Judi Moylan (Pearce, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The opportunity to stand in this House is a great privilege, and I would like to thank the people of Pearce for trusting me, for a seventh time, to represent their interests. I am continually in awe of the strength of our democracy, even though it is often maligned, and I am continually reminded what a privilege it is to participate in the great democratic process of this House. I am nevertheless mindful of the large number of people who cast informal votes in this election, who clearly feel disenfranchised. The close result serves to remind me—and, indeed everyone in this House—of the duty of care. In my case it is a duty of care in the conduct and consideration of the business of this House and the solemn obligation to work to restore the confidence of those who chose not to engage in this election by voting informally. How good it would be, though, if the public could see more of the constructive, bipartisan nature of the work that goes on here through the committees. That rarely gets aired in the public portrayal of our work in this place.

Of course our system of democracy is not perfect. I am reminded of the words of Sir Robert Menzies who, in his ‘The forgotten people’ radio speech, confessed:

I, like you, am aware of the weaknesses of democracy, of its occasional stupidities and shallowness, its temptation to prefer the rabble-rousing spell binder … But, giving all this in, I believe in democracy as the only method of government which can produce justice based upon the recognition of enduring human values.

The suite of changes ushered in with this new parliament present me with greater opportunities to speak and represent the people of Pearce, as well as to bring attention to issues that require reform, and I am grateful for the opportunity to make a contribution in that respect. Of course, one of the agreed parliamentary changes has been to have greater independence of the Speaker. I have not had the opportunity in the big House to congratulate the member for Scullin on his reappointment to that high office, but I do so on this occasion of my contribution to the address-in-reply debate.

To successfully contest an election one requires a veritable army of people to assist. And those people seem to necessarily have a great belief in our great democratic processes, because they give a lot of time voluntarily to this cause. It is very much a team effort. It is therefore a great pleasure for me to acknowledge and thank the Western Australian State Director of the Liberal Party, Ben Morton, and his team, including campaign officer Whittney Jago, as well as the State President, Barry Court, and his executive.

The Pearce campaign, I have to say, was brilliantly run by an experienced campaign committee to whom I am indebted. It is more than I deserve. No member could have been better supported than I was, once again, by campaign chair Lane Taylor and the team, including Ron Farris, Stuart Burling, Trevor Hancock, Kirstin Mardardy, Pearce Divisional President Rod Henderson and my staff, Jana Allan, Anne Bagot, Conrad Natoli, Simon Hall, Michael Spark and Ros Wright. My campaign team was supported by the members of the Pearce division of the Liberal Party, and I was particularly grateful to the many generous donors and helpers. We had about 350 volunteers assisting in the lead-up to the election and on the day; I have to say I am extremely grateful for their generous contributions to the success of that campaign in Pearce.

Being the first Liberal woman to be elected to the House of Representatives in Western Australia for the so-called conservative parties in 1993, it is a particular pleasure for me to be able to welcome my fellow Western Australian, the member for Hasluck, Ken Wyatt, the first Aboriginal elected to the House of Representatives. His electorate neighbours Pearce. Listening to the member’s address-in-reply speech, I was deeply moved by a quote he read from Nelson Mandela that said:

Education is the great engine of personal development. It is through education that the daughter of a peasant can become a doctor, that a son of a mineworker can become the head of the mine, that a child of farm workers can become the president of a great nation.

I always get a little choked up when I read that, but I would like to add a personal note: ‘and the daughter of a railway man can take a seat in this great parliament’. Mandela’s words are a timeless reminder that governments should provide to every citizen the opportunity to reach their full potential. Menzies spoke of the many forgotten people in his era whose values he described as relating to homes material, homes human and homes spiritual.

Homes material refers literally to those saving for their own home, and we might care to reflect that the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute estimates that in Australia today more than 860,000 low-income households are currently experiencing housing stress. That is just over 15 per cent of all Australian households. The housing crisis is one I have spoken on in several successive address-in-reply speeches in this place, and it is a crisis that continues to mount.

Yesterday the West Australian reported that there are 55,000 people on the waiting list for social housing in Western Australia alone. Why should this concern us? Well it comes back to the other two homes that Menzies referred to in his forgotten people speech. Explaining the concept of homes human, Menzies remarked:

My home is where my wife and children are. The instinct to be with them is the great instinct of civilised man; the instinct to give them a chance in life …

All parents share this desire to give their child or children the best possible chance in life, yet some families face greater challenges than others. And as this country becomes increasingly wealthy, there is a very substantial underclass of people developing who are not keeping pace with the great wealth growth of others. More than 1.2 million Australians have profound or severe disability, for example, and because of limited services family members often provide most of the care with a disproportionate number of women carrying that work. Carers frequently feel sidelined, financially disadvantaged and despairing at the lack of respite available to them.

Those with mental illnesses face the additional challenge of this illness being swept under the carpet of the nation’s collective conscience. An estimated 20 per cent of the population have suffered mental health disorders, yet our mental health services are desperately underfunded. I applaud the efforts of those generous souls running services such as the Avon Youth in the wheat belt town of Northam in my electorate, and elsewhere, always struggling for funding and doing their best in what can only be described as very challenging circumstances.

The Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth will be holding a workshop in Canberra in December to raise issues affecting children and young people. To some extent this builds on the work that I participated in in the previous parliament as part of the Standing Committee on Family, Community, Housing and Youth looking at the issues that affect children and young people. I am looking forward to attending that workshop, because I think a country, a government and a society can very much be judged on how it cares for its children, its aged and its disadvantaged.

