Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

the second one. I had to walk three transport ministers over that bridge—another one down here I think!—to actually nail it. And it is the right kind of investment, because the north of South Australia, the regions, is where the mineral wealth is. In fact, every major mine in South Australia is in the electorate of Grey, which covers a mere 92.4 per cent of the state.

There is the Port Wakefield overpass and the dual lanes we have commenced on the Augusta Highway, which is now only going to go as far as Lochiel and not keep going all the way to Port Augusta, which I had hoped. That's reprioritisation with the current government, but we should keep going on those things. The upgrades to the Horrocks Highway, Eyre, Augusta—the whole lot of them—have had major upgrades, and there is the sealing of the Strzelecki Track. I don't know how many have been up the Strez—once again, the member for Gippsland has been up the Strez with me. In fact, we had a photo in front of the sign that spelt Strzelecki wrong! That's been fixed up, I can tell you. That road will become one of the great tourist routes of Australia, connecting Queensland through the outback and bringing you down into South Australia, into the Flinders Ranges if you turn left—or you can go right and go up to Lake Eyre. It's not a bad little option, really. And, of course, the mighty Moomba basin sits right in the middle of it. That was a god outcome.

Then there are the tens of millions of dollars that have gone into BBRF programs, sports and community facilities, town sewerage systems, marine facilities, historical precinct preservation, bike trails, tourism—it goes on and on. They're are all good projects. There is the Mobile Black Spot Program and an enormous expansion in coverage. Is it complete? No. It will never be complaint. Perhaps that was touched on again with Starlink; you can't get behind every rock with a radio frequency. But it's certainly made a big difference.

Another thing I've been involved with is how Defence has a penchant for going out and compulsorily acquiring properties. We've had a fair bit of it go in the electorate of Grey. I've been sticking up for the landholders' rights, which I think are treated terribly in this situation. I've got people I helped out who had 25 years to reach settlement. I've got others now that are approaching the 15-year mark on the compulsory acquisition around Cultana. I'm pleased to be involved with these good people. I'm a bit concerned now that it's all done that the Army is going to abandon Cultana anyhow. It's been a difficult time for those things.

The establishment of four headspace units across Grey is a great thing. I wanted another one in Port Pirie and haven't been able to get it, but just a couple of weeks ago we opened a Medicare mental health facility there, and I'm indebted to the former minister Greg Hunt, who put those on the line to fill that space. As for those four headspace units, we've got one in Port Lincoln, one in Whyalla, one in Port Augusta and another one in with the Royal Flying Doctor Service. They are doing great things reaching out to our young people.

And there is the dog fence. Where are you, David Littleproud? There he is. The dog fence is a 120-year-old fence that snakes across outback South Australia, protecting sheep farmers from wild dogs and dingoes. We were struggling to get this one up at the South Australian level, and we managed to get David Littleproud to come open the Jamestown show. His staff said, 'We've got a couple of hours free in the morning; have you got anything you could do?' and I said, 'Yes, I've got a really good idea.' So I got a hold of the people at the dog fence and they came in for a meeting. We were about 10 minutes into the meeting and, to his great credit, David said, 'Yes, I've got it. I understand what you're saying, and we're going to make this happen.' And we did with a $5 million contribution from the federal government, $5 million from the state government and $5 million from growers. What I got out of it was an increase in my levy! But the fence is now about two-thirds complete and making a real difference across the outback. They are really good wins. There are the regional airports. I don't think there is a remote airstrip in a remote community that is not sealed for the Royal Flying Doctor Service to get in, and that has been the remote area airport subsidy.

Here in the House, we all belong to all kinds of committees and different organisations. There are a couple I'm going to mention here. Unfortunately, the member for Moreton is not here today, but the enemies of diabetes is an organisation we had to rename. I didn't really want to be a 'friend' of diabetes, so we renamed it the 'enemies'. Graham Perrett's been the co-chair with me for the last nine years of these three parliaments. We're both leaving, and I wish him well in his retirement from federal parliament as well. We are very alike, Graham and I, in personality, I think—like the two moons of Mars, as it were. But when it comes to opinions on things political, we're more like other things celestial—Venus and Mars—I think. There's a fair way between us.

There was another committee that I worked on. I was chair of the agriculture committee. I went to Ian Macfarlane at the time—I can do a reasonable job of imitating Ian, but I won't do it here in the chamber—and I said, 'I want an inquiry into country-of-origin food labelling.' He said, 'Why would you worry? It's been done to death. There's been about eight inquiries before.' And I said, 'Yes, I know that.' And he said, 'Well, you're not going to get anywhere.' So I said, 'Look, all of those inquiries—I've looked at the reports—say that the government should do something about it. We should have a country-of-origin food-labelling system. You give me a go at this and we'll tell you how to do it. How about that?'

