last week when I said there are 37,000 new public servants in Canberra; there are 41,000.
Early Childhood Education and Care (Three Day Guarantee) Bill 2025; Second Reading | Bills | House debates
In June 2024 the Mitchell Institute, based in Victoria, did a survey of child care around Australia. I'm not happy to report that my electorate of Grey was declared the biggest childcare desert...
In June 2024 the Mitchell Institute, based in Victoria, did a survey of child care around Australia. I'm not happy to report that my electorate of Grey was declared the biggest childcare desert in Australia. That's not a title that I gladly received. It identified that, for every available space of child care in Grey, there were three children under the age of five. It's a three-to-one ratio. We are desperately short. It is holding my communities back in so many ways, not just for locals but for businesses that want to employ skilled workers. We have a skilled worker shortage. They want to employ workers from Australia, even from across the world. You do the job interview: 'Oh, great. Yes, we would be very pleased to move to your town, but my partner is a nurse'—or they might be a teacher, a welder, or a shearer. Who knows—'so where do we drop the kids off?' 'Sorry, there's no child care in this town.' 'What are we meant to do? What do the locals do?' They utilise the grandparents. They utilize their mums, dads and uncles, who are, in many cases, getting run into the ground with this child-minding service. I know grandparents who travel hundreds of kilometres a week to babysit their grandchildren. It's not as if they begrudge their time with their grandchildren, but, as you move on in years, it shouldn't be your job to be the first-line carer because your family needs to get back to work for all kinds of reasons. We talk about housing crises and things in this place. You see why people want a two-income family. So many people want to keep their skills up, whatever they are. For the people who come in from outside, it is an absolute barrier. My own home town has just lost its doctor for exactly this reason—no child care. It really is a multilayered effect. The government is here speaking about improving child care for a section of the community but not for all of the community. Last year I had our shadow minister for child care, Angie Bell, in the electorate. We toured widely through Eyre Peninsula, through the mid north and Yorke Peninsula and ran into a common complaint, that we just don't have enough, or any, local child care. My advice to these groups, where they aren't organised, is to get organised, to get the numbers together and make the case so that, when the opportunity comes up, hopefully in not too long a period, we can actually put the case forward to try to get you over the line. We have a problem here. The national childcare system is built around subsidies. You provide the service, the subsidy is attached to the client and the money is made available to the childcare centre for the number of clients they have. I think it probably works okay where you have a big enough base. But the evidence is on the board that, if you've got a population of, let's say, 4,000, there is simply not an economic model for a private provider. You will not get a private provider to come in and build the infrastructure and then operate it, because they know they won't break even, even with the significant subsidies that sit within the system at the moment. There's a case to be made in some of those centres that are around the 4,000 mark that, if some capital were provided, that may open the space for a private provider to come in. But, of course, the further you go down the population curve the less and less that becomes viable, which leaves only local councils. I don't blame them for not wanting to take up childcare centres. Roads, rates and rubbish, and then you tack on all the other things that local councils are meant to do at the moment, including, in some cases, aged care—it really isn't a core role for them. In South Australia we do have a system which I think is pretty successful. It's called Rural Care. It's where the education department has made child care available—on site, normally—for a small number within the community. Those centres have a maximum staff of three. Consequently, if you've got infants, that limits you to 12. In many cases it operates quite well, but in many cases they're too small, so we need those caps lifted. The education department are anathema to the South Australian government, I must say, and the government are not interested in opening any more centres. There is a pathway forward here, of course. The Commonwealth, as the provider of child care, should be stepping into that space and working with the state government, particularly in South Australia, where this system exists, and saying, 'What do you need to make this work?' It makes sense to me that in any small country town the best placed organisation to run child care would be one that is already in the industry of child care, and that's education. You can have a common site. You can have staff that may well be interchangeable when one calls in sick. You have a gardener and administration. No-one would be able to run it cheaper than the South Australian education department. That's the pathway forward as far as I'm concerned. We had this report by the Mitchell Institute. I have been advised by people to get numbers together. I was very pleased that a number of RDA, Regional Development Australia, committees—I have 3½ in my footprint—have worked very hard to get up some local figures, and that's really helpful. Then there are 23 councils—I have 26 on my patch, if someone's short of one or two!—that have come together in common purpose to form a group to lobby for attention to this problem, and I thank them. I think the more squeaking wheels we've got, the more chance we have of getting some attention. They are all pretty frustrated, and I'm pretty frustrated, because this Labor government is ladling more and more money into the sector where it already operates, and we're getting absolutely no support at all in the country regions where we cannot access child care. I just heard the previous member speaking. He said: 'We guarantee three days a week, 72 hours a fortnight, of subsidised child care.' Well, when I buy a car I get a guarantee for five or seven years, and if the gearbox falls out of it—or the transmission, as it may be—and it's no good, I know where to go and collect on that guarantee: I go back to the bloke who sold it to me, and I go back to the company that manufactured it. I've got a place to go back to. That happens with my hot water jug too. A guarantee is a guarantee. Would the government please explain to us how we in the country are meant to collect on this guarantee of three days a week when there is no place to put our children into care. Are we expected to transport them 500 kilometres to Adelaide and put them into child care for the day? It is not a guarantee unless there's a guarantee in it, and there's no guarantee in this. It is a complete snubbing of people that live in the country and their needs. They're offering 100 hours a fortnight of subsidised care for Indigenous children. I'm not against that, but it's exactly the same thing: in many of these communities, they won't be able to access it either. There is no longer any prioritisation for working families. If, in a working family, the mother goes off to have a baby on accouchement leave and then the baby's born—because we're never too sure when they're going to come—they will be jostling for places against people who don't have to go to work to get the baby into a childcare centre so they can go back to work. I understand the reasons why the government would want to move in this direction, but you have to be aware of the global impact of any decision—the reaction, if you like. What gives way for this? I'm very concerned about that. We've seen a big investment in child care since this government came to power. There was $4 billion for higher subsidies. There was $3.6 billion for the 15 per cent lift in wages for the sector. I'm not saying anything against that in principle. Now they say there's another $426 million to guarantee 72 hours a fortnight. There's a bit of a moot point here. The Productivity Commission says this will cost $2.3 billion, and that's a fair kind of gap, one would have to say. But whichever figure you use, $426 million or $2.3 billion, and you add it to the $7.6 billion spent before, there's a hell of a lot extra going into child care in Australia, and the only way people in my community, in many of my communities, can participate in this largess is they get to pay the bill. They get to pay a bit more tax to make it cheaper for people who already have the service to access the service. It's more for the haves in this particular case and absolutely nothing for the have-nots. It does not recognise in any way the issues we are facing in rural and regional Australia, and, as far as this government is concerned, it virtually doesn't affect anyone who lives in the seats this they represent here in this place, and I think that's absolutely apparent. They do not care for people who don't provide them a seat in the parliament. It's pretty appalling, I'd have to say. So places like my home town of Kimber, Wudinna, Wilmington, Oaroo—I could go on—have all approached me about trying to get a child care centre in their towns, but they have no infrastructure, they have no private provider, and councils aren't willing to step up into that space and provide a large investment that would probably be loss-making in the long term. I don't blame them, but something has to be done. We have a program that still exists. It's called home care and it's a pretty good idea, really, like somebody living and working in their house, perhaps, going about household chores, or even working in the home office from time to time or whatever fits, can manage to have up to three kids in their house, very much like having school holidays and three children in the house while you are running a house. But it's become increasingly difficult and unattractive to run these programs—regulations. Regulations are driven by government directions, and they are being strangled. The problem is now you can't get anyone to stick their hand up to have a go. In fact, the regulators have been trying to corral these people to provide home care in commercial premises. It's a bit of a nonsensical statement, isn't it—provide home care in a commercial premises where you can combine with someone else providing home care in a commercial premises, to make sure it's safe for the children. It's just not recognising the reality. Other place like Crystal Brook need to expand. Kadina need to rebuild as they have outgrown the building. They have, I think, 70 people on their books waiting to get in at the moment. Kadina had a bid in for the Growing Regions Program. The Growing Regions Program was announced the other day. I got three projects in Grey. The member for Barker got two projects in Barker. I think that's the extent of the South Australian largess. We managed to snaffle three per cent of the national total that went into this Growing Regions Program. In my case, there's one program in Whyalla, one in Oaroo ,and the other is to build art rooms in the APY lands for the men. Kadina, which has a shovel-ready project, put in for this program—not a razzoo. People are discouraged and its hurting. We need to get the message through. Alternatively, perhaps we need to change the government, and people will have a chance to do that in the not too distant future. I don't pretend that the solutions are easy, but, until governments recognise that we have a problem, absolutely nothing is going to get fixed, and I bring this problem to the parliament. I'm very hopeful that my successor, because I'm running out of speed, will be bringing this problem back as well. I've been working with Tom Venning around the electorate. He's met with a lot of people. If he comes back in my place, I can guarantee, he will be on this wagon as well.
Electricity Infrastructure Legislation Amendment Bill 2025; Second Reading | Bills | House debates
Renewable energy undoubtedly is a wonderful thing. In South Australia, we have led the nation in the establishment of renewable energy. In fact, there is 2,400 megawatts of installed capacity in...
Renewable energy undoubtedly is a wonderful thing. In South Australia, we have led the nation in the establishment of renewable energy. In fact, there is 2,400 megawatts of installed capacity in South Australia. But there is a bit of a rider here. While we've got 2,400 megawatts of installed capacity, AEMO will not allow the wind generators to generate more than 50 per cent of that at any one time. When I drive around my electorate, which hosts many of these wind farms, it's one of the reasons that, when the wind seems to be strong enough and the price is good enough, they are still not turning. The reason they are not allowed to operate is that the grid, without some base-load generators—like gas in South Australia's case—is too unstable. South Australia has led the charge on renewable energy, and I think there's a lesson here for the rest of Australia. Around 70 to 75 per cent of our electricity is coming from renewable energy. We have double that of the next mainland state. I might say your state, Mr Deputy Speaker Wilkie, is in front of that, but you are running on historical hydro assets. But, for the mainland, South Australia leads the charge at around 74 per cent. The next state is Victoria. They have half that, around 32 per cent. It's not the only thing that South Australia had led the charge on. Not only do we have double the next state's renewable energy but we have, by a margin of 50 per cent, Australia's highest retail price. You cannot disconnect the two events. It's not possible to say that South Australia has 75 per cent renewable electricity, but it's just a quirk of nature that somehow our retail prices are 50 per cent higher than the next state, which is New South Wales, by the way. This is having an unbelievably detrimental effect on South Australia and our industries, our manufacturing industries in particular. I met with a number of rather large ones in recent times that are bemused by the fact that, in a place where we have adequate renewable resources, also fossil fuel resources and, of course, nuclear resources, somehow we not only are leading the nation but are right up amongst those in the world on electricity prices. The issue really is—and I did hear the previous member for Bennelong interject, talking about his power prices—that there is an embedded and hidden subsidy system that supports renewables. That is why a wind generator, or a solar cell for that matter, can sell electricity into the market at a profit when the wholesale price is minus $60 a megawatt. They sell, at a profit to them, at minus $60 a megawatt hour. What makes up the difference? It is the retailers, who are forced to buy this energy off the generators at a negative price, who then slip it onto our retail bills; that's why South Australia has such high retails bills. But it's not detailed on our retail bills. It doesn't tell us the reason your retail bill is so high is that we are paying a subsidy to the wind generators that have cut off the traditional forms of generation. I think any system that is so confusing that the man on the street can make no sense of it all is pretty difficult. If you've got a long afternoon, I'll explain to the parliament how the bidding stem works; it's a complete mystery within itself. It's hiding the reality and its punishing industries along the way, which is why we have that higher price. This bill is about giving the minister—it's an oversight fixing up a problem from before, perhaps—more power to approve offshore wind. I've visited Germany. I was very interested in their Energiewende, which is their transition from fossil fuels to renewables. I have a friend in the German parliament who is beside himself at the moment at the speed at which they are losing industry in Germany. It is being shipped out to countries that don't care so much about emissions, it would be fair to say. When I read up and when I checked when I was there—it was a little while back now—basically, offshore wind generators cost about three times the price of onshore wind generators. Why on earth would someone build them offshore if they're more expensive to build? That obviously it has to feed back into the price at some stage. The reason is—particularly in Germany but also here in Australia, we're finding now—that people don't want to be looking at them. They want renewable energy, but they don't want it on their patch. The previous speaker just touched on that, somewhat. We don't see wind farms in and around capital cities. We don't see them in Adelaide on the Mount Lofty Ranges. But we do see them when we get further north and out of Adelaide, in the hills around Burra or Port Augusta. It's okay to have them up there, but we certainly don't want them where the general public has to look at them. It's pretty much the same with solar farms. Some of my farmers welcome the wind farms; they pay pretty well per tower installation. Not so much do the rest of the community, as a rule, because they get to look at the turbines and they largely don't get any financial benefit. And they're not big employers. In the end, there's a fair bit going on when they're constructing them. I was only recently looking at some farms that have been constructed around Burra, which is a beautiful part of the world, and the mess they have made on the tops of the hills. They've ripped out native vegetation, which is hundreds of years old. It's disgraceful, really—nothing else. A farmer would never be allowed. We have non-clearance rules in South Australia. They've been there for 30 years. Farmers aren't allowed to clear their land, but it seems that, of course, windfarm operators are. They're all in the country. It makes you wonder where we're going here in Australia with our energy policies overall. Last week, we had three industry groups come out and implore the government to slow down the closure of fossil fuel. They said that Australia will not meet the 82 per cent target for 2030, which the government set for itself. I don't think there's much doubt about that. Not only are wind and solar approvals at a low point—the government has trumpeted them, but they are actually stuck with all kinds of approval problems at the moment—but also the thousands of kilometres of transmission lines that the government has designated are meeting local hostility. The government has worked to try and overrule local opinion here, again, and that's not really taking the community with you. If these things were so good, people would open the gate. It seems also that green hydrogen has hit the wall after an initial surge of great enthusiasm when we see Twiggy Forrest of Fortescue walk away from green hydrogen in Australia and say that he thinks the government should keep investing in it but he's not going to, thank you very much. AGL have walked away. In South Australia, we have the state government intending to build a green hydrogen plant in Whyalla and run an electricity generator off of that. Only this week, we're seeing the Premier taking issue with GFG Alliance, and there may be good reasons to do so, over a whole lot of issues. But let me point out that, when the hydrogen plant was proposed by the South Australian government, there was no talk of an offtake agreement with anyone else. They were going to use the hydrogen themselves, for their plant. My understanding is that they've ordered the generators but they haven't ordered the electrolysers. I think the state government had thought they would build it. They put down a budget figure—I don't think they'd scoped it at all, from what I'm told by industry insiders—of around $600 million. I can't find anyone in the industry who thinks they'll build it for less than double that, and I think the reality of green hydrogen is starting to sink in around the world. I make the point that about a dozen years ago in South Australia we were the epicentre of hot rocks. We were told very confidently at that time that South Australia would be running on hot rocks by the middle of the 2020s. There's not one hot rocks facility, because in the end, after the initial enthusiasm, the costs actually beat the projects. You just could not find a cheap enough way of developing the hot rocks industry to generate electricity. It would have been perfectly clean electricity. So would nuclear generated electricity, as far as that goes. It would have been perfectly clean. It would have worked well. It was just way, way too expensive. It seems that that may be the path for green hydrogen, as much as we all hope it will happen—and I hope it will happen. it would be wonderful for my electorate if some of the projects that have been proposed get up. It would be wonderful for the world and for generating electricity. But it has to be at a price that is at least somewhere near being competitive with current electricity-generating systems. Otherwise, we won't do anything in Australia. We just will not be able to afford it. At the moment, we're seeing cafes closing up, and they're blaming their electricity prices. As for manufacturing, I have a couple of very large mineral processors in my electorate, and I know how much they are struggling with the cost of energy at the moment, particularly the electricity prices. Minister Bowen has told us we're going to need 22,000 solar panels a day—somebody should line them up on a patch of ground and let people get their heads around it—and 40 seven-megawatt wind turbines a week. So they're looking to push for offshore wind at three times the price and have found that communities are no happier with those proposals than they were with the ones on the land, given the impact on the fishing and tourism industries. There are alternatives. Last week I had the pleasure of going to Port Augusta and listening to Miss America 2023, Grace Stanke, a nuclear scientist and engineer, talk about her life, how she got to be an engineer in a nuclear plant and what a fan of nuclear energy she is. She explained to us all the things that happen around us that are powered by nuclear energy in one form or another or made with nuclear isotopes—things like smoke detectors and the radiotherapy that saved her father's life and perhaps mine as well. She spoke of how she enthused she was as a young woman about the fact that this source of energy already does so much good in our society. Why wouldn't we take it and do more good with it by providing cheap, clean, emission-free electricity to the world? It's very rewarding for me, because I've had some communication with the Port Augusta community and I'm finding very low levels of resistance there. I'm not saying they're welcoming it with open arms at this stage, but they are more than happy to sit down and have an intelligent conversation about it. Having government members or their associates circulate pictures of three-eyed fish is contemptible, quite frankly. We should be having a more mature debate in Australia about these important issues than that. This legislation is about a ministerial override, and that's the kind of thing that should scare all of us all the time. It's being jammed through in the dying days of this parliament, it must be said. This is probably the third last sitting day of this parliament, and the government want to get it through in an awful rush, against the will of communities—communities that are not keen to host these offshore wind platforms, which threaten their tourism, threaten the scenic beauty of coastal communities and threaten fishing communities, whether those threats are real or imagined. I guess that beauty is always in the eye of the beholder, but it's fair to say that there are concerns in those communities, and it's quite clear that the government has not run a thorough consulting process and taken the communities with it. It's very important. If governments want to lead the Australian public they should be prepared to speak with them and take their views on board. I'll be opposing the legislation.
