Garth Hamilton (Groom, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am very happy to be here making my speech on the address-in-reply. I would like to congratulate all those who have made their maiden speeches today. It's a fantastic feeling to come in here and lay yourself bare, to be open, to tell people what it is you are about and what it is you want to do. It has been fantastic to see them here with their friends and families. I was here on the weekend watching all the visitors coming through Parliament House. I make these reflections because when I came in to parliament much of that wasn't the case. I came in during the middle of the pandemic. The gallery was almost as bare as it is now when I gave my maiden speech. I think about eight people were allowed in at the time. I think back upon that now and much has changed. It's great sign that Australia and our parliament is returning to a more normal state of affairs.

I am very privileged to have the chance to address the chamber today in what is still the first flush of this, the 47th parliament. I think it is appropriate in this speech to speak, firstly, as an Australian and to congratulate the Prime Minister and to wish him good health during his term in that role. First and foremost, I am an Australian and I hope this government succeeds and looks after the nation to the best of its capabilities. It is an honour to be here representing the people of Groom, who have placed their trust if me for a second time. I think it is very important to talk about what an honour it is to be here as their elected representative. It is quite a humbling experience when someone from your electorate comes to you and asks for your help and wants you to help them overcome some issue and you realise that that is entirely the job: helping people. It's fantastic when you get the opportunity to do that. So it is wonderful to be here in what is my second term reinvigorated and looking forward to the opportunity to do that more.

It may seem quite an obvious statement, but success in a federal election campaign is never guaranteed nor an easy feat, so I would very much like to thank those who stood beside me and supported me during the election campaign. Of course, I start with the party members of whom I always consider myself first and foremost to be one. It is a very strong party group we have in Groom. It is built upon the fantastic FDCs of Toowoomba North, Toowoomba South and Condamine. I am very grateful for the activity that they undertake to ensure that we continue to have strong support and good representation here. I'm truly humbled to be their representative.

I think back to the conditions in Toowoomba on the day of the election. It was probably one of the worst election campaign days since the 2016 Toowoomba South by-election for Dave Janetzki which some party members remind me of often. It started out cold, wet and miserable and it just got worse and worse as the day went on. But so many of our wonderful party faithful came out and were there on the ground doing the hard work of electioneering on that day. There are too many to thank, but I do want to thank particularly my FDC executive, Isaac Moody, Bronwyn Evans and Jim Curtis, for all their hard work, and the campaign manager, Bec Anderson, for her tireless efforts.

I would like to pay special tribute to Mr Alan Travers, who sadly passed away earlier this month after a battle with cancer. Alan and his wife, Louise, were key contributors to my campaign, standing out on the Toowoomba City prepoll in what can only be described as terrible conditions in between doctors appointments and mandated rest breaks. By the day of the election, Alan could really only speak in whispers, but he still managed to stay there, handing out hundreds of how-to-vote cards to Toowoomba residents. I want to make it very, very clear I don't take the support of people like Alan lightly, and I don't think anyone in this House does. When you have a party member who's there because they believe in something, they believe in values that drive them to contribute, they have a vision for Australia, they want to see you continue to improve on the path that you've been going down, you know they are not there just for you; they are there to support you and they want you to succeed, but they are there because they believe in something. It's fantastic to think that you could share that belief with someone like Alan, who was willing to contribute so much of his time in such a difficult period of his life. I very much thank Louise for everything she has done.

During this term I've also lost two other party members who contributed significantly and made a big difference to my time as a party member: Mr John Redmond and Mr Boyd Schuber. Boyd was the cheekiest how-to-vote card giver outer. Even if someone didn't want a card, they were going to get one from Boyd. He had a magic way of ensuring people walked in with one. It was almost a challenge to him, and I remember his contributions fondly.

I'd also, of course, like to thank my family. An election campaign is not something you can do without seeing the impacts on your family. My children saw very little of me, and my wife probably even less. I thank them for their contribution, and I acknowledge their full support. I'd also like to thank my staff, who continuously go above and beyond in supporting me. It's a fantastic thing to have good people around you.

I will also quickly mention that you don't come into politics expecting to find friends, but to find people with whom you can deal, whom you know you are working with truly towards the betterment of the nation, is very, very important. I've found many of those, and, given that he's here, I'll thank the member for Fraser for the collegiate way we've been able to work together so far on the economics committee. I hope that 'so far' is a very long far; I'm sure it will be.

