Cathy McGowan (Indi, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to make my contribution to the address-in-reply and the debate on the Governor-General's speech. In December 2013, when I delivered my first speech in parliament, I said:

The people of Indi have a vision for a community where people feel they belong and have a sense of purpose, where people pull together and help each other, where diversity, acceptance and tolerance are valued; a community that has quality services, infrastructure, education, jobs and health and opportunities for the next generation.

In this speech today in parliament I want to talk about some of the work we have done since that first speech was made, the agenda for this term of parliament and the call to action to the people of Indi to take the Indi way of working and move it on to the next stages.

I would particularly like to begin by acknowledging and recognising the work of my community. As an Independent member of parliament, the community plays an integral role in ensuring that I act as an effective local member. My community understands the issues, and I need to make sure that I stay connected to my community so that I understand the issues. The Indi way, as we call it, started with the involvement and enthusiasm of country young people, the young people in my community, and it continued with a commitment to training, support and empowerment of volunteers. We took the enthusiasm and the energy and together we moulded it and gave direction to that want to make the world a better place. And we encouraged, with all our volunteers, a commitment to values, to be respectful, to be our best selves, to acknowledge difference and to take responsibility for ourselves and our actions. Ultimately, this model builds on the understanding that our democracy is important to us. But democracy means everybody has the chance to have their voices heard, to engage in political action and to actually work for the change that they want to see. In north-east Victoria we value democracy, we value participation and we want to make sure it is continued.

Part of my role as a member of parliament is the facilitation and the development of anybody who is interested in learning about politics. There are a whole lot of ways that we do that. We have volunteers who come to Canberra. We have learning and training programs through the office. I go out to communities. I speak to schools. Schools come to Canberra. We have leadership development programs. There are a myriad of ways of explaining to people that, as the representative, it is my job to take the ideas of the community to Canberra and, not being a member of a party, I do not rely on my party for the ideas; I actually rely on my community. We call this the Indi way.

Initially, we were driven by a sense of dissatisfaction and disillusionment. I know it is common right across Australia that people are sick of the way politics works. They do not trust that things are going the way they should. That certainly was the feeling in Indi, but we did not fall into that trap. We did not go down that negative path. We took those feelings of disconnect and dissatisfaction and asked, 'What can we do with it? How can we get a member of parliament who is actually going to have our vision and will represent us but be the representative and not necessarily the power base that perhaps you get from parties?'

In Indi we have a saying that the future is made or determined by those who turn up. Not only did young people turn up to run the campaign and not only do many people now turn up to be part of the political activity of the electorate, but in this speech today I want to make a call out to those who stood up in the 2016 election and did the work, did the hours, did the miles, did those numerous meetings and gave the intellectual power that they had to do the planning for the election and help with the community development side of it. We had over 700 signed-up volunteers, all of whom had signed on to the value statement and contributed to the election. But it was led by this amazing team of wonderful people: Alana Johnson, Anne Shaw, Chris Hazell, Denis Ginnivan, Jacqui Hawkins, John Davis, Judy Brewer, Karen Nankervis, Michelle Dunscombe, Nick Haines, Phil Haines, Roberta Baker, Roland Wahlquist, Ross Kearney, Rowan O'Hagan, Ruth McGowan, Susan Benedyka, Tammy Atkins, Tony Lane, Cam Klose, Julie De Hennin, Trish Curtis, Mark and Jill Howard, Angela Killingsworth and Jane Taylor. They were the core group, but it is always dangerous when you name some people, because it was also everybody else who made the difference.

The election in northeast Victoria was cold and wet and rainy and long, and many, many volunteers stood for hours in the very miserable cold weather not only doing how-to-vote cards but also having conversations with people, engaging them and talking about how other people could get involved—a deep and heartfelt thankyou for that work. I know you are going nowhere, that you are staying involved and that you will continually stay in touch with me and make sure that I represent our interests in this parliament.