Criminal Code Amendment (Hate Crimes) Bill 2024; Second Reading | Bills | House debates
Who would have thought that here in post World War II Australia—where the Jews came, following the Holocaust and the extermination of six million Jews in Hitler's death camps, a well...
Who would have thought that here in post World War II Australia—where the Jews came, following the Holocaust and the extermination of six million Jews in Hitler's death camps, a well educated and by those days a modern and Christian nation—we would now see at least the beginnings of that behaviour in Australia. Australia had provided a safe haven for 70-plus years since that time, and now those sentiments of early 1930s Germany seem to have taken root here. It is the thin veneer of civilisation. I reflect that perhaps the right history isn't being taught to our children at school. But then, when I think about it, I don't think the history of the Holocaust was taught to me at school, either. I was an avid reader as a young man—novels, whatever—and many of the novels of the time were based in the roots of World War II, so we accumulated knowledge about what those death camps were like. I think that's missing from modern culture at the moment. Perhaps this nation needs to turn itself to making sure that our young people know what occurred at that time, and why they should always be on their guard against it. I did wonder, through those years, what was so different to our civilisation compared to that of Germany's—just given a different time and a different place. Don't think for one moment that the terrible outcomes of the Holocaust started at that level. It started at a local level with people taking action against local Jews. It was on a low scale, and then it just grew and became a monster. It seems that we have now imported the enmities from another hemisphere, but it needs to stop and it needs to stop now. Perhaps there has been an undercurrent of antisemitism in Australia for some time but, prior to 7 October 2023, it was well suppressed. Yet within two days—well before Israel had responded—we saw people demonstrating on the steps of the Opera House, some chanting 'Where are the Jews?', others chanting, 'Gas the Jews'. 'Where are the Jews?' seems like a pretty nonsensical thing to say. But for such a thing to form so quickly and be so ugly, whatever they were chanting, you can be sure it was not complimentary. It is the seed. It's more than the seed; it's the beginnings of rabid antisemitism, and it needs to be stamped out. Since then, every week we have had demonstrations in the streets and on university campuses. Universities have been an absolute disgrace through this period, seemingly totally incapable of standing up to the hate being preached on their campuses. We've seen security at Jewish schools and members' offices being attacked. This is a democracy—that is simply not permissible. We've seen Jewish property being defaced, Jewish businesses being attacked and the firebombing of a synagogue—what could be a bigger afront to the Jewish community? Then there was the caravan packed with explosives that we still don't know enough about. It's hard not to make those links to 1930s Germany. This should have been jumped on from week one, and my colleagues have stated the case. We should have had a far stronger reaction to this in Australia in terms of leadership. As the Prime Minister has pointed out, the legal system is taking action against those people who've been perpetrating these views, but we've seen precious little for it. Whether or not the Criminal Code Amendment (Hate Crimes) Bill is appropriate and whether or not it is the courts that are refusing to actually reach out and reach the kinds of penalties that I think the good people in the street are expecting, I'm not so sure, but that's what is behind the coalition's push to put in mandatory sentencing for acts of terrorism which are characterised under these things. So, where are the consequences? Last week, I put out an e-newsletter, and one of the things I talked about in the e-newsletter was antisemitism in Australia at the moment. I had a response from woman that was very polite and to the point. She challenged my views on Palestine, and I cannot find myself talking about the subject and these new hate laws without actually making the link between antisemitism and what has been happening with those supporters of Palestine and what's been happening with the Gaza Strip. This is what I responded. I don't normally read my speeches, but I'm sure you'll forgive me for actually going through this letter that sets out what I think: Bob Hawke is remembered as the one who said "If the bell tolls for Israel, it tolls for all mankind. I don't profess to be a qualified historian, but generally my reading has led me to conclude the history of Judah and Israel long pre-dates the advent of Islam. For millennia pre-dating Mohammad, Jews, predominated in the area and were dispersed around the world through the later days of the Roman Empire and by local attacks through the middle-ages. In their place Arab tribes became the predominate culture even though a significant Jewish population remained. The world was collectively horrified by the unbelievable murder of six million Jews under Hitler in WW2 and its aftermath decided to partition British administered Palestine (a consequence of WW1) into two independent states, one Jewish, one Arab. Israel proclaimed its independence under this authority and was immediately attacked by its Arab neighbours and in response expanded its land base to develop buffers. Other wars have followed, and Israel has always prevailed. I make the point; as long as its neighbours (Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Syria)— let's hope things have changed in Syria— deny its right to exist, the first war Israel loses will be its last. More wars and interactions have followed, and Israel had taken to developing Jewish settlements in Gaza. In 2005, under a negotiated settlement they completely withdrew and handed control to Fatah. It was all to no avail! Fatah was subsequently defeated by Hamas in an election, a civil war broke out which resulted in Hamas becoming the governing force in Gaza. There has not been an election since! There hasn't been an election in 20 years. Hamas totally denies Israel's right to exist and over the next 16 years built a military machine designed to eliminate Israel. On Oct 7th 2023, Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel, not on the military establishment, but specifically targeting defenceless civilians at a music festival. Hamas soldiers butchered 1200 civilians including children, they committed despicable crimes of torture, rape and abuse, they then abducted a further 240 defenceless civilians and took them hostage. This was an inhuman act, and they should not have been surprised at Israel's response. What would we expect our government to do if we were attacked in a similar manner? It is my opinion Hamas wanted a strong response from Israel holding the view they could escalate their action into a wider regional war against Israel. They hold their own people in contempt by hiding their military and its firepower within civilian infrastructure like schools and hospitals. If the completely one-sided votes supported by the Australian government in the UN, calling for an immediate cease-fire and conditional release of hostages and with no guarantees for Israel had been observed, as they called for, Israel would not have incapacitated Hezbollah over the northern border in Lebanon. Perhaps this time it will allow the Lebanese to take control of their country, not Iran. That would be an excellent outcome and we should all applaud. During the conflict Iran attacked Israel with 3000 missiles in a day. Israel's response was largely to destroy Iran's air force—that can only be a good thing. Along with the depleting of Hamas these three events led to Iran's inability to protect the murderous Assad regime in Syria and again there, we can only hope his removal will allow for a proper and compassionate government to form, one that does not use chemical and biological weapons against its own people. Once again, we should all applaud. None of this would have been possible if the Albanese Government had its way in the UN. And, I add, if we had had an immediate ceasefire with no conditions in favour of Israel. It was a disgraceful position for the government to take. These changes put forward in this legislation are a step in the right direction. They lower the threshold for criminality. They remove the defence of acting in good faith. They introduce threatening behaviour as an offence. This bill was introduced in September. We are now in February. We have had numerous demonstrations and numerous acts against the Jewish community in that time. What have the government been waiting for? They introduced this legislation in September and knew we would support it, yet here we are debating it in this Chamber five months later. What counts at the end of the day is that we not only make the changes but also require our courts to give appropriate sentencing. At this stage, I'm not aware of a court in Australia giving the kind of penalty for the behaviour we have seen—I'm not aware of any outcome that would meet my threshold. That's why it's important that we move to mandatory sentencing in this area, because it seems that the judiciary are not up to the fight—or they don't realise the gravity of what is happening here, don't think what is happening in Australia today is so different to what was happening in 1932 and 1933 in Germany or don't think that that thin veneer of civilisation can be stripped away from the most urbane of us. If it could happen there, it can virtually happen anywhere. We need to be on our guard right from the first step and stamp out that kind of behaviour. The legislation is good, although it doesn't go far enough, and, of course, I will support it.
Free TAFE Bill 2024; Second Reading | Bills | House debates
They could probably both learn a bit. Where there's the responsibility of raising finance at one level of government, the money is just basically given to the states to spend on whatever...