So we got permission. It went ahead. We had to get permission from Barnaby Joyce as well. And then we delivered the report. Some circumstances happened and we managed to get it implemented. So when you go down to the supermarket now and you pick up the food and you see the bar graph on it and it tells you how much of that content is Australian, that came from my committee. I wrote the report, basically, but with the support of the rest of the committee. That's just what you can do when you actually dig in there and find the answer.

At the time of the inquiry, I said, 'There are a whole lot of people in Australia who need to push that shopping trolley down the supermarket and fill it up with the cheapest food they can to feed their family, and they shouldn't feel bad about that. I say, "Good on them." But there is a whole lot of people in Australia just like me who have a high enough income to make a choice about whether they want to support Australian manufacturing or whether they want to support Australian growers, but they can't do it if they haven't got the information, and now they have.' I'm pleased that that will now spread on to fish, but at the time I knew that was a bridge too far. It would have got too complicated and bogged down. So we made the move, and that was a good outcome.

There's an old adage that holds true: you cannot please all the people all the time. We know that's true, but I say to electors that they should elect an individual to this place whom they trust to make an intelligent decision on their behalf when that individual is in possession of the facts. You may not always agree with the conclusion that the elected person comes to, but you should elect someone you trust to make an intelligent decision. It is better summed up, I think, by Edmund Burke, the Irish philosopher-politician of the late 1700s, who said, and excuse the sexist language; it is of its time:

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

My reading of that is that we should not be in this place to slavishly follow the latest poll. We shouldn't be driven by those ways of making decisions. We should be here to provide our judgement and to lead our communities through challenging decisions. There are two obvious areas where I'd claim to have done so, and these areas have delivered success—I must say, sadly, only to have it reversed by the current government at the change of government.

The first is Ceduna and the cashless debit card. Out there we'd had, I think, seven deaths. We'd had a coroner's report into people sleeping rough and into drug and alcohol abuse. It was really a very tragic story, and one thing led to another. We'd had a number of interim outcomes, and then Twiggy Forrest suggested to a joint party room one day that we pursue a cashless debit card and, with the great support of the local community in Ceduna, we led the nation.

I thank Allan Suter, mayor at the time, and also the Far West Aboriginal Communities Leaders Group, which was established at the time. It took some real guts and determination for them to withstand local pressure, as you would imagine, to back the card in. Once again, I think Mr Chester was with me when we were at a meeting and there was this old pastor. I thought the meeting was going a bit rough—we had a few public servants in there—and then he stood up and we all listened to what he had to say. He cleared his throat and he said, 'I reckon we ought to do it. I think it'd be a good thing,' and we knew we were over the line. And it was a good thing. It made such a difference. There are people who sit around—they've taken surveys or whatever—and say, 'Oh, it's inconclusive.' I can tell you it's as clear as night and day. In fact, of the two of the mayors who led the community through that time, one has sold his house and is leaving community and the other one is leaving in the next 12 months, because they can't bear to see what's happening to their town.

So I'm pleased that our leader, Peter Dutton, has said we will be bringing back the cashless debit card. It does not take income away from people; it just says you can't spend it on drugs, alcohol and gambling. Three things—that's all it prohibits. Everything else you can buy. It made a difference to rates of domestic and public violence and to admissions to emergency care. The rates at the moment are far higher than they were when the card was in action. School attendance has fallen too.

The other place where I would claim to have led the community was in my home town of Kimba, where I raised the possibility of and led the push to establish a national radioactive waste management facility. I'd had an opportunity courtesy of one of the round-the-world trips that once were available to parliamentary members who'd served more than one term. You could go around the world once in pursuing your study topic. We'd had a big desalination plant planned for the Upper Spencer Gulf, and I was very interested in the environmental impacts of what that might look like. Of course, I've still got one of the world 's biggest uranium mines—it's a by-product of its being a copper mine—in the electorate, at Olympic Dam, or Roxby Downs. I had the possibility of going to Europe, and the French, the Swedes and the Finns showed us a wonderful time and took us through their facilities. We looked at the uranium fuel site from top to bottom, including disposal. When the opportunity came up for a low-level waste repository, I really thought this was money for jam. It just needed somebody to recognise what it was. But how could I ask somebody else to nominate their property when I was sitting on my own piece of land and could nominate my own? That's exactly what I did. In the end, I was rubbed out by protocol, it would be fair to say, but by then others in the community had offered their properties. Some of them are in the chamber today, and I'll come to them in a little while.