But Indi will only thrive as more organisations, groups, communities and people gain the skills and confidence to act on their own solutions, make their own plans and take effective action to get results. There is absolutely no point coming and seeing me, as a member of parliament, and describing a problem. It is of interest, but it does not get the answer we need. All too often people come to me with a problem and say, 'Cathy, can you do something about it? Can you go to the minister?' What we have come to understand is, sure, that is an action, but, if you give a country problem to a city minister, they will give you a city answer. You get a much better response if you bring together known ways of working and give the minister a solution to the problem—that is, if you say: here is the problem, here is what needs to be done, here we are as a community and here is how we can work together. That is what we have been doing in Indi. I was so pleased last week to be able to bring representatives of the dairy industry to parliament. People from the dairy industry came up. They are going through a really tough time, but they had sat down, defined the problem and worked out answers to what needed to be done, and they came to Canberra. We had a very constructive day meeting the Prime Minister, the Minister for Infrastructure and Regional Development and the Assistant Minister for Agriculture and Water Resources, talking about these issues and setting up partnerships that we know we can move together, and I was really pleased to do that.

Also last week, the Alpine Valleys Community Leadership Program came to Canberra. It is another example of a community group learning about leadership—coming up here, spending the day and actually getting a hold on how parliament works and how they can advance it. I just made a little error there—it was Alpine Valleys who met the Prime Minister. It was not the dairy group; they were busy doing other things. When the Alpine Valleys Leadership group spoke to the Prime Minister they talked to him about the need for leadership training and empowering communities so that people who put up their hand to be president, secretary or treasurer of a group can not only learn how to do those jobs but learn how to network and engage with their community, and also with parliament.

I was so pleased, because the Prime Minister said he was really interested in this idea of community leadership and how we could get it working nationally. I know in New South Wales it is not so popular, but in Victoria we have 10 geographically based community leadership programs. We get some money out of the Victorian government, all of us put in kind in, and every year we graduate about 30 community leaders, who then go back and work in their community in a networked way. The good thing about them coming to Canberra is that they get to understand how parliament works so they can then take on their own issues and start working in the system. These delegates are a really good example of how effective people can be in their own communities.

Together with that work, the thing we did in Indi in 2015 which was so strong was a series of kitchen table conversations. Something like 400 or 500 people turned up around kitchen tables to talk about their issues. We then pulled that together to have the Indi Summit, of which we have a report. The Indi Summit said, 'These are the issues that we care about in our electorate and we are going to commit to doing things about these issues.' Of course, among those there are some issues that I have a particular interest in and will work on, namely renewable energy and employment for young people. The arts are really big in Indi, so how do we develop and grow the arts? How do we get a stronger voice for young people? How do we make sure our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are represented? They are some of the topics that we are now working really closely on with our community.

What I am really pleased about is that we have set the model in place. We have now had four years of it working and it shows that community groups are interested and able to do things about their own problems. They can then come and work together with their political representatives. Then, with access to government and opposition, and to ministers, we can do the Canberra work to get rid of the roadblocks that are stopping change, to get the incentives that we need. Many of them are there; we need to bring them back into the community. I am really pleased that that model is doing so well.

In my next three years of being the member for Indi, I want to talk to government about how we can do a much stronger job on policy development, particularly rural and regional policy development, that builds strong partnerships with the people on the ground, the grassroots groups who know exactly what is going on. Sometimes they might not have the exact answer, but together they can work to solve things. Too often in government we work backwards. We say, 'What happened?' and we spend our time catching up. I spoke in parliament yesterday about the problems we have with our train line, and all I could say is that we are spending huge amounts of time and energy trying to fix a problem that should not have been there in the first place. We are doing catch-up. I see the member for Corangamite is here in the House, and I know the enormous problems she has with mobile phone delivery, with roads, with transport. We are all playing catch-up. The truth of the matter is—

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