They could probably both learn a bit. Where there's the responsibility of raising finance at one level of government, the money is just basically given to the states to spend on whatever operation they are running. I think that's poor governance in many ways. Most of what I have to say relates to the South Australian experience because that is what I am most familiar with. I have many friends who have given up a significant portion of their lives to work and operate in the TAFE section as lecturers and training providers and have really believed in TAFE. Almost all of them have eventually left, very disillusioned with TAFE in South Australia and mystified as to why it has been driven into the ground and why it has consequently failed, largely. In 2018 in South Australia, there was a review that was ordered by the federal regulator and conducted by the Nous Group. It found that there were major problems with no less than 16 courses that TAFE in South Australia were offering. The review criticised the heavy funding cuts that had been delivered by, listen to this, the Labor government under Jay Weatherill. It said that TAFE had lost sight of the importance of quality. If confidence was already low in South Australia, that just smashed it. In many ways, it really spelt the demise of TAFE. Smaller facilities were closed completely; larger ones in many places were largely decommissioned. There was a fellow called Jack Velthuizen in Whyalla, a significant Whyalla identity. I don't think he'll mind me quoting him in this area. He voted Labor all his life. I got on well with Jack. We understood each other. We knew how we each voted, but we both believed in Whyalla and in people. Jack was on the tools at the plant for much of his life, and he then ended up being a TAFE lecturer and was very proud of the metal workshops that were in TAFE at the time. In the end, they were idle, and he was beside himself with despair at what had happened. Jack went on to become president of the Whyalla Football League, a position he held at the time of his demise when he passed away in 2021, which is a fair indication of his commitment to community. I miss him. He was a good fellow. But, anyway, he had become very disillusioned with the whole direction of TAFE. Of course, the problem was that these places had become deserted. I'd benefited at some level from TAFE training at some time. I think I did my first chem certs through TAFE, but I also did a tree-pruning course. I'm given to reflect that, in many places, they were delivering yoga instructor and dog handler courses and all that kind of thing. Honestly, if you want a business training enterprise, it needs to be focused on being a business training enterprise and getting on with the hard things in life. In many ways, I think that TAFE lost its way. The consequence of that, of course, was that industry had no confidence. I just heard the member for Bruce speaking about how people trusts TAFE. Well, I'm here to tell the parliament that they don't—certainly not in South Australia. I speak to people in industry about people coming to them with their qualifications and seeking work. When they saw that they'd done their training, their apprenticeship or whatever through TAFE, they basically didn't trust it. They'd say, 'That means they won't be able to operate this, that and everything else, and I'll have to train them from scratch again.' I have used this phrase: who ever failed a TAFE course? That tells you about the quality that is actually offered here in the end. I was speaking only recently to an acquaintance who did a 12-month TAFE course and didn't attend and received high marks in their exam. They passed the course, yet they'd barely attended. That tells you why the public and industry don't trust TAFE, and it tells us why, then, industry fled to the private sector for training. It's more flexible. It provides services when, where and how you need them. TAFE, by comparison, is a government organisation. The people that work there are public servants and it's heavily unionised. Consequently, it is just inflexible. Trying to get training courses delivered when it suits your workforce rather than when it suits the workforce at the training facility is one of the reasons they've been left behind. So industry have established their own training platforms. I live in Kimba, and just down the road from me, at Cleve—a distance of 100 kilometres or so—the Motor Trade Association have developed a regional training facility for country based mechanics. It's fantastic for the kids on the Eyre Peninsula and further afield that now don't have to go to the city and can access their training out in the country. Master Builders and the Housing Industry Association of Australia have their own training platforms and credentials that the industry trust and that they have designed for their use. This move for free TAFE undermines their efforts and investment, and it's dangerous. It is a move by this government to prop up failed state enterprises, and, as I said, we're on the sticky paper. And there is no budgeted provision for this expansion of free TAFE. How on earth can that happen? We have a whole raft of government policies now, including housing, the forgiveness—the write off—of HECS debts and extra investment in the NBN, all apparently not costing the budget a cent. These are billions and billions and billions of dollars that the federal government is committing itself to that magically don't appear in the budget papers. It makes a mockery of the Treasurer's claims that this government has delivered two surplus budgets. If that is the case, why is the net debt of the Australian government now higher than before the surplus budgets? It defies any logic at all, and it is an attempt by the government to pull the wool over the eyes of the Australian public. It will be exposed. In the coming months and the coming weeks, there will be increased scrutiny of the government's claims. This is, in fact, an attempt to nationalise the training and skills industry. It undermines the investment of the housing industry, of the motor trades and of private providers like Career Employment Group, which are a very significant contributor in my electorate to actually piloting people through their training and through their apprenticeships, and they've got to compete with free. And the industry doesn't trust the credentials. I think it's a broken glass that can't be mended. Denita Wawn from Master Builders Australia has said that it unfairly distorts the market, and it does not bring more people to industry. The challenge is quality. Can TAFE rebuild that? I think it's pretty unlikely on the basis of the current dropout rate. The non-completion rate of free courses at TAFE is 87 per cent. That's telling us something. So far, the government has spent $1.5 billion on free TAFE, and there are 80,000 fewer apprenticeships and trainees today than when they came to office. That's a 20 per cent drop. For women, it's worse. The commencement stats have halved under this government. So now the government is doubling down and trying to entice apprentices and trainees back into the system—back into a training facility that industry does not trust. I think this is bad government, quite frankly. I think it's undermining the investment and effort of others to build a system that they trust and that they rely on. Unbelievably, the government has not done any work on actually assessing the impact of the free TAFE policies that they've implemented so far, and they are pushing even further. This reeks of a captain's call, and, when captains make bad calls, the ship sinks.
I want to clarify a few things at the beginning of this contribution. TAFEs are state owned and operated. This is a very slippery slope that we get ourselves on in this federal parliament, where...
I want to clarify a few things at the beginning of this contribution. TAFEs are state owned and operated. This is a very slippery slope that we get ourselves on in this federal parliament, where we see the failings of state governments and think that we better do something here in Canberra and end up owning the whole kit and caboodle, if you like. It's happened across a whole range of government services, which are provided by the states but are significantly funded by the federal parliament, and, of course, we lose control. While the federal government of the day wears the responsibility for raising taxes, in the end, the money is granted to the states, and we have—
Jackson, Uncle Charles, OAM | Statements by Members | House debates
Today I want to talk about Charles Jackson OAM from Port Augusta. Charlie Jackson is the South Australian Senior Australian of the Year and an Adnyamathanha man. The Adnyamathanha are the rock...
Today I want to talk about Charles Jackson OAM from Port Augusta. Charlie Jackson is the South Australian Senior Australian of the Year and an Adnyamathanha man. The Adnyamathanha are the rock people of the Flinders Ranges. Charlie's worked all his life for the betterment of his people in a number of government agencies and outside in different businesses. He's a very erudite man, well-spoken and highly regarded in his community. In the last few years, I and my office have been working with him trying to get to the bottom of the jumble of what on earth has happened to the Adnyamathanha traditional owners lands trust and its entanglement with a body called Rangelea. In my valedictory speech the other day, I named ORIC as one of the most useless government corporations I've ever seen. How on earth we can have a body which is entrusted to police Indigenous corporations not be able to get the facts and figures needed to get to the bottom of the problems, I do not understand. I congratulate Charlie for his incredibly strong stance in this area and for leading his people in this transparency case but also for his long life of commitment to his community and to the Port Augusta area in general. Well done, Charlie. He is a very fine ambassador and a very fine pick for South Australian Senior Australian of the Year.
Diabetes | Private Members' Business | House debates
The motion is seconded. To the JDRF kids and the Kids in the House program, I've got to say, that in the 17 years I've been here, I think this is the most effective lobbying campaign we've seen....
The motion is seconded. To the JDRF kids and the Kids in the House program, I've got to say, that in the 17 years I've been here, I think this is the most effective lobbying campaign we've seen. Congratulations JDRF and Mike Wilson on this program. All those blue shirts and those little kids actually tear at your heartstrings, because you know what diabetes is doing to them but also to their families and how difficult it is to cope with on every level. Welcome to Parliament House, and thank you, member for Morton, for putting this motion up. The member for Morton and I have become very firm friends after our 17 years together in parliament. We're leaving at the same time, and I'm looking to hand over the reins of the coalition's side of being the co-chair of—I don't actually call us the Friends of Diabetes. I say we're the enemies of diabetes in this place, and long may that tag live! The member for Lindsay, alongside me here, has her own personal story about diabetes. I look forward to this group. It is the longest-serving group—the first friendship group formed in this place and the longest surviving. What I'd like to see is the group abandoned because we've solved all the problems with diabetes, but I suspect that's a little way away yet. There is a special mention for Fletcher Buchanan, who's momentarily distracted, and his mum, Alex. His dad, Luke, can't be here today. He's a principal. Oh, there we go—actually, there's an update. Welcome. All of you have your own personal story. Fletcher is only two years old. I went down to Yorketown two or three weeks ago to introduce myself to him, and he's a delightful young fellow who is looking forward to taking advantage of the advances in the treatment of diabetes. When I think back over what we've achieved over the 17 years in parliament, there weren't any constant glucose monitors around, then. They didn't link up to pumps. That has made such a vital change to people with diabetes, but we're not happy. We want a cure. That's the answer. We can't do that unless we keep up on the scientific front. I normally start my speeches about diabetes by saying it's the leading cause of heart disease, the leading cause of blindness and the leading cause of amputation. I should add that it's also one of the leading causes of kidney disease, dementia, stroke, mental stress, cancer and liver disease. There are very good reasons for Australia to make a concerted effort to play its part in the international scene to see this cursed disease off, quite frankly. None of you choose to have it. You just have to wear it and live with it. So thank you so much for your stoicism. I'd also like to make a special mention of Mike Wilson OAM, who has led this organisation for 20 years. You stepped down mid-year, but it's good to see you back in here, Mike. I think we were due to have lunch today somewhere, but the cafe wasn't open or something. We look forward to working with Sydney in your place. There are so many things about diabetes. It's not just type 1, of course; there is type 2 diabetes as well. Sadly, I have reported to this House many times that the electorate of Grey is the world champion or the Australian champion when it comes to the incidence of diabetes full stop. There are 1.4 million Australians diagnosed with diabetes, and type 2 diabetes is creating havoc. So we need to keep going on all those fronts. I think it less likely that we will find a cure for type 2, but I think we will continue to find better and better treatments. But I do think the future is bright from the point of view of finding that long-term cure. I don't know who the smart lady or smart man will be that will suddenly say, 'Eureka, we've got the answer here!' Maybe it will happen incrementally. But I do know that in this place, in this parliament, that both sides of parliament and the crossbenches—all of us—are united in the cause of trying to support juvenile diabetes research. I back the calls from the member for Moreton, that we need to see a continuation of that funding—I think you're looking for $30 million at the moment. It originally came from Greg Hunt. There was an extension last year. We need it to be locked into the budget on an ongoing basis until it's done.
Morocco | Constituency Statements | House debates
Between the dates of 27 October and 2 November, I was given the great privilege as co-chair of the friends of Morocco at the request of the Moroccan government to lead a delegation to Morocco....
Between the dates of 27 October and 2 November, I was given the great privilege as co-chair of the friends of Morocco at the request of the Moroccan government to lead a delegation to Morocco. One of the reasons I am signed up to be a friend of Morocco is that I had the privilege of visiting the country before I entered parliament, in fact. What I saw there at that stage was quite impressive, but I was very much more impressed with what I saw on our trip back to Morocco just a couple of weeks ago. It is a vibrant democracy and, I would say without any shadow of a doubt in my mind, the most successful democracy in the Arab world. It's enlightened. It's led by a vibrant parliament and a very enlightened king, Mohammed VI. They are a very tolerant society, where women are encouraged in education, in the workforce, in management and in parliament, and they have very good representation. It is wonderful to see that in a predominantly Muslim nation in a fairly troubled part of the world. I think they set a wonderful example. They are having huge investment in education and training. We visited some of their facilities. They have a free trade agreement with Europe. In 2012, Renault opened a car factory near Tangier, where they now make 340,000 units a year. Most of them are going directly back into the EU tariff free, of course. They built a port, Tanger Med, which they opened in 2007. It is now the biggest port in the Mediterranean. It's shifting nine million containers a year. As a result of that, they are building another port down at Laayoune, which is in the contested area of the Western Sahara. Morocco would like our support, along with 100 other countries around the world, to recognise their autonomous administration there. They are building a third port in eastern Morocco on the Mediterranean. I'm indebted to the help of Madam Wassane Zailachi, the ambassador here in Australia. The Moroccans have asked that we try and get the government moving in the way of free trade agreement with Morocco. Subsequently, since I've come back, I have written on behalf of the delegation, which included the member for Adelaide, to ask the trade minister, Don Farrell, to open those negotiations. Verbally, I think Steve Georganas has had advice that he will be open to that, but I'll looking forward to pushing forward with that agenda.
Regional Australia | Matters of Public Importance | House debates
I am an optimistic person. I like to believe in the best of people. The MPI today is: After two and a half years, regional Australians are worse off under this Government. I have said many times...
I am an optimistic person. I like to believe in the best of people. The MPI today is: After two and a half years, regional Australians are worse off under this Government. I have said many times that I don't think members of the Labor Party come here to do harm, and I don't think they mean to do harm to regional Australia. I think they are, in the truest sense of the word, just simply ignorant, and they don't understand what it is they are doing to rural Australia. I have been keeping a bit of a list of the things that I think are really biting and really hurting and have changed in this 2½ years of government. First is the cost of everything. Only the other day I was in a butcher's shop looking at sausages that were $16 a kilogram. I can't tell you what an obstacle this is for people anywhere, let alone in the country. Our electricity prices, despite promises of a $275 reduction, have gone up by 30 per cent. If you think that's tough on households, imagine what it's like for a small manufacturing business or a large retail centre or whatever it might be. Costs in the country are pretty tough on everything. There have been 12 interest rate rises under this government. The average mortgage is $35,000 worse off. Personal income taxes are up by 25 per cent. We've heard the government parrot about their tax cuts—the stage 3 tax cuts which were actually funded under the former government—but, in fact, bracket creep is taking care of those very, very quickly indeed. The abolition of the live sheep trade is eroding confidence right across the sheep industry, not just in Western Australia. There are some orders on some ships at the moment, and we know not what the owners of the ships will do; they may depart Australia early. There is the recommencement of the indiscriminate water buybacks along the Murray River. I led a delegation from the top to the bottom of the Murray, talking to growers about what would this mean in their communities; I can tell you it hurts. The building of transmission lines and renewable energy parks through high-value farmlands is starting to meet with real resistance in our rural and farming communities, I can tell you. There is the abolition of the ag visa program; this was to provide a workforce for Australian farmers to sow and harvest crops—that is gone. There is the drying up of road projects. I worked very hard to get major upgrades on major highways within my electorate, and we began the duplication of the Augusta Highway; it's gone just on 30 kilometres. Work is still underway, I might say, but it's the money that was allocated from the previous government, and it's about to cease, and there is nothing in the forward estimates to keep this work going the rest of the way to Port Augusta. On the local roads and community infrastructure, members just before me spoke about the increase in roads renewal. In fact, it has been put back in one hand—what was taken away from the left. The reduction of instant tax write-off measures for farmers and the imposing of the biosecurity levy on farmers—I think that's stuck in the Senate at the moment. But the idea that farmers would be paying for the import inspections on non-agricultural products, like fridges, white goods, machinery, electronics et cetera, is quite preposterous. The vehicle emissions standard will come into effect in the middle of next year but with another $15,000 to $20,000 on the vehicles that we use in regional areas. There is the abolition of the native title respondents fund for those landholders that find themselves in the position of having to fight to keep their rights on their own property. There is the commitment to expand Australia's parks and reserves from 20 per cent to 30 per cent. I only heard the environment minister in a meeting this morning being very excited about the prospect of going from 22 per cent of land being under the protection of Australia to 30 per cent in the next five years. I can guarantee you that that land, that protected area, will not be coming out of the electorate of Sydney. It won't be coming out of the electorate of Melbourne. It won't be coming out of the central area; it will be coming out of the regions that I represent, and it creates holes in the economic fabric. There is the allowance of big emitters to buy up agricultural land set aside for emissions to meet the safeguard mechanism. The safeguard mechanism itself is actually undermining the metal refining platforms, like the steelworks at Whyalla, the lead smelter in Port Pirie and the copper smelter in Roxby Downs. It is making it more and more difficult. So it has been a tough 2½ years, I'd have to say, and I think the government needs to take a very close assessment of what they've done to rural and regional Australia. I would like to continue— (Timeexpired)
Valedictory | Parliamentary Representation | House debates
the second one. I had to walk three transport ministers over that bridge—another one down here I think!—to actually nail it. And it is the right kind of investment, because the north...
