Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

They are in the Pacific; their one problem is that they hold Australian citizenship. It seems that you do not get as many brownie points if you are the foreign affairs minister or the minister for community services if you are helping your own, your Torres Strait Islander communities, compared to being out there saying to the Pacific islanders, ‘Yes, you need a hand too.’ That is not good enough.

We have a two-speed economy developing in Australia of the rural areas and metropolitan Australia. We have a back being turned on communities that are in enormous need but sadly are not on tram tracks, not in suburbia and not in CBDs of capital cities. We cannot continue in Australia to have our values of a fair go, with everybody paying their taxes—for example, flood levies being applied right across the populations whether you lost some of those 4,000 kilometres of fencing or not—and have the sense that you are all in there making the effort, but when it comes to your individual needs, if you are a community way beyond the cities and regional centres of Australia, you just do not matter.

I commend this motion. I say to the member for Leichhardt: what an important thing you are doing today. The coalition, yes, will do the job, but unfortunately we need to have this job done tomorrow to rebuild the sea walls of these low-lying islands. It is not fair that those small communities are suffering in the way that they are. They are Australians. They do their best. They stood between us and the Japanese some 60 years ago. No-one then said, ‘Oh, we don’t care much about what happens out there.’ We understood that they were the doorway, the gateway, to the rest of the country—

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