While I now represent my community from the opposition benches, I promise to continue fighting for the wonderful local opportunities and projects I outlined in my maiden speech, whether it's Inland Rail, improved trade partnerships or building our local defence force. I can't reiterate enough how important Inland Rail will be to Toowoomba. This is what sets us up as a distribution hub for South-East Queensland. It's a critical piece of infrastructure that has been so long in the planning, and it has been fantastic to see the enabling works happening in Groom over the last couple of weeks on the site of InterLinkSQ. The project is now so close and the opportunities it will present are so close to our region. I commit myself fully to ensuring that we see the full benefit of those opportunities coming into Toowoomba. It's something I strongly believe will set us up for generations to come.

I also want to see us capitalise on the railway parklands project. I was successful working with the chamber of commerce, working with council, to achieve funding for it under the SEQ city deal. This is a crucial piece of infrastructure that will address two very key issues that Toowoomba faces. One is, of course, what so many places face, which is the housing crisis. This provides the options for medium-density housing right in the centre of Toowoomba's CBD. What that does is address the other issue we have, which is revitalising our CBD, providing vital foot traffic, something that our CBD was built on over 100 years ago and now needs care and attention again to ensure that those local stores have that work and that business coming through. So this is a vital project to see delivered, and I remain very much committed to that.

If anything, I'm motivated more than ever to fight for our community. Over my first term as the member for Groom I've been lucky enough to see and meet so many more people, community groups and businesses who have strengthened for me the vision of what our community wants and needs. Just last week I was at Oakey with one of these local community leaders who do so much good—Katerina Medland. She works with the Oakey PCYC, providing a place for Oakey kids to enjoy themselves. With fitness and mental health goals, it's fantastic. I linger on this point because Oakey is a part of my electorate that has a special place in my heart. It's a town that has faced and overcome a lot of challenges in recent times, be it with PFAS, the closure of the mine or the uncertainty around future of its defence base. It has faced these challenges and it's coming through; things are starting to turn around. It's been a very, very resilient town filled with very, very resilient people, and it's great to see that mine coming back. Whether it's over kindly-offered cups of tea after door-knocking or a quiet word after a community meeting, I've enjoyed listening to the hopes and needs of our community. I thank all those who offer me a cup of tea when I'm out door-knocking. It's a wonderful experience as a member when someone wants to invite you in and really lay out for you what they want and their vision for their local community. I'm very grateful for every one of those opportunities. As I led off with in my maiden speech, our region is a place of strong community values that is proud both of its ambitions for the future and of its history.

We saw some great figures come out today from the Toowoomba Regional Council about the strength of our local economy, and I think it's important to touch on that. There's $13.1 billion in planned infrastructure projects or major projects going on in our region, both private and public. We've seen this great flood of investment, and it follows on from previous investments, like the Toowoomba Second Range Crossing, which did so much for us. But where it leaves us is that the Toowoomba regional economy is the second-largest in Queensland outside of the metropolitan areas. We're growing, we're growing stronger and we're growing more and more diverse. Our top five industries are health care, mining, manufacturing, education and training, and construction. But what's fantastic is, following behind that, the growth of newer industries that maybe weren't so traditional in a regional setting. Our financial and insurance services are following hot on the heels of those other industries and are growing and expanding. Of course we've long had Heritage Bank, but we're seeing smaller institutions coming in and continuing to invest and grow, and it's absolutely fantastic.

But what this has solidified for me is the view that we have yet to really realise the benefits of the hub-and-spoke model that people talk about for regional service delivery. I think for a long time we've had this view of Toowoomba as being the hub and—unfortunately—during my time, quite frankly, I've seen that challenged. I was at a hospital visit at St Andrew's listening to staff there tell me that their radiologists who provide breast cancer screening all travel up from Brisbane each day. It's such a vital service and such an important thing for us to have in our community—and yet we're reliant upon people driving up and down from Brisbane. I think for me what the hub-and-spoke model means is that we have that latency—that we're the ones providing that out from Toowoomba. That's what the end of the golf swing looks like: when we're able to have that support and provide it out to the smaller communities around us. So I have an increased impetus to see us deliver on that model.