the second one. I had to walk three transport ministers over that bridge—another one down here I think!—to actually nail it. And it is the right kind of investment, because the north of South Australia, the regions, is where the mineral wealth is. In fact, every major mine in South Australia is in the electorate of Grey, which covers a mere 92.4 per cent of the state. There is the Port Wakefield overpass and the dual lanes we have commenced on the Augusta Highway, which is now only going to go as far as Lochiel and not keep going all the way to Port Augusta, which I had hoped. That's reprioritisation with the current government, but we should keep going on those things. The upgrades to the Horrocks Highway, Eyre, Augusta—the whole lot of them—have had major upgrades, and there is the sealing of the Strzelecki Track. I don't know how many have been up the Strez—once again, the member for Gippsland has been up the Strez with me. In fact, we had a photo in front of the sign that spelt Strzelecki wrong! That's been fixed up, I can tell you. That road will become one of the great tourist routes of Australia, connecting Queensland through the outback and bringing you down into South Australia, into the Flinders Ranges if you turn left—or you can go right and go up to Lake Eyre. It's not a bad little option, really. And, of course, the mighty Moomba basin sits right in the middle of it. That was a god outcome. Then there are the tens of millions of dollars that have gone into BBRF programs, sports and community facilities, town sewerage systems, marine facilities, historical precinct preservation, bike trails, tourism—it goes on and on. They're are all good projects. There is the Mobile Black Spot Program and an enormous expansion in coverage. Is it complete? No. It will never be complaint. Perhaps that was touched on again with Starlink; you can't get behind every rock with a radio frequency. But it's certainly made a big difference. Another thing I've been involved with is how Defence has a penchant for going out and compulsorily acquiring properties. We've had a fair bit of it go in the electorate of Grey. I've been sticking up for the landholders' rights, which I think are treated terribly in this situation. I've got people I helped out who had 25 years to reach settlement. I've got others now that are approaching the 15-year mark on the compulsory acquisition around Cultana. I'm pleased to be involved with these good people. I'm a bit concerned now that it's all done that the Army is going to abandon Cultana anyhow. It's been a difficult time for those things. The establishment of four headspace units across Grey is a great thing. I wanted another one in Port Pirie and haven't been able to get it, but just a couple of weeks ago we opened a Medicare mental health facility there, and I'm indebted to the former minister Greg Hunt, who put those on the line to fill that space. As for those four headspace units, we've got one in Port Lincoln, one in Whyalla, one in Port Augusta and another one in with the Royal Flying Doctor Service. They are doing great things reaching out to our young people. And there is the dog fence. Where are you, David Littleproud? There he is. The dog fence is a 120-year-old fence that snakes across outback South Australia, protecting sheep farmers from wild dogs and dingoes. We were struggling to get this one up at the South Australian level, and we managed to get David Littleproud to come open the Jamestown show. His staff said, 'We've got a couple of hours free in the morning; have you got anything you could do?' and I said, 'Yes, I've got a really good idea.' So I got a hold of the people at the dog fence and they came in for a meeting. We were about 10 minutes into the meeting and, to his great credit, David said, 'Yes, I've got it. I understand what you're saying, and we're going to make this happen.' And we did with a $5 million contribution from the federal government, $5 million from the state government and $5 million from growers. What I got out of it was an increase in my levy! But the fence is now about two-thirds complete and making a real difference across the outback. They are really good wins. There are the regional airports. I don't think there is a remote airstrip in a remote community that is not sealed for the Royal Flying Doctor Service to get in, and that has been the remote area airport subsidy. Here in the House, we all belong to all kinds of committees and different organisations. There are a couple I'm going to mention here. Unfortunately, the member for Moreton is not here today, but the enemies of diabetes is an organisation we had to rename. I didn't really want to be a 'friend' of diabetes, so we renamed it the 'enemies'. Graham Perrett's been the co-chair with me for the last nine years of these three parliaments. We're both leaving, and I wish him well in his retirement from federal parliament as well. We are very alike, Graham and I, in personality, I think—like the two moons of Mars, as it were. But when it comes to opinions on things political, we're more like other things celestial—Venus and Mars—I think. There's a fair way between us. There was another committee that I worked on. I was chair of the agriculture committee. I went to Ian Macfarlane at the time—I can do a reasonable job of imitating Ian, but I won't do it here in the chamber—and I said, 'I want an inquiry into country-of-origin food labelling.' He said, 'Why would you worry? It's been done to death. There's been about eight inquiries before.' And I said, 'Yes, I know that.' And he said, 'Well, you're not going to get anywhere.' So I said, 'Look, all of those inquiries—I've looked at the reports—say that the government should do something about it. We should have a country-of-origin food-labelling system. You give me a go at this and we'll tell you how to do it. How about that?' So we got permission. It went ahead. We had to get permission from Barnaby Joyce as well. And then we delivered the report. Some circumstances happened and we managed to get it implemented. So when you go down to the supermarket now and you pick up the food and you see the bar graph on it and it tells you how much of that content is Australian, that came from my committee. I wrote the report, basically, but with the support of the rest of the committee. That's just what you can do when you actually dig in there and find the answer. At the time of the inquiry, I said, 'There are a whole lot of people in Australia who need to push that shopping trolley down the supermarket and fill it up with the cheapest food they can to feed their family, and they shouldn't feel bad about that. I say, "Good on them." But there is a whole lot of people in Australia just like me who have a high enough income to make a choice about whether they want to support Australian manufacturing or whether they want to support Australian growers, but they can't do it if they haven't got the information, and now they have.' I'm pleased that that will now spread on to fish, but at the time I knew that was a bridge too far. It would have got too complicated and bogged down. So we made the move, and that was a good outcome. There's an old adage that holds true: you cannot please all the people all the time. We know that's true, but I say to electors that they should elect an individual to this place whom they trust to make an intelligent decision on their behalf when that individual is in possession of the facts. You may not always agree with the conclusion that the elected person comes to, but you should elect someone you trust to make an intelligent decision. It is better summed up, I think, by Edmund Burke, the Irish philosopher-politician of the late 1700s, who said, and excuse the sexist language; it is of its time: Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion. My reading of that is that we should not be in this place to slavishly follow the latest poll. We shouldn't be driven by those ways of making decisions. We should be here to provide our judgement and to lead our communities through challenging decisions. There are two obvious areas where I'd claim to have done so, and these areas have delivered success—I must say, sadly, only to have it reversed by the current government at the change of government. The first is Ceduna and the cashless debit card. Out there we'd had, I think, seven deaths. We'd had a coroner's report into people sleeping rough and into drug and alcohol abuse. It was really a very tragic story, and one thing led to another. We'd had a number of interim outcomes, and then Twiggy Forrest suggested to a joint party room one day that we pursue a cashless debit card and, with the great support of the local community in Ceduna, we led the nation. I thank Allan Suter, mayor at the time, and also the Far West Aboriginal Communities Leaders Group, which was established at the time. It took some real guts and determination for them to withstand local pressure, as you would imagine, to back the card in. Once again, I think Mr Chester was with me when we were at a meeting and there was this old pastor. I thought the meeting was going a bit rough—we had a few public servants in there—and then he stood up and we all listened to what he had to say. He cleared his throat and he said, 'I reckon we ought to do it. I think it'd be a good thing,' and we knew we were over the line. And it was a good thing. It made such a difference. There are people who sit around—they've taken surveys or whatever—and say, 'Oh, it's inconclusive.' I can tell you it's as clear as night and day. In fact, of the two of the mayors who led the community through that time, one has sold his house and is leaving community and the other one is leaving in the next 12 months, because they can't bear to see what's happening to their town. So I'm pleased that our leader, Peter Dutton, has said we will be bringing back the cashless debit card. It does not take income away from people; it just says you can't spend it on drugs, alcohol and gambling. Three things—that's all it prohibits. Everything else you can buy. It made a difference to rates of domestic and public violence and to admissions to emergency care. The rates at the moment are far higher than they were when the card was in action. School attendance has fallen too. The other place where I would claim to have led the community was in my home town of Kimba, where I raised the possibility of and led the push to establish a national radioactive waste management facility. I'd had an opportunity courtesy of one of the round-the-world trips that once were available to parliamentary members who'd served more than one term. You could go around the world once in pursuing your study topic. We'd had a big desalination plant planned for the Upper Spencer Gulf, and I was very interested in the environmental impacts of what that might look like. Of course, I've still got one of the world 's biggest uranium mines—it's a by-product of its being a copper mine—in the electorate, at Olympic Dam, or Roxby Downs. I had the possibility of going to Europe, and the French, the Swedes and the Finns showed us a wonderful time and took us through their facilities. We looked at the uranium fuel site from top to bottom, including disposal. When the opportunity came up for a low-level waste repository, I really thought this was money for jam. It just needed somebody to recognise what it was. But how could I ask somebody else to nominate their property when I was sitting on my own piece of land and could nominate my own? That's exactly what I did. In the end, I was rubbed out by protocol, it would be fair to say, but by then others in the community had offered their properties. Some of them are in the chamber today, and I'll come to them in a little while. In Kimba we went through a survey and then two full plebiscites. In every one, support for the facility grew, to the point where we reached 62.2 per cent. For the record, that was about the same as for same-sex marriage, which was an overwhelming, landslide result, if I remember rightly. So it's worth putting that in context. Then we managed to get it through both houses of parliament. There had been claims from an Indigenous group. The Barngarla Determination Aboriginal Corporation twice had their case thrown out of the Federal Court. They went back for a third attempt and, on a story whose basis stretches belief—and I've spoken about it in this chamber before—it was halted by the Federal Court. The Federal Court left the door wide open for an appeal, but, in the shadows of the approaching Voice referendum, the current government abandoned ship, and there's still no solution for Australia's storage of low-level waste. Something like one-in-three families benefit from nuclear medicine. It's a weak decision by the government. I'm sorry to do that in this kind of address, but really I'm very sad about it. I'm very grateful to those families that stuck their hand up in the local community. To go on with this theme, it's instructive that the Voice referendum was rejected in a landslide, 60-40. It was actually closer to 80-20 in my electorate. Rightly, Australia rejected the notion of two classes of citizen. I think we've taken a backward step as a result of the Voice referendum, and part of the reason it was rejected, I think, is that native title has become an extortion racket. Projects have been halted or delayed at the penultimate moment by a claim of significant religious or cultural interpretation. Rampant conservationists are edging in and misusing native title groups. I have absolutely no doubt about this. It's an unholy alliance. By doing so they are eroding Indigenous people's standing in the general community. The intolerance to this in the general community is rising. It all started with Hindmarsh Island, a case back in the 1990s where there was fabricated evidence. More lately we have seen the refusal of the Blayney goldmine and the Santos Barossa pipeline project. Again in Grey, there was a small desalination project at Port Lincoln. It had some community resistance, but the South Australian government, not worried about that community resistance at all, were quite happy to go ahead with it, but then of course, when the Indigenous owners—well, they're not owners, because this is freehold property. Once again, it was the Barngarla people who put in an objection, and it all seems to have fallen over. When the community objected, that was okay. When the Barngarla people objected, it became a stopper. Australians don't see this as fair and reasonable treatment, and that's why I actually decry the fact it's causing more problems than it's fixing. I've allocated a large amount of time in my 17 years in politics to try and better understand the issues and opportunities of Indigenous Australia, particularly remote communities. Eight per cent of my electorate identify as Indigenous, and around 40 per cent of those live in remote communities. For the ones that are living in the bigger communities, things aren't perfect, but we are absolutely making progress. The member for Parkes touched on this. I'm seeing success stories—people in jobs, getting their kids to school, driving good cars, living in good houses, living a good life, enjoying the Australian dream. But I can tell you in remote communities we're not there, and we're not there by a long way. I fear we're actually going backwards. I think I've gained a lot of respect in those remote communities simply because I go there regularly, and I'm prepared to sit down not only with the leaders but with anyone I find outside the shop or in the village square. We sit down in the dust and talk about what it is they want and what they'd like to see changed and what drives the place. I think I get respect for going there. I absolutely claim that I have their best interests at heart, and I've delivered investment on many levels—and friendships. The billions of dollars we're spending in these remote communities, delivering improvements in schools, health clinics, shops, roads, dialysis units, communications—it's all very evident. But, I have to say, despite all that investment, improvements