Anthony Byrne (Holt, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Last Saturday afternoon I hosted a neighbourhood barbecue attended by some 200 people who came from Cranbourne—good working-class people, working families, people from every demographic in that area. It was an open gathering and it was intended to restore and remember the sense of community that existed in Cranbourne. Cranbourne gets a lot of bad press, particularly on programs like The Footy Show, with Sam Newman trying to make people from Cranbourne look like village idiots.

Cranbourne is a fantastic place to which a lot of young working families are shifting to make a new life. It is those working families which have been delivering the economic prosperity that our country enjoys. They should get some reciprocation for the work that they put into the country but they are not getting that in a range of areas. For example, a Medicare office has been established in the Cranbourne shopping centre. After 10 years of lobbying in Cranbourne, this office was finally opened by the government in April 2005. But when it was opened, people could not access the service on a Thursday night or a Saturday morning. That really irritated the people. That fact was actually raised at the community barbecue last Saturday. They pay their taxes and they get a Medicare office after 10 years of lobbying, but they do not have access to that service on Thursday evenings or Saturday mornings, unlike Frankston, Fountain Gate and Dandenong.

People from Cranbourne were asking: why is this so? We therefore wrote to the Minister for Human Services, Senator Ellison. His response was, in effect, that we did not need it. That is not the feedback we are getting from the residents of Cranbourne. They are saying that they do want access to this particular service, because they are working families and they would like to be able to access the facility on a Thursday night and a Saturday morning. Having spent 10 years, as I said, along with the residents of Cranbourne—and I note that the member for Flinders has walked into this place—lobbying for a Medicare office, they now have a Medicare office, but they actually want, like Fountain Gate, Dandenong and Frankston, the capacity to access this service on a Thursday night and a Saturday morning.

I also know that, to date, there has been no funding for the Cranbourne aquatic and leisure centre. But I understand that the member for Flinders is strongly supportive of federal government funding for this particular facility. It is an innovative facility. It is a facility that has a two-million-litre underground storage facility.

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