A large part of that will be in improving our health services, and I very much welcome the state government's forward commitment to funding a new Toowoomba hospital, and I acknowledge the tremendous advocacy for this that's come from the member for Toowoomba North, Trevor Watts, and the member for Toowoomba South, David Janetzki. This has been a long fight, and it's something that has been fully embraced—be it by the council, the chamber or TSBE. We've had every community group get behind this and it's a fantastic win to see for our region. But it's vital we put a firm date on the commencement of construction as soon as possible, and we need to see that happening now, because we know that the facilities we have are already past their use-by date.

The new hospital will not only service the existing needs of our region but also provide specialist staff and—as we're seeing increasingly—couple with the education sector to provide a new pathway for kids from the Toowoomba region who see a future in health care. Since I first started in this role, and I'm coming up to two years, a pathway has been created so that children can go through school, study medicine, train in a medical field, and then go on to practice—all within the Toowoomba region. That's a new development for us, and it's absolutely fantastic. For such a long time we've been known as the healthcare provider, not just for South West Queensland but also for northern New South Wales. We know that we can now address the issue of how we get medical professionals to come out to the region: we know that if they train in Toowoomba, they're more likely to stay in Toowoomba. That development is a great result of the work of the previous government. It's something we will see the benefits of, not immediately, but it will build and build and build. I look forward to watching that.

We're seeing a lot of other exciting new opportunities for kids emerging as well. I always pinch myself when I talk about Toowoomba becoming a centre of excellence for space engineering, for space research. Who would have thought that a town built on the dairy industry would be a place that now leads the conversation in Australia in this field? It's extraordinary. Yet, that's where we stand. And it's not just a one-off investment that has done this. There has been a lot of work by a lot of people who have come together over a long time. And, yes, there has been government support.

I was very proud to have worked with both the Chancellor and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Queensland to fight to get Trailblazer funding under the last government. It's was an absolutely fantastic success story, because that funding wasn't given as a starting point for them to build space engineering as a new subject; it was topping up all the work that they had done. I thank Professor Peter Schubel and his team and staff for all the hard work they've done to build that up. We're already seeing that being supported by local industry. We've seen investment from Boeing, with the Loyal Wingman program coming into our region. Just the other day we heard that Virgin Orbit signed a contract to do their test launches out of the Wellcamp Airport, just down the road from UniSQ. This is a fantastic combination. We're seeing industry come in; we're seeing research. We know that this will work together. I guess the bit that excites me even more is that, when I think about the defence capabilities that have long been in our region—and, of course, space engineering and space research will have so much crossover with defence—I think about the opportunity that it provides us to grow and to build upon that hard work.

I thank very much and throw a quick shout-out to Trent Groves at Oakey for all he does for the local community and at Cabarlah. I note the member for Braddon is here with me, and I reflect upon his previous experience at 7SIG, and I thank the boys from the 7SIG rugby team for always finding five minutes of time to allow me to come and play with them. They're great contributors to our local community. It's such an important industry for us to grow and build upon.

If we can secure this specialised industry in Toowoomba, we can make our region a space and defence hub for the nation. That's where we can go. Of course, at its most basic level, the advancement of the Toowoomba region will rest on roads and water infrastructure. We need a second road to Highfields to support our western growth corridor. It is a part of Toowoomba that is growing at an exceptional rate. We need a proper fix for the Gore Highway, which seems to wash away every time it rains. Those incredible black soil fields that stretch out west of Toowoomba provide us with a challenge. We need a new dam to draw from to ensure our growth is never limited again, as it was during the millennium drought. It's important for us to focus on that, that we are in a competitive market. We need to grow and show that we are ready to grow and that we want to invest in growth if we want to continue to see that government investment.

My core role as a member will be to ensure we get our fair share. These important projects will remain front of mind of this government. It's important that, during my first term, what has crystallised very clearly is my vision for our region. I speak to the city of Toowoomba. The idea that we could provide inner-city living in a regional location is something we should aspire to, that we can go beyond just being a country town that has the things we need but becoming a city that has everything that you would want. That's where we can go to. It fills me with enthusiasm and excitement that this is a vision that is shared across our region. The stronger we can make Toowoomba, the stronger we can make that hub and the better our entire region will be.

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