to their actual outcomes are hard to identify. The gap is not closing. The education system is failing. The reason it fails is because kids aren't at school. No teacher can teach children who don't attend school. Here's the sad news for them as they grow up: if you can't read a label or the safety directions, in this modern world, there isn't a job for you. It's virtually impossible. So we've got to break this cycle. Remote communities are totally dependent on taxpayer dollars for their existence, and we should be able to have a grown-up conversation, not just here but with them everywhere, about the wisdom of a policy that maintains and grows a population in a part of Australia where there is not a genuine economic possibility of underwriting that existence. Men, particularly, have been totally stripped of their role in society. The men's roles were to deliver shelter and food, to find water, to defend their family. Now all that comes from the government. They go down to the shop. One of the biggest sales on the APY Lands, for instance, is frozen kangaroo tails. It tells you about that disconnect from their traditional lifestyle. I give a speech on this recently in the Federation Chamber, and the member for Clark was in the chair. I'm sure he won't mind me sort of quoting him. I don't want to get it wrong, but he came up to me afterwards and said: 'I've never heard anyone explain it to me like that before. Clearly, you're not speaking from ignorance; you are speaking from experience.' I don't know if that will change his attitudes on anything, but he was generous enough to grant me that concession—that it was heart felt and that it came from experience. Enough on that. We'll get to the thankyous. Serving in this place is a privilege, and that electorates put their trust in individuals like me and like all my friends sitting around me at the moment is an honour within itself and is a wonderful thing. I've had wonderful opportunities to travel at least some of the world—I just spoke about Morocco before—to meet national and local leaders and the best and brightest people with plans and ideas to improve the nation. That's a privilege. I've laid wreaths on delegation at Hellfire Pass and Brunei Bay in Brunei. I've been to Menin Gate twice for the evening service which has been carrying on since about 1926, I think. I have walked Kokoda in a private capacity and attended an Anzac Day Dawn Service at Gallipoli. On that occasion, I'd only attached myself to the delegation at the eleventh hour. It was a freezing cold day. We were sitting at Lone Pine, and I heard them say: 'On behalf of the Australian government, Mr Snowdon will lay a wreath, and, on behalf of the Senate, someone else will lay a wreath, and, on behalf of this, someone will lay a wreath. On behalf of the House of Representatives'—I thought, 'I wonder who they'll get to do that.' Then they said, 'Mr Ramsay.' I thought, 'Right!' I'm rugged up; I've got my gloves on, got the scarf on, got the coat on, and off it's all coming, as fast as I could go. I got there in my suit, so I didn't look too bad, went up and laid the wreath. That's quite a special moment. It even got better because my sister who's in the gallery at the moment said: 'You wouldn't believe what I saw when I turned on the news after Anzac Day. The first thing that came on the ABC was my brother going down to put a wreath up at Lone Pine.' There you go. After all the best laid out plans for everyone else that wanted to get on the ABC that night, it was down to the member for Grey! They are wonderful experiences, but I think perhaps the greatest reward for this job is actually when you fix up personal problems. From the outside, I don't think you rate it, but, people come to you when the system has chewed them up, spat them out and not taken any notice of what they've had to say or it's just—everyone's seen Little Britain'computer says no.' You can do anything you like up until the computer says no. My staff and I put our shoulders to the wheel and achieve an outcome that should have happened in the very first place, but you just know that you made such a complete difference to their life. It is a privilege. What getting ready for a political life doesn't prepare you for is that you become a counsellor. People will tell you the best and the worst of their lives, and I think both of them are a privilege. People share some of their darkest moments with you and don't necessarily want you to fix it but to instead just listen. That you can be that person is a very rare and pretty privileged position. I've come to thank some of the people who have given me an opportunity, but, before I get there, once again it was the member for Parkes who touched on the Rudd-slide. We were bright eyed and bushy tailed—the six new Liberals and the one new National that arrived here in 2007. Of that group of six Liberals, four have already left—actually I must have that a bit wrong because my maths doesn't add up. Three are delivering valedictories today, and there's still going to be one left. Something doesn't work quite right there, but anyway. We walked into the party room on the first morning, and, of course, there was a lot of licking of wounds going on after the years of the Howard government. We'd lost government. There were six new Liberals there who thought it was a wonderful thing—they'd just elected us—but everyone else was a bit down. The redoubtable Senator Bill Heffernan said, 'The reason we lost this election was all the deadhead candidates we had.' We all looked at each other and said, 'He must be talking about us.' We became the deadheads. For some years, we used to meet as the deadheads and get people with political experience to come in and speak to us. And, I think in fine form, we decided to appoint Bill Heffernan as the patron saint of the deadheads, and we used to have an award called the Billy for the person who had caused the most problems to the government that week or the week that we met in. It was a good time. Including Scott Morrison, after this next election, we'll be down to just Alex Hawke, who I can't see here at the moment. He will have to carry on without us. Just on the three valedictories today—the three from this side of the chamber—I must say it is very fitting that we give them together. We came in together and we're going out together. Nola, from day one, a pocket rocket or—and I know you won't mind me saying this—a pint-sized milking maid! But don't get on the wrong side of Nola. She was determined for her electorate every time, and I am a great admirer—and she's a great friend, and we will remain friends. To Mark Coulton: we have so much in common, Mark. We're both life members of Apex. We're both farmers. As farmers, we both understood that if you wanted to droughtproof your farm you had to marry schoolteachers! They are sitting together behind me at the moment, Robyn and Teresa. Together they piloted the parliamentary partners association for six years, and I think that is a very important organisation. If we could get more of the partners to come more often to Canberra and share in their partner's experience, we might be able to keep them together on a bit more of a regular basis, rather than having so many of them split up. I think anything that brings you closer together through those times is a very good and important thing, and I thank them both for that. To the electors of Grey—six times they've seen fit to appoint me to represent them: thank you so much. I don't say that lightly. To the more than 400 members of the Grey Liberal Party who journeyed up to a 1,000-kilometre round trip back in 2006 to preselect me: thank you so much. And they've just gone through that process again. If I'd never been the Liberal candidate for Grey, I would never have had the opportunity to be the member for Grey. To the 800 people who make up the membership of the 22 Liberal Party branches across Grey: thank you for your work each and every election, keeping the flame alive in the community—because we all believe in the same things, even those we have differences with across the chamber. We all believe in a better Australia. A lot of us just believe in a different pathway to get there. I'm absolutely thankful for their support. To my home town of Kimba and my lifelong friends who have supported me—some of them that are here today, some of the most important; not all of them—certainly, through that period of the radioactive waste management facility. I'm just the third member for Grey from the Liberal Party. The seat of Grey was formed in 1903, and I'm only the third Liberal. In fact, from 1943 to 1993, we held it just once. That's 50 years. We held it for one term in the 1966 parliament, when it was won by a fellow called Don Jessop, who later had a career in the Senate. In 1993 Barry Wakelin won the seat for the Liberal Party, and I succeeded him. Now we've held this seat for the last 31 years. Barry is from exactly the same home town as myself, Kimber. I think that's quite a remarkable outcome. So, for 31 years, my small community on the northern edge of the Wheatbelt has provided the member for Grey. It's a community of just over a thousand people. I think we punch above our weight right around South Australia. The current chair of the South Australian local government association is the Kimber mayor, Dean Johnson. And, with Caroline Schaefer and her father, Arthur Whyte, Kimber has contributed a member of parliament at either state or federal level for 40 of the last 48 years, and for 17 of those years we had one at state level and one at federal level. I think that's quite remarkable. It's something about living on the edge. It's not easy making a living in Kimber, and I think it's always attuned the people of the town to what the exterior threats are and why we need to have a common purpose when we come together as a community and work for those outcomes. One of the great joys of the job is the plethora of new friends we've made right around the electorate, people that we would have never, ever met in another life. Obviously, there are too many to mention. But a special call-out today for Anthea Kennett up there in the pink—thank you, Anthea—who's come here from Wallaroo today. She and her husband, John, committed no greater sin than being our friends when we took our kids to boarding school together. I managed to recruit them into the Liberal Party and rebuild the local branch there. They weren't on their own, I must say, but thank you for making the effort of being here today, Anthea. The team from Kimba, Jo and John Schaefer, Jeff and Jenny Baldock, Graeme and Heather Baldock—Heather was my first campaign manager—are still here with me, 17 years later, backing their local boy. I thank them so much. They are just such wonderful, valuable friends. There's another couple who couldn't be here: Bert and Barb Woolford. Barb is a ball of energy and will throw her shoulder to the wheel on any attempt. Of course, one of the things you need to do is try and get some people up on the APY Lands when you're having an election. Barb was often at the forefront of leading a delegation or being part of a delegation to go and hand out for Rowan Ramsey. One particular afternoon, she and my wife, Teresa, were there—I think they were at Mimili—and there was a fair kind of raucous going on about 50 metres away from the voting station, as sometimes happens in these communities. Just when they thought things might really get out of hand, this big bloke walked in, in traditional dress, with a spear. He went over and, in no uncertain terms, told them they should disperse and get about their lives, which is pretty much what they did. Then he headed towards the voting box with his big spear. Barb and Teresa thought, 'Oh, gee, what do we do when he gets over here?' Teresa said, 'Hold your nerve.' He came up and put his spear down on the ground and then—as he should—he took a 'How to vote for Rowan Ramsey' card and went in and executed his democratic right. Barb's has been a very special contribution. One year, someone from the Electoral Commission got sick and they only did half the booths, so she headed back up and did the second week. I always say, incidentally, that to get to the Lands it's a thousand kilometres without going out of my electorate, from my gate to the turn-off, and then, if you want to go to the WA border, it's another eight hours. I try and do that a couple of times a year. To my staff, Gen Wells, Fiona Duffield, Neil Sawley, Courtney Stephens, Katie Patterson and Meredith Westbrook, who are all here today: thank you. And thank you to Deb Darby, who came down ill and couldn't make it. They've all been outstanding. Leonie Lloyd-Smith—the reason I just put her on the end is that she's someone most of you in this place would know. She has come to Canberra with me virtually every week for the last 10 years or so. She's the chief organiser of the staff nosh-up on Wednesday nights, so they may well miss Leonie's services. Vicki Manderson is also back in the Port Pirie office today holding the fort. They are a terrific staff—terrific because not only do they serve me loyally, as they should do, but they serve the electorate loyally. When people come in with their problems, they have the time, the patience and the compassion to sit down and talk through those problems. Both the electorate and I are well served by them, and I thank each and all of them. Some of them—in fact, three—have been with me for the entire 17 years, and one, Gen Wells, just a few months short of that. In the chamber today, we have Teresa's sister, Jackie, and Jackie's husband, Peter, as well as my sisters Beth and Janet and Janet's husband, Andrew. My other sister, Anne-Marie, is watching from home. Thank you, all, for being here and your support throughout my time in this parliament. My three wonderful children are all here today: Alex with her husband, Ben, and our grandson, Arthur. Can you give me a wave, Arthur? There you go! Good on you, fella. To Courtney and Lachlan, wonderful supporters: I thank you. I know you've given up a bit for me to have this career. I hope it's been rewarded in other ways. Certainly one thing we haven't done is lose touch. At the time we made the decision for me to have a go at this job, Lachlan was actually at university in Adelaide and living in our unit. While they always needed us, they didn't need me to drop them off at footy and netball anymore, so it was a good time for us, and for me. This brings me to the last and most important person, my beautiful wife, Teresa, my soulmate of 46 years plus. In Mark's terms—he treaded the platform before me—many people consider her to be the second member for Grey. We get two for the price of one. She has driven some of the countless kilometres that we've travelled around the electorate, has dealt with behind-the-scenes things like donations—we look forward to those; there'd be a lot of requests coming in for those—and, particularly in the early years—she's an art teacher by trade—set out the materials that come out of the office. We've been each other's sounding board, not always in furious agreement, sometimes just furious! It proves the strength of our relationship that we can have a very vigorous discussion about things and then just move on. Because there's no doubt we still love each other. I love Teresa, and I'm so privileged to have had her in my life. Many people have said to me over the years, 'You've got a driver, haven't you?' because we do about 80,000 kilometres a year, and I say, 'Yes. I had to marry her.' It's been a wonderful journey. We made the decision to embark upon it together. We are ending it, I guess in a privileged way, in that we were able to choose the time of our leaving. I'm working on, like I said, being a long time in that first group before I get to either of the second two, and going off and enjoying everything. Thank you all for your friendship and support.
on indulgence—I must say, coming fourth in the line after some very fine valedictories, I feel a bit like I'm the last speaker in the session after lunch and I'm stopping people from going...