Finally, Menzies spoke of ‘homes spiritual’—going back to that theme—the fabric that draws together. He noted:

In war, as indeed at most times, we become the ready victims of phrases. We speak glibly of many things without pausing to consider what they signify. … We speak of “morale” as if it were a quality … created by others … when in truth there can be no national morale which is not based upon the individual courage of men and women.

The challenges of today are no less onerous than those of previous generations. We face wars of a different kind. It has been a sad duty for me to attend Pearce air base on several occasions as the bodies of some of our young men serving in Afghanistan have been returned to Australia and their broken-hearted families, friends and communities. I pay tribute to our service men and women and their families and hope that, whatever our views may be on the conflict in Afghanistan, we will always seek to honour the memory of these young people and respect the sacrifice they have made in the course of their duty to Australia.

We face other challenges of varying nature. How are we going to provide water? How are we going to grow enough food? How are we going to provide the amount of infrastructure that such a large continent requires with such a rapidly growing population? We need to think about the energy issues that will confront us in the decades ahead and we need to think about how we can leave our environment in good shape for the future. So I think that, loosely speaking, the wars of today and the challenges of today are no less onerous than those of the Menzies era, just a little different. Our democracy may have its weaknesses, and no doubt this parliamentary term will have its occasional rabblerousing, but I am personally committed to endeavouring to seek the justice that Menzies so eloquently spoke of and to remember the many forgotten people in our midst today.

Going back to the theme of education, one of the greatest gifts we can give all children and young people, apart from the basics of stable accommodation, good nutrition and a safe and stable community to live in, is education and training. They can then take their place in the wider community confident in the knowledge that they can take control over their own lives. The member for Hasluck has already spoken to me about our mutual interest in education and training. We have committed to working together to ensure that the eastern region of Perth in Western Australia offers opportunity to young people from primary to tertiary level education. We share areas where we have some of the most disadvantaged young people, and most of the places of higher education in Perth are located in the western suburbs or the southern part of the northern suburbs.

It has long been my dream to ensure that we have adequate higher education places in the eastern region. We started on that a few years ago and made good progress. I know that my community in the Avon are keen to ensure that Muresk Agricultural College, which is actually closed at the present time, has a robust future. I am committed to supporting the community in the continuity of courses on the campus to give rural students tertiary opportunities they may not otherwise have. Trade training opportunities are also a priority. Under the previous government we anticipated an Australian Technical College being located in the eastern region to offer further opportunities to young people—and I strongly supported that.

The eastern region is a fast-growing region with tremendous pressures on major roads, such as the Great Eastern Highway and the Great Northern Highway—highways of national significance—and the need for a bypass road through the beautiful Swan Valley and the Chittering is now an urgent priority. I have been pleased to work with the community in an effort to speed up funding commitments by both the state and federal governments. This road carries traffic through the heart of the beautiful Swan Valley—one of the oldest wine-growing regions in Western Australia and an iconic tourist precinct.

With the volume of heavy haulage vehicles using this road due to the mining boom, it is now obvious that this needs urgent priority. A delay in this work will jeopardise future developments in the north-west as this becomes a traffic bottleneck, compromising the integrity of the Swan Valley as a tourist precinct and putting the lives of road users at risk. I had the pleasure of having a meeting with the state minister for transport, Simon O’Brien, just recently to raise this and other issues such as the Great Eastern Highway, which is equally important in carrying the traffic from the eastern seaboard of Australia to the ports and airport and other places in Western Australia.

Given the profile of the Pearce electorate, regional tourism has been a matter of great interest, particularly in the lead-up to the election because it is a major provider of jobs and it boosts the local economy. We need to have a new funding model for regional tourist offices, and I have made a commitment to work to that end. As I said, many small business people become engaged in regional tourism. It is very important to local economies, and at the moment we do not seem to have a funding model that actually fits. There is a great deal of work that could be done for minimum cost with the use of the internet.

Talking about internet use, also marking the civilised man, according to Menzies, is ‘the life which finds room for literature, for arts and for science’. The digital revolution has provided the greatest tool through which we can exchange and experience mankind’s richness of culture and discovery. It is just wonderful if we can learn to use it productively. I suppose it was thought of as a bit of a luxury to begin with, but the internet has fast become a necessity underpinning education, the economy, our social life and even the delivery of health care into the future. But speed has become the singular focus of debate rather than a broader conversation about how we view this powerful technology interacting with and adding value to our daily lives. Vision should drive policy, not technicalities; yet an overarching vision is missing in the debate about the internet and the ability for all people to be able to access it.

Finally, there are many priorities for the electorate of Pearce, including primary health care and while we have largely dealt with the issue of infectious disease, the real challenge today is chronic illness—and diabetes is perhaps one of those illnesses on a relentless march and much more does need to be done to emphasise preventative health. I am pleased to see the government’s recent commitment to preventative health, but one of the key barriers to better preventative health is the pressure on our overworked general practitioners, and access to primary health care could be and should be a major contributor to keeping people healthy.

Again, in the regions that I represent, there is a great deficiency of doctors and of primary health care. It was a matter of great sadness to me and indeed to the whole Avon community that two children recently died as a result of the lack of medical treatment in the country town of Northam. This country town is about an hour and a half out of the centre of the city. It is just a complete tragedy that two children should lose their lives because there was not a doctor on duty at the regional hospital.

I am pleased that, in working with the Wheatbelt GP Network, the minister did send me a note just recently to say that there will be a GP clinic established in Northam to supplement health care there. I have also spoken to the health minister about the need for a rural training school for doctors so that we are not just trying to plug holes all the time but growing our pool of doctors for the wheat belt into the future.

In conclusion, our democracy may have its weaknesses, and no doubt this parliamentary term will have its occasional rabble-rousing, but through it I will endeavour to seek the justice which Menzies so fondly spoke of and not forget the forgotten people.

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