on indulgence—I must say, coming fourth in the line after some very fine valedictories, I feel a bit like I'm the last speaker in the session after lunch and I'm stopping people from going to drinks! Seventeen years—you wouldn't believe it would go so quickly, quite frankly. It's more than a blink. It's more like a hard day's work out in the paddock, quite frankly; it's tough enough while you're there but it's over quite quickly. It doesn't seem it was 17 years ago that I got here. I must admit, I went to a meeting this morning and got out on the wrong floor; I started off 17 years ago like that! I am reminded, in that sense, of the way life rolls on. A good friend of mine, Josie, said one day, 'Life is like a toilet roll; the closer you get to the end, the faster it goes.' I love this job. I'm not tired of it, and I'm fit enough to keep going. It seems like I've got a growing task sheet; there are as many things on my desk at the moment as there's ever been. And I think, arguably, I'm the best in-form person in Australia in the seat of Grey. So why not keep going? The answer is, quite frankly, as I told my party room back in March, increasingly our friends are falling into three groups: those that are touring either Australia or the world, or towing a caravan around Australia; those are trying to die; and those that have been successful in the attempt. Teresa and I have collectively decided we're going to spend a bit of time in the former group before we get to the latter, and smell the roses along the way—even though, I must admit, Teresa is facing some trepidation at the idea of having me home full time. But we'll get along with that. This job is never complete in rural and regional Australia. We still have an education gap. We struggle to attract teachers, health workers, aged-care workers and professionals. We have childcare deserts; in fact, Grey is listed as having one of the worst childcare deserts in Australia, and that is holding back communities in my electorate. When you try and get somebody to come, to recruit them to come and work in your business in one of the small towns, the first thing they say is, 'Where do I put my kids in child care?' The government's spent a lot of extra money on child care recently, but we're not getting any new places in regional Australia. We need that to change. Those of us that do live and work in and who were born and raised in regional Australia are a bit bewildered by the fact that so few people want to come and share this lifestyle, as the member for Parkes said. There will be a number of things he had to say that I'll cut across to. It's pretty good out there. For anyone that's got skills, you might be interested to come and live and work in the seat of Grey, and I just say: 'Go for it. You won't regret it.' Part of that is that Australia doesn't connect as well with its traditional roots—its rural roots, its regional roots. And a lot of that is because, when we were younger, almost everyone in the city knew someone who lived in the country—an uncle or aunty who lived on the farm or a grandma and grandpa. They'd go up in the school holidays. But, increasingly, that's become a rarity more than the norm, and so there are whole swathes of the population now that are basically intimidated by the thought of going into the country for anything more than a short visit. It's been a privilege to be a member of the federal parliament. I don't think any of us should ever forget what a privilege it is or forget who put us here. And I note, in that sense, the Liberal Party's gone through the process of preselecting someone to run in my place at the next election. I'm very hopeful that he'll be successful, and, to Tom Venning up there—it's his first visit to the parliament, so welcome, Tom. I hope, when you come back, you won't be sitting here; you'll be on the other side of the House. A very enjoyable experience. It has been 17 years, and there have been some very significant achievements in my electorate in that time, and one would hope, for that kind of timeframe, there would be. On some, I've been the prime mover. On other, I've lent my support to the ideas and the dreams to assist the passions of others. It's how we get things done—working together in our communities for the common good. And I think members of parliament have a unique megaphone. Many times, we can actually use that public megaphone to get somebody in the Public Service to do what they should have been doing in the first place or to draw attention to an opportunity or a miscarriage of justice. But I think that megaphone is best used if it's not overused and if you actually pick your targets in where you can make a difference and throw your shoulders to the wheel on those. Equally, there is so much to do, because we need more of those skilled professionals that I touched on before. We have plenty of critics on the work we do in this place. Someone should come out for a bit of a stroll some time. There are not as many as who would drive you out of it, but there are plenty of people that have a fairly low opinion of politics generally. And I just say to them: 'Okay. I can see that not everything we do in this place is perfect, but where do you think they do it better? Just start pointing to those dots on the map around the world where they have a better democracy and where they have better outcomes,' and, generally speaking, I find them speechless. I do offer in there, if you can find the place, I'll see if I can set up a permanent visa for you. But there is no doubt in my mind that, if you're born in Australia, you have won the lottery of life. We are so lucky. We're the envy of the world in many cases. In most surveys, we're in the top half-dozen economies of the world and the highest incomes. We have the fourth longest uninterrupted democracy in the world. That's a pretty amazing thing for a nation whose Constitution is 123 years old. It just shows you how unstable the world can be—that we are the fourth longest. We have world-class services, generally speaking. They're all under pressure, and we all know that we could all do better in certain areas, but don't undersell what we have here. By comparison with many other nations, this is a very enviable place to live. On that theme—once again, the member for Parkes touched on it—Donald Horne is the often misquoted author who wrote the book The Lucky Country, but what he was saying was that Australia was lucky, but we're in danger of squandering our luck, and that our luck would run out. I actually think I'm more worried about that today than I would have been in 1963 when he wrote the book, because we seem to be loading the dice against Australia and Australia's industries at the moment and disadvantaging ourselves in comparison with other nations around the world. I've just come back from leading a delegation to Morocco, joined by some very good parliamentarians, including the member for Adelaide over there—thanks, Steve. And the dynamism of the place—their ability to get something done in a short timeframe—just leaves you wondering whether they're 50 years behind or 50 years in front of us, quite frankly. They've set up a free trade agreement with Europe, and Renault have built this enormous car plant there and are shipping the cars straight back in. They have economic tax-free zones—all these things. They are an innovative country on the move, and I think maybe we need to reflect on how they got to that place. Our falling per capita productivity is a great concern, as are drifting education standards. We know that our schools are not keeping up with our neighbours', in our own neighbourhood. There are stifling regulations and ever-expanding responsibilities of employers to pick up the bill of national objectives—for example, domestic violence leave. And it's not a bad policy—it's a perfectly admirable thing to do, the right thing to do—but how on earth did it end up being the employer's responsibility rather than the responsibility of general society, of the taxpayer? That's the kind of thing we pop onto employers all the time, such as when a government in South Australia suddenly decides to declare Easter Sunday a holiday and the pay goes from time and a half to double time and a half for people who are trying to run a cafe. It wasn't theirs to give away! They are giving away the money of private individuals and businesses, and I think we always need to be mindful of that in a place like this, where we make decisions about what those impacts are on the ground. As Australians, we're always seeking increasing standards. The nursing home, the level of health care, the style of holiday and the number of appliances that our parents accepted aren't good enough for us. But it all costs money, and we expect this great country to foot the bill. So, those aged-care facilities that are too small for us and don't have the connected bathroom and all those kinds of things, but that all costs money. I think there's a fair argument that we are actually not contributing enough to our nation to make it successful, to pay for all the things that we are demanding as a population. I think that's something we could all reflect on—how we do a better job for our nation. A very famous president of the US talked about what we could do for our nation rather than the other way around. I think we are reaching that point. So, while people will make claims now to work a four-day week, for instance, or they don't want to come into work at all, thank you very much, or they want to have more holidays, I think we need to reflect on that level of productivity and what on earth is going to pay for all these extra things that we want in our lives. There's a money-go-round effect here. More and more Australians are involved in the service industries—and good on them; I'm not saying that's a bad thing to do. But, on the other hand, service industries do not create new wealth for this nation; primary producers do. In the very broad term of when I went to school, primary producers were people who actually farmed or produced something from scratch, like a miner or a manufacturer. Increasingly there are fewer in that cohort and more in the area of service delivery. That's all very well as long as the country can pay for it, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to do so, and I think we need to reflect on that. The electorate of Grey has achieved much over the last six parliaments. The member for Parkes talked about big shiny things, and I'm very pleased to report that we have a twin bridge in Port Augusta called the Joy Baluch AM Bridge—
Diabetes | Statements by Members | House debates
Last Thursday, 14 November, was World Diabetes Day. This chamber will have heard many times that one of my honours in this place has been to be the co-chair of the parliamentary enemies of...
Last Thursday, 14 November, was World Diabetes Day. This chamber will have heard many times that one of my honours in this place has been to be the co-chair of the parliamentary enemies of diabetes. Along with my good friend who's not in the chamber at the moment, the member for Moreton, we have been the co-chairs of this organisation for some time. Next week the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation will once again be holding its Kids in the House event. I have often remarked in the past that I think this is one of the most effective lobbying methods or programs that I've seen in my time in parliament. It is just fantastic to see these young Australians in here, searching for help with their life from the point of view of keeping research going in the right areas to finally find a cure for diabetes. In preparation for this event, last week I took the time to go down to the bottom of Yorke Peninsula to meet Fletcher Buchanan—a fantastic little outward-going two year-old—and his mum, Alex, and father, Luke. Alex and Fletcher will be here next week, and I'll be looking forward to meeting up with them in the House and introducing them to some of my friends. In the same timeframe, I'll also be meeting up with Mike Wilson, the retiring CEO of the JDRF Foundation. He announced his retirement in September, after 20 years. Thanks for your service, Mike. We are now working with Sydney Yovic, as the new CEO.
Aged Care Bill 2024, Aged Care Legislation Amendment Bill 2024; Second Reading | Bills | House debates
I also recognise what the member for Nicholls just put on the line there to share with Australia, and I thank him for it. Reforming the aged-care sector is necessary; it's a fair call, and it is...
I also recognise what the member for Nicholls just put on the line there to share with Australia, and I thank him for it. Reforming the aged-care sector is necessary; it's a fair call, and it is time for reform, with the Aged Care Bill 2024. We have co-operated with the government on the royal commission recommendations, at least part of the response, and we've reached broad agreement with the government on the financial arrangements, which will be a penalty on some Australians, and it took some work to achieve some amendments, which we believe are right and proper. The fact the bill is now in this form I suggest means the government agrees with us. That's a good thing. The member for Nicholls just detailed the fact that we negotiated the grandfathering clause. I think this is basic good governance at any level, whether reforming tax systems or assistance programs. Anyone who has invested in an existing government policy should not be disadvantaged retrospectively by a change of government policy. I think, pretty much with everything governments do, it should be grandfathered and always looking to the future. That is the right and proper thing to do. Better taper rates that are a little more generous—in fact, I think we halved the taper rate that the government first suggested for obvious reasons. And the fixed timeline—I think the fixed lifetime cap is an assurance for people. I'm working on getting old, Mr Deputy Speaker! I intend to be working on it for some time yet! It is my view that, as people get older, they're a little more careful with the money they have managed to accumulate through their life. They think, 'This is mine,' and, in many cases, they want to pass it onto their children. I'm not sure that they should be of that opinion. I think maybe that's causing as many problems as it helps. But you can understand that, regarding that fixed lifetime cap. Of course, one that is extremely important to me and that maybe we haven't pushed hard enough is the $300 million spend for infrastructure. It is that area that I want to spend the bulk of my speech talking about—that is, the disadvantage of rural and regional electorates in trying to provide aged care, what amount we will sit on and how much tougher it is to manage there than elsewhere. Aged care in the country is extra expensive—higher costs, food supplies, transport—particularly for staff. That seems a little illogical, but the problem is, because we can't fill our staffing rosters, aged-care facilities frequently have to resort to agency staff, which is around two to three times the cost of regular staff. They just have no choice. They've got to keep their doors open. Legislation was passed in this place I think last year—it may have been earlier this year—by the government to enforce every aged-care facility to have a 24/7 registered nurse on call. For smaller facilities, it's just a bar that is too high and it's more expensive staffing. That has led them to using agency staff as well or breaking the regulations and running the risk of being curtailed. In my electorate, I've already lost one nursing home, one that my aunty lived in, incidentally, for some years. It was a very nice place down at Stansbury on Yorke Peninsula called Elanora. Four years ago it closed. It was a community run organisation, but they hit hard times, and so it was taken over by Eldercare, who did their best, but, in the end, they too were beaten by the staffing issues. I could take you there, Mr Deputy Speaker, to Stansbury. It's like heaven on a stick. It's a beautiful Yorke Peninsula little seaside coastal town. You'd think, 'Why wouldn't people want to go there and work?' But it's around about 2½ or three hours from Adelaide, and they don't want to go there to work. They don't want to go there and live. People want to come there for holidays. They fill up the shacks all the time—not a problem. But we just can't get the staff there. I've got another one on Yorke Peninsula that is seriously under pressure at the moment, at a time when actually the demand for aged care is increasing. It's not as if we haven't had the warning. It was in 2002 that Peter Costello released the first Intergenerational report and identified exactly this issue—that the ageing of Australia was going to present an ongoing and increasing challenge for younger Australians as they were asked to fund the retired people of this nation—and asked how we would deal with that. So one of the problems we have in this ageing Australia is people like me. I think I'm a baby boomer. I'm never too sure about where those margins fit in, but I'll settle for that. We all want better. We want better facilities than our parents aged in and our grandparents aged in. We want better rooms. We want independent baths and showering facilities, and for good reason. We've just been through a pandemic, and you can justify that on medical and health grounds alone. So we want better. But better costs more. Better means knocking down old facilities that actually can do the job, but nobody wants to use them anymore. I'm very grateful for this: in Whyalla, we have a community-run organisation that really hit hard times and got to the point of having to close their doors. Helping Hand, which is a Catholic, Uniting Church associated aged-care facility stepped in and took over management, and it was running until the last election. I managed to secure a commitment from the government at the time of a $10 million grant to help them rebuild and refurbish, to get rid of the shared bathrooms and to build some extra facilities. We did not win the election, and the Labor party did not make the same commitment. But I'm very grateful that they did come to the party. Eventually, prices went up, as they have everywhere, but $17.2 million has come from the current federal government to Helping Hand in Whyalla, and I'm very grateful for that investment. I think we can see the pathway forward there now, with management from a bigger organisation having some advantages and providing some economic gains. But we need investment similar to that and in fact even more in Port Augusta at the moment. We've got facilities that are in the 1970s style, and they need to be upgraded. There's demand there. We have a private operator there. To give you some idea, the private operator came into possession of facilities that were owned by the council and sold to the private operator for $1. That will give you some indication of how much money it was not making—how much money it was losing. We've had someone be prepared to stick their hand up and take the risk. I understand that they are breaking even, but there is no way in the world we can find the kind of investment dollar they need to refurbish, rebuild and expand. The $300 million is very important. I make the point that there are 150 electorates around Australia, so $300 million won't go all that far. That's the answer. This is a reform. It will help fund the health system. It will ask people who have more to contribute more. I'm not against that. I think the fact that we've come together means it will be accepted a little more than if it were a politically difficult decision. In government, in nine years, things get forgotten quickly, I might say. In government, in nine years, we tripled the number of home-care packages. We went from somewhere around 60,000 to over 200,000. We're still being criticised—quite rightly, I guess, because there weren't enough, and there are still not enough. But it's worth remembering that, in nine years, we tripled the number of home-care packages. We invested a further $18 billion a year into aged care. It raises serious issues for Australia, with ever-increasing demand on government services everywhere. Our stalled and indeed falling per capita productivity is a huge concern. If we want more and better health care, aged care, child care, education and NDIS and we don't want to pay more taxes—and clearly a majority of Australians don't want to—some way or another, we've got to increase productivity. We cannot have a backwards slip in productivity. The only way Australia will be able to afford the future it wants is if we are more productive. That means we have to take the bull by the horns here in this place and talk about how we get more for the same, if you like. How do we get the work of the nation to make sure we have a better outcome for our efforts? If you ask any individual worker, 'Can you work harder,' they'll say, 'No.' But we are not keeping up with the rest of the world. One way or another, we need to re-examine what we do. This goes to fundamental issues. We now have a 37.5-hour working week in Australia. I think it's 37. We've got people who only want to work four days a week, not come to work and do everything else that goes with that. I think we all, as Australians, need to put our shoulders a little harder to the wheel. I don't think I will win a lot of votes advocating for a 40-hour week. But maybe that's what we need. Maybe Australia needs to go back to having all of us going just a little bit harder. For me, a 40-hour week looks like taking most of it off. There are other people out there running delis and small businesses that are exactly the same as the people that work in this place. That is not a magic answer, but it's one option. I just think we all need to do a bit more. The proposals of an ever-expanding holiday, workplace benefits, restrictions on workplace practices, working from home, and leave entitlements forever expanding—we just need to think about what it is we do here in this place. When I hear in South Australia that the government walks in one day and decides it would be a good idea if we had an extra public holiday on Easter Sunday—that's fine for them, apart from the hospitals. No-one was working for the government on Sunday but everybody out there running a deli on that day, everybody trying to cater for public services now has to pay double time and a half on Sunday when it would have been a regular weekend rate before. Those are the decisions that are made in Parliament House that have effect on the ground and that, in the end, affect things like the way that we deliver aged care. In aged care: higher wages—good, give it a tick. Better quality care? Absolutely, we're all in favour of that. Better facilities? Absolutely, we're in favour of it. But they all cost, and so do staffing ratios. It's arguable, particularly with smaller facilities, that the staffing ratios should be different, and there should be far greater recognition. There was a little move in the last budget, for far greater recognition given the role of enrolled nurses in aged care. Now, I don't want to belittle anyone in the industry—a lot of aged care, though, is not rocket science. It's about having the right attitude—the aptitude, if you like. When people say, 'Why can't we get more people working in aged care?', I often say, 'Aged care, disability care or any other kind of care—it's not as if we are all adaptable to it or suitable.' I think you need to have vocation. Some people are just not good with other people. Maybe it's intentional or maybe it's genetic. I'm not sure they are the people that I want in aged care; I want people who are, by nature, treated by kindness, care and the capacity to take less than optimal—I don't mean in the sense of wages; I mean in the sense that they might have different customers but they need to rise above that. I think they do something very special. One of the downsides of the royal commission that I lament was the focus on some bad facilities and some bad workers that I think, in a way, degraded care workers in the eyes of the public across the board. People were saying, 'I don't enjoy the job anymore because they all think that we're abusing these oldies in here.' I know from the facilities I walked into, the people I talked to and the people I know who work within them that it is not the case. It is not anything but a very tiny minority, but that minority gained a lot of airplay in that space. It had to be exposed—I'm not saying it doesn't—but there is collateral damage that sits within the industry. So we need to pay them better. We need to provide better facilities. This bill will help with all those things. But we also need to continue to recognise the contribution that those workers in the industry make, and generally what a wonderful job they do for caring for the people in this nation, for what it is.
Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2024; Second Reading | Bills | House debates
I rise to speak on the government's Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2024. George Orwell has had a bit of trot-out in this debate. I'm not...
I rise to speak on the government's Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2024. George Orwell has had a bit of trot-out in this debate. I'm not surprised. He published Nineteen Eighty-Four 75 years ago, a novel about the control of people's lives through surveillance, propaganda and thought control. The technologies don't seems so outrageous in today's electronic world. Its underlying themes highlight the dangerous overreach that is represented in this government bill on combating misinformation and disinformation. I can understand why the government feels as though it needs to make an attempt to condition the information that some people receive. My daughter once wrote an article in the Stock Journal in South Australia. She was writing a regular column at the time. She said that, given modern information platforms, consumers need to be able to identify and assess the value of the source of the information—whether there are vested interests, where the author sourced the material and whether it's well researched or relying on second-hand hearsay, second-rate primary material. I can only heartily agree. The demise of traditional media in Australia is, as I have said in this place on a number of occasions, an underlying threat to our democracy. The funding sources that have paid for traditional media are quite quickly slipping away. They've all gone to the computer in our pocket—this thing here, our mobile devices. Real estate, cars, property, advertisements are all on the internet, hollowing out the funding streams for traditional newsrooms and journalists, who were expected to check sources for veracity, to clip things that were actually true. The replacements do not, and the question today is: do we legislate against misinformation, even in genuine error, or do we educate against it? My greatest concern about this bill is that honestly held opinions of Australians would be able to be deemed misinformation, with digital platforms required to remove them in such cases. So what of religious beliefs? Can they be categorised as wrong or right? This external assessment of beliefs is an area of concern for the religious community. Can those assessments impact on the religious schools that are operating in the education system? The bill gives the government regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, extraordinary powers to regulate speech. I'm not questioning either the independence of the ACMA or its record, but I do make the point that its chair is appointed by the Governor-General at the behest of the government of the day. That opens up questions about independence and perhaps predilections and existing opinions that they may have. More concerningly, the minister of the day will have the ability to exempt their preferred platforms, providing enormous power to control the news stream, to effectively control the message. This is where the reference to George Orwell stands out like a beacon of light—even the chant from Animal Farm, the decree of the ruling force summarised by the pigs: 'Four legs good, two legs bad.' It's a perfect example of one-line propaganda. Then, as the ruling forces adapted to the benefits of power and wealth, the chant was altered to, 'Four legs good, two legs better,' in a complete rejection of an earlier slogan, the important point being that the ruling power controls the message. Orwell said, 'If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people things they do not want to hear.' I think that's a very telling quote—the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. While we all have concerns about some of the rubbish peddled on the online platforms—me as much as anyone else, I'd have to say—we should not risk muzzling the ability of the minority to question the ruling point of view. Well-functioning democracies require open and vigorous questioning. It is the firewall which corrals corruption. Oppositions must be able to pursue questions which go to the heart of government management and honesty. This legislation risks that function. The legislation determines the minister will be able to decide whether the platforms have sufficiently censored the online posts to meet their interpretation of the truth. Inevitably governments will believe that they speak the truth and that their critics do not. The legislation will allow communications minister to personally order a misinformation investigation and misinformation hearings on terms of their choosing. The legislation will allow noble government officials to require the handover of information and documents related to information. If the major platforms do not sufficiently censor misinformation—take it off their sites—they face large fines; in fact, up to five per cent of global turnover. You would know, Mr Deputy Speaker Buchholz, that Google is a major player in this space. Google global turnover last year was US$307 billion, five per cent of which is US$23 billion. One could forgive Google if they became conservative about what they allow on their pages. In fact, they have to make a qualitative decision in front of the ACMA examination of their work. It is worth reflecting that Galileo in the 15th century was tried and found guilty of heresy and was confined to house arrest for the final nine years of his life for opposing the scientific consensus of the day that the earth was at the celestial centre of the universe and all the planets were revolving around it. He questioned the ruling scientific general opinion of the day and gave up nine years of his life for it. 'As the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?' John Maynard Keynes is often given the benefit of being the first user of that clause but it is contested. In this changing world, the concept of challenging the established order can be deemed as misleading and thus illegal. Can a case be built against the status quo? How can a case be built against the status quo? For instance, could the exposure of thalidomide or of the Khemlani loans affair happened if this legislation had been in place at the time? Could Australian whistleblowers have raised sufficient concern to have caught the attention of the public on issues such as PFAS contamination to prosecute their case? I am indebted to the member for Barker, who just spoke on the recent referendum in Australia. What constraints would have been put on at least one side of that referendum debate by the minister of the day being able to control which organisations can sell the message and which ones can't? Can they refer an investigation on the very things that the member for Barker raised? Are all of those concerns unknowns? It just feels like overreach on every level. Is it the baby or is it the bathwater? Me thinks, in this case, the bill goes too far. This legislation is unparalleled in other like-minded countries. Places like the USA and the United Kingdom don't have laws that even come close to what the Albanese government is proposing. Like other MPs, I have received a high level of concern on this, and I can assure the public that the coalition is strongly opposed to it. There are so many other things that sit within it. I talked about the newsrooms of Australia and the fact that they are fewer and further between the journalists, the people who we would trust with the kind of information that we rely on. We were given an apology from the ABC again yesterday. The one news organisation that this parliament funds to give a true and factual correct record has been caught out yet again. There seems to be a conga line of apologies coming from the ABC. There have been people on this side of politics who have for a long time thought that the ABC is a biased organisation; it is no longer trustworthy. In fact, why would an organisation that had the most trustworthy news service in the world have to continually advertise that fact to us? Methinks that maybe they are not confident about their own claim. We are reducing all the time. We don't have those radical news sources now. While on one hand the government argues that the contributions of those who are mischievous is causing a problem, it should also concede that there are people out there who have genuine concerns and are able to raise issues, using the megaphone of the electronic media, and bring this parliament's attention to the problems that exist within. Without that megaphone that they have at the moment, perhaps they can't move the case. So it's too dangerous for me. We are a free democracy. I think we need to find another way to crack this nut, if that's what is required. So I will be voting against this along with my colleagues, and I commend that case to the parliament.
Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) Bill 2024; Second Reading | Bills | House debates
I rise to speak on the Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) Bill 2024. It's difficult to make any argument against better wages for childcare workers, and...
I rise to speak on the Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) Bill 2024. It's difficult to make any argument against better wages for childcare workers, and I certainly don't intend to. This side of the House will be supporting these increases. But it is worth considering in this debate how we've got to this point and, probably more to the point, what the increase will achieve, given the current economics of the nation. This wage increase is to be 15 per cent over the next two years, with the first instalment of 10 per cent coming next month and another five per cent in December 2025. There are some conditions that are outstanding at the moment, and we're told there are more. At this stage the childcare centres and the companies that run them, the organisations, are unsure what the extra criteria will be. They know not what the changes will be, and it's supposed to start next month, in December. We can assume, maybe, that it's not 1 December. But, certainly, this needs to be in place by the middle of the month or so—six or seven weeks at the maximum. Yet the government seems to have not yet sat down with industry and worked out exactly how it's going to run. This government has a track record of doing exactly that, of making a motherhood statement—a grand announcement, if you like—and then trying to work out the detail afterwards. Only this morning I picked up the Australian and it was telling me that the Labor government will make the decision, perhaps on Melbourne Cup Day, that the $7 billion investment in the military satellite program is to be axed. It was only 18 months ago that they made the decision. So, in 18 months, they made a decision to spend $7 billion on a new military satellite system for Australia and then walked away from it. This has the feel of The Hollowmen. They make the big, bold announcement without considering the detail of how on earth they're going to get there in the endgame. There's been a whole host of Labor policies across the board that have been in this ilk. One would think that this one will be delivered, because at the end of the day they're dealing with taxpayers' dollars and a known number of workers, but it is running it down to the line. Why on earth wasn't this work done when the policy was announced back in August so that organisations—companies, councils, community organisations—that run these daycare centres can make ongoing, concrete decisions on what they know will be the situation? The higher wages for childcare workers and carers were announced, as I said, on 8 August. And I read in the government's notes that this program will run for just two years. Then what? What happens after that two-year period? It gets us past the next election, sure. I understand that. But what happens after that two-year period? Does the funding just stop? At this stage that's exactly what it will do, on 30 November 2026. Will the childcare centres or the parents then be lumped with this wage increase, which by then will be well and truly locked in? There won't be any going back on wage increases, and I don't think anyone would be suggesting that. But it becomes a question then of who will pay for it and how it will be paid for. The problem when government starts subsidising anything, but certainly wages, is how they get off the sticky paper. If wage increases are not accompanied by efficiency gains, in the end it can only come out of the taxpayers' pockets and out of the industries that drive the economy. By that I don't mean to downgrade any industry but what we would have called, when we went to school, the primary and secondary industries, the ones that create wealth. A wage increase for a government funded workforce can only come at the expense of others. The problem with these jobs in particular is that this government has no focus on driving productivity at the same time that it makes the wage increases. That is dangerous for the books of Australia and our underlying success in the longer term future. We know that the lowest paid childcare worker at the moment receives around $24 an hour, and that's somewhere less than $50,000 a year—I'm assuming a 37-hour week or thereabouts, which is $46,000 or $47,000. That's no princely sum for somebody who's well educated in their area. If we want good people to work in that area, I think we ought to accept the fact that it's got to have a higher wage. But there needs to be more focus on how child care is delivered in this nation so we don't fall into this trap of just throwing more money and not getting a different result out of it. The rub is that while this wage is going up, the cost of living is exploding. The government has actually been forced into having to take this step because people have been falling out of child care. The cost of living is increasing exponentially, it seems. I went to a suburban supermarket the other day. It's on the eastern side of Adelaide; I'll admit that. It was $85 for a kilogram of undercut steak—85 bucks. Gee whiz! That's just about out of reach for most, I'd say. It was $16 for sausages. If people think that the cost of living's only going up by three or four per cent, have another think. The things that families buy—electricity, council rates, insurance, education—are all going up by greater amounts than the headline inflation rates. This wage increase will be welcome, but it will be eroded quite quickly unless something changes in the way this economy is being managed. It's worth recalling that in 2023 the government put $3.6 billion into child care for reducing subsidies. The subsidies for anyone under $83,000 a year went from 85 per cent to 90 per cent. Effectively, the parent had a reduction of 30 per cent of their payment for the child care. Everyone welcomed that, saying, 'What a wonderful outcome.' But what's happened since that time? This extra $3.6 billion has gone into the sector, and the price of child care has gone up by 12 per cent. This was supposed to reduce rates for parents, so where's the money gone? We know that the centres aren't making a fortune and that it hasn't gone into profits. It's gone into the inflated costs of all the things that childcare centres have to buy, which are remarkably similar to those things that the parents have to buy—electricity; council rates; labour, in this particular case; and insurance. Most of those things are controlled or at least driven by government decisions. It hasn't had the effect that one might have thought or that the government certainly thought, and I wonder if they're actually across their economic brief well enough to understand what they're doing with the economy generally. We've seen another announcement today about HECS debts. This is off-budget money, for goodness sake. It actually turns out to be quite counter productive to the economy and all the people that have to work within it. They have form here in the childcare sector. During the six years of the former Labor government—the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years—there was a 54 per cent increase in childcare costs, around nine per cent a year, and now we're having a 12 per cent increase in childcare costs. Over those six years, they averaged around nine per cent a year. Whatever it is they do to child care, they certainly know how to drive the cost of it up. If we keep driving the cost of these services up exponentially across Australia—don't get me started on the NDIS, the health sector or a number of other things—Australia becomes unsustainable. That's why these are serious issues. We are not opposing this wage increase, but the government needs to better understand what it is doing to manage the economy. There's another line in the government's statement that greatly concerns me—and I've spoken in this chamber many times about this. It says, 'This increase will not apply to family day care or home care educators.' They're not eligible. I'm here to tell you that around 30 or 35 per cent of my electorate lives in a childcare desert. It's one of the worst in Australia, and, in many of these towns and communities, family day care and home care are just the kind of child care that can be established in what I call these suboptimal populations. We know that if we have fewer than about 4,000 people in a community—if there are only 3,000 or 4,000 people in the community—a commercial model of childcare delivery is simply not viable, and yet the government seems to be completely content to allow that situation to continue. The government has put $3.6 billion into lifting the subsidies for parents and another $4.7 billion, I think, for higher wages in the sector, but not one dollar for a new place in the childcare deserts of Australia. Increasingly, we see governments—and we also saw the Royal Commission into Early Childhood Education and Care in South Australia, chaired by Julia Gillard—recommend that early years learning from three years of age should be available universally. It should be available to every child in Australia, yet we've got all these people living in communities that absolutely cannot access any kind of child care. It's holding the communities back. Companies can't recruit workforce to their operations, because, when a family arrives and asks, 'Where's the childcare centre?' they're told, 'Oh, we haven't got one; you'll have to take them to your own family,' and the family says, 'Well, my family doesn't live here. They live in Queensland.' It's creating a handbrake right across the economy. It's the government's role. I've said in this place many times that, in South Australia, we have a thing called rural care. It's where the Department for Education in South Australia stepped up to the plate with 18 centres across South Australia—I think 17 were in my own electorate—recognising that the best organisation to deliver child care in smaller communities is the education department. What we need is for the federal minister to speak to the state ministers about coming to an agreement about how you fill this gap. I have no doubt that, if you've got a population of fewer than 2,000 or 3,000 people, the education department is by far the best organisation to be delivering early years learning. They have schools, staff and campuses. They have administration; they have a gardener—the whole bit. It might run at a loss, but it'll run at less of a loss than anyone else doing it. That's the place for the federal government to step in and find common ground with that state government. I've got centres from all across South Australia in that boat. Towns like Wilmington, Booleroo, Kadina, Kimba—my home town—Wudinna and Orroroo are all looking for increased places or just some places in the childcare system. This is something that I feel quite passionately about. It shouldn't be acceptable that people in the regions, in the country and in the rural areas get to pay higher taxes to fund a service that they can't access so people in the city can access that service at a cheaper rate. It just doesn't wash with me. It's like universal health care—if it's going to be universal, it has to be universal care. I know we're not going to have brain surgeons in every little country town in Australia, but how about we have doctors in every country town in Australia or we properly fund our hospitals so they can manage and not take away all the skills and responsibilities that small country hospitals have until they are very little more than aged-care services. These services are very important to these communities, but they shouldn't be undermined in their ability to deliver these services. I'll leave my comments with that.
Nuclear Energy Select Committee; Appointment | Committees | House debates
Let me say from the outset that I strongly support the amendments put forward by the member for Fairfax at the beginning of this debate. It is no secret, of course, that I'm a supporter of...
Let me say from the outset that I strongly support the amendments put forward by the member for Fairfax at the beginning of this debate. It is no secret, of course, that I'm a supporter of nuclear energy. I think it is the right way forward for Australia. Not only do I think it's the right way forward for Australia; it seems that the top economic nations of the world actually agree with that point of view, and they want to go in that direction as well. I'm a little bit more jaded than the member for Sturt may be. I've been here a bit longer than him, and he seemed to show great faith that the government was doing this in good faith—that they are actually looking for the possibilities for a nuclear future for Australia, to give it real consideration and put the merits on the table. Next month I will have been in this place for 17 years, and I'm afraid that my confidence in his assessment of the government is severely tested. Has the government come to a reality moment? I suspect not. The minister is in the chamber at the moment, and it's not hard to find quotes from him on his opinion of nuclear energy. I suppose, if the government is going to push ahead, one of the first casualties would be the minister's future as minister, because, obviously, he could not pilot that kind of policy reform through the chamber. He said it's the most expensive form of energy in the world, it won't work and it definitely will not happen in Australia. Now, presumably, he is behind this piece of legislation that is set to throw light on this issue. He may be in for a great disappointment. He's wrongly called this story at just about every step of the way thus far, and, of course, any committee will have to accept contributions from the public as they come forward. I suspect there will be a lot of very strong scientific contributions to this committee. It will be a far better committee if the amendments put forward by the member for Fairfax are agreed to. I don't think the evidence coming forward to the committee will suit the minister's point of view. The problem the government has with nuclear energy is that it just doesn't fit its narrative—the 100 per cent renewable future that they are determined to take Australia into. It's worth noting that this committee will, as all select committees are, be controlled by the government, and it will be interesting to see what it's findings are at the end. It doesn't suit the government's narrative, but it shows how out of touch they are with the Australian public, because the conversation has moved on, not just in Australia but around the world, as nations are facing the reality of net zero and how we get there. When any nation, any country, any economy goes down the pathway of renewables, they find out that the firming up of that technology increases exponentially. Remember, earlier in the debates around the world on climate change, there was a lot of discussion about the J curve. But I'm telling you there's a new J curve in vogue here, and it comes to renewable energy—that when you begin to install renewable energy it's very cheap to back up. It's already there; it's free. But, as we've seen in South Australia, if you have enough cheap energy coming into the market—and renewable energy is cheap to generate; I don't make any bones about that—there is the problem that it puts the baseload generators out of business, and then you've got nothing to back it up when the wind's not blowing and the sun's not shining. I've said in this chamber before how lucky we are in Australia to have South Australia as a test case, as the canary in the coalmine. We have demonstrated in South Australia that this is exactly not the way to go. We have, in South Australia, the highest level of renewable energy in Australia, barring Tasmania, by double—twice as high as in any other state in Australia. And our retail electricity prices are 50 per cent higher than in the next state. I have a bill sitting on my computer at the moment. I was speaking to a business owner in Port Augusta the other day. And it's interesting that it was Port Augusta; the member for Hunter mentioned Port Augusta. Two years ago this business owner was paying 32c a kilowatt for electricity, and on the last bill it was 60c. We haven't quite hit a 100 per cent increase. But how on earth is anyone expected to run a business under those circumstances? This business owner has installed a large number of solar rooftop generators—PV. He's getting the princely sum of 5c a kilowatt hour for his contribution to the power network. It is interesting that it was in Port Augusta, because of course Port Augusta is one of those places the coalition have nominated as a possible site for nuclear power stations. I thought the best I could do would be to put a circular out in Port Augusta. It was a nice four-page contribution, with a letter from Member Rowan Ramsey to the people of Port Augusta about how I think this would be very good for their future. The other day I asked my staff, 'What feedback did we get on that?' It turns out that we haven't had any feedback. So I rang up my mate in Port Augusta and asked, 'Did you get a publication about nuclear energy with a letter from me on the front of it?' He said, 'Yes, I got that alright.' I said, 'I haven't had any negative feedback; I haven't had any feedback at all.' And he said, 'No, that's because everyone I know just reckons it's a good idea and let's get on with it!' So, if the government thinks they're going to run a scare campaign around these places that have been nominated as possible sites for nuclear reactors, they're wrong. That is why I say that they are out of step with public opinion on this. I think there are two things that have primarily changed here, and I thank the member for Sturt for bringing up the issue of AUKUS. You can't on one hand say it is safe to put nuclear reactors in a tin can, stick a heap of Australian sailors in it and then park it in the middle of one of Australia's bigger cities—because they won't be parked just in Adelaide; these submarines will visit Sydney and Melbourne. They will say, 'That's perfectly safe,' but, if you were to move that reactor onto the dock alongside the submarine, then, of course, it's a horrific idea and it would poison the whole of Australia. These are ridiculous arguments. It is immature of the government to assess the Australian public's perception, understanding and intelligence by belittling nuclear energy. Maybe they have had that dose of reality, as the member for Sturt hopes. I suspect not. This is all about a government in panic leading up to an election. Why did we spend half of question time yesterday talking about selling off the NBN, which no-one has any intention of doing? These are distractions. Why did the Prime Minister have question time in the morning and then scurry out of Australia? Because a torch is well and truly on the government, and they are seeking to divert the attention away from their failings on just about every level on any issue that you would like to bring up. We're watching a government in meltdown, in the final stages of attacking itself. This morning, there was a contribution to the media from the Minister for Defence's former chief of staff. Things are coming apart at the seams. The government have been talking about putting in regulations on gambling advertising, and we go month after month because they're stuck. They can't work their way through the muddle. So what do they do now? They say, 'Let's bring out nuclear energy,' and, 'Let's bring out the scare campaigns,' and, 'Let's give the Greens a chance to come onto this committee to try and scare all those poor Australian children out there by telling them that their future is going to be clouded by the green vapour of nuclear energy.' It is so shallow. It is so transparent and pathetic, and the Australian public will see through it; I have absolutely no doubt about that. It will be seen through by the electors of Grey. I'm becoming increasingly confident that by about April or May—when I no longer have a job in this place—I'll be picking up the newspaper in South Australia and reading about Prime Minister Dutton. I'm looking forward to it.
Grey Electorate: First Nations Australians | Grievance Debate | House debates
I've been the member for Grey for 17 years—well, it will be 17 years in November. I have announced my retirement, so I won't be coming back after the next election, whenever that might be....
I've been the member for Grey for 17 years—well, it will be 17 years in November. I have announced my retirement, so I won't be coming back after the next election, whenever that might be. I appreciate your concern. Thank you, member for McEwen. I've worked hard with my electorate, to stay in touch. Grey is not an easy electorate. Many say, 'How do you manage the travel?' It's difficult. I think the range of subject matter is a more difficult issue; it's enormous across an electorate like Grey. I've worked particularly hard to try and stay in touch with my Indigenous community. Around 7½ per cent of Grey is Indigenous. By my estimate, about 40 per cent of those live in remote Indigenous communities. It is there that I see the biggest gap, as it were. Generally, in urban areas Indigenous people are going okay, with some exceeding and others failing but a great number who are well adjusted, employed, raising families and participating in mainstream Australia. There's still a gap, but we're closing that gap. But this is why I visited the APY Lands. I try to get up there about twice a year, and it's quite an effort to do so. I tell people it's a thousand kilometres from my gate to the turn-off, without going out of the electorate, and then it's another eight hours through to the Western Australian border. So, when I go, it takes me a week. I try to always drive. I could fly, because the taxpayers are good enough to fund charter flights for you, but when I land there the first thing I need is a car. I need to travel from community to community; find the leaders, the people, the workers and the programs; and see how it's going on the ground. I tend to go unannounced. The census says there are about 2,400 people living on the Lands. I think there are more than that, and it's not surprising that the census may not be completely accurate up there. By the 2022 figures—I can't find anything more recent—there are 568 enrolled in school. It's difficult to pin down, but the general estimate is that we think somewhere between $250 million and $350 million is spent by the taxpayer each year in maintaining that population. That's enormous, but I don't begrudge that money, because nowhere is that gap between Indigenous Australia and mainstream Australia so obvious as in places like the APY Lands and some other remote Indigenous settlements that I have. But I think the bigger question is: what do we get for our money? We have better housing, even though I was just up there two weeks ago and I regret to inform the House that there are currently seven burnt-out million-dollar-plus houses up there. We are getting three new police stations again, and I think that'll take it up to about eight under construction at the moment. They are about $5 million a throw. There are health centres, and they're very good health centres. I take my hat off to those people who work there and bring great services to that area. There is investment in shops. In my time, there have been new shops in Fregon and Amata. There are swimming pools—a new swimming pool was just built at Ernabella—and a youth centre, which I estimate to be worth about $6 million. Sadly, I have to report—and this is the story of the APY Lands—that the youth centre is closed due to vandalism. The toilets have been destroyed. The swimming pool supervisor has left. The swimming pool has never been used, and it's full of rocks and has gone green. We put $106 million into turning the main access road on the APY Lands into all-weather. Some of that's bitumen. We fund the Indigenous rangers. We fund art centres. It goes on and on. After 17 years, I would say the place is physically in far better shape but the outcomes are worse. That's a tragedy, and it's something that really upsets me. We spend more than half a billion dollars a year there, and it's getting worse. So, clearly, something's not working. Everywhere we have government workers, NGOs and charities, and when I speak to them they all try to convince me of what a great job they're doing: 'This program is really making a difference.' They all tell me that. I think, 'Oh, that sounds pretty good,' but I challenge them back and say, 'If your program's doing such a good job, why is the place getting worse?' You can almost see the blood run from their faces. No-one's ever thought of that question before. So my conclusion is that the model is failing. I struggle to think of a program where maintaining and even expanding a population in a remote area, with no natural economy to support them, could be more guaranteed to destroy a culture than what we're doing. For the men, especially, everything they did traditionally is now superfluous to their living. It is replaced by the government. It's no wonder that there's no respect for the elders anymore. It's no wonder that young people are bored and they turn to drugs and alcohol. Unfortunately the next outcome of that is violence, including domestic violence, and abuse of children. There are horrific stories. We have heard Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price tell those stories in the other place. There has been a debasement of traditional values. For instance—sounds good—we have sorry camp. I have been to a sorry camp that had been going for two months. During sorry camp, they vacate the houses. They live down in a creek bed or wherever amongst the flies, with babies crawling around, no sanitation. It is not possible to believe that traditionally they did not bury their dead within two days. It is a hot part of the world; there would be nothing left after two weeks. Yet now they go for weeks. They disrupt school. They disrupt the whole community. I have a good friend who has been through business who says it's getting more and more violent and he doesn't like what's happening. I said, 'Why do you do it?' He said, 'I go along to try and moderate.' I asked: 'Would you like your children to go?' He said, 'Absolutely not.' Old people—the tjilpis, the minas—speak to me almost crying, telling me what has become of their families from the domestic violence, crime, child abuse, children in kinship care, which is failing; it is overloaded. It cannot continue indefinitely. I'm going to have to round this up; I'm running out of time. I said to the member as we came in, 'We need longer speeches in this place to put down more important stories.' But the do-gooders in the city think they're doing a good job in these remote lands. I regret to inform this place: they are not; we are on the wrong track. Senator Nampijinpa Price has called for an audit of all these programs and I fully support it. It is absolutely what needs to happen. There are a whole lot of programs not doing any good. The people on them believe they are doing good, and I don't blame them personally, but it is not cutting the mustard. We need to bring back mutual responsibility. We had a work for the dole program, the community development program. There is no longer any compunction to work. We had, in Ceduna at least and a few other places, the cashless debit card. It made an enormous difference. It needs to be rolled out over a much wider footprint. There needs to be mutual responsibility. We need to make people—parents—responsible for sending their children to school. The problem is, when the government moves in, it then becomes the government's job to get the children to school. I know we need to children well fed to think and function in school, but once the school takes over the breakfast program and then the lunch program, guess who owns it? It becomes the school's job to feed the kids and those same kids will go hungry in school holidays and on weekends. It's not the answer. The answer is we need to build responsibility. Noel Pearson says we need these people to be able to walk in two worlds, and I fully support that. We need the schools to function at a level that will enable children to go away, to participate in the wider world where there is an economy, where there's a chance to get a job, where they can join their urban cousins, which I talked about at the beginning of the speech, and actually have a chance of success in life. Because when I see a three-, four-, five- or six-year-old up there, I just think, 'You poor bugger. How are you ever going to get out of this?' We send them away to school for a while. Parents will let them to go down to a school in Adelaide but, by and large, they want them to come home. You can understand why people want their kids to come home, but home isn't a place where they can thrive; home is a place of disaster. It is going the wrong way. It is one of my great sorrows, the fact that I'm winding up a 17-year career and I have not made a significant difference in that area. I have tried but I feel that, at the end of it, we are actually worse off than when I began.