In Kimba we went through a survey and then two full plebiscites. In every one, support for the facility grew, to the point where we reached 62.2 per cent. For the record, that was about the same as for same-sex marriage, which was an overwhelming, landslide result, if I remember rightly. So it's worth putting that in context. Then we managed to get it through both houses of parliament. There had been claims from an Indigenous group. The Barngarla Determination Aboriginal Corporation twice had their case thrown out of the Federal Court. They went back for a third attempt and, on a story whose basis stretches belief—and I've spoken about it in this chamber before—it was halted by the Federal Court. The Federal Court left the door wide open for an appeal, but, in the shadows of the approaching Voice referendum, the current government abandoned ship, and there's still no solution for Australia's storage of low-level waste. Something like one-in-three families benefit from nuclear medicine. It's a weak decision by the government. I'm sorry to do that in this kind of address, but really I'm very sad about it. I'm very grateful to those families that stuck their hand up in the local community.

To go on with this theme, it's instructive that the Voice referendum was rejected in a landslide, 60-40. It was actually closer to 80-20 in my electorate. Rightly, Australia rejected the notion of two classes of citizen. I think we've taken a backward step as a result of the Voice referendum, and part of the reason it was rejected, I think, is that native title has become an extortion racket. Projects have been halted or delayed at the penultimate moment by a claim of significant religious or cultural interpretation. Rampant conservationists are edging in and misusing native title groups. I have absolutely no doubt about this. It's an unholy alliance. By doing so they are eroding Indigenous people's standing in the general community. The intolerance to this in the general community is rising.

It all started with Hindmarsh Island, a case back in the 1990s where there was fabricated evidence. More lately we have seen the refusal of the Blayney goldmine and the Santos Barossa pipeline project. Again in Grey, there was a small desalination project at Port Lincoln. It had some community resistance, but the South Australian government, not worried about that community resistance at all, were quite happy to go ahead with it, but then of course, when the Indigenous owners—well, they're not owners, because this is freehold property. Once again, it was the Barngarla people who put in an objection, and it all seems to have fallen over. When the community objected, that was okay. When the Barngarla people objected, it became a stopper. Australians don't see this as fair and reasonable treatment, and that's why I actually decry the fact it's causing more problems than it's fixing.

I've allocated a large amount of time in my 17 years in politics to try and better understand the issues and opportunities of Indigenous Australia, particularly remote communities. Eight per cent of my electorate identify as Indigenous, and around 40 per cent of those live in remote communities. For the ones that are living in the bigger communities, things aren't perfect, but we are absolutely making progress. The member for Parkes touched on this. I'm seeing success stories—people in jobs, getting their kids to school, driving good cars, living in good houses, living a good life, enjoying the Australian dream. But I can tell you in remote communities we're not there, and we're not there by a long way. I fear we're actually going backwards.

I think I've gained a lot of respect in those remote communities simply because I go there regularly, and I'm prepared to sit down not only with the leaders but with anyone I find outside the shop or in the village square. We sit down in the dust and talk about what it is they want and what they'd like to see changed and what drives the place. I think I get respect for going there. I absolutely claim that I have their best interests at heart, and I've delivered investment on many levels—and friendships.

The billions of dollars we're spending in these remote communities, delivering improvements in schools, health clinics, shops, roads, dialysis units, communications—it's all very evident. But, I have to say, despite all that investment, improvements to their actual outcomes are hard to identify. The gap is not closing. The education system is failing. The reason it fails is because kids aren't at school. No teacher can teach children who don't attend school. Here's the sad news for them as they grow up: if you can't read a label or the safety directions, in this modern world, there isn't a job for you. It's virtually impossible. So we've got to break this cycle.

Remote communities are totally dependent on taxpayer dollars for their existence, and we should be able to have a grown-up conversation, not just here but with them everywhere, about the wisdom of a policy that maintains and grows a population in a part of Australia where there is not a genuine economic possibility of underwriting that existence. Men, particularly, have been totally stripped of their role in society. The men's roles were to deliver shelter and food, to find water, to defend their family. Now all that comes from the government. They go down to the shop. One of the biggest sales on the APY Lands, for instance, is frozen kangaroo tails. It tells you about that disconnect from their traditional lifestyle.

I give a speech on this recently in the Federation Chamber, and the member for Clark was in the chair. I'm sure he won't mind me sort of quoting him. I don't want to get it wrong, but he came up to me afterwards and said: 'I've never heard anyone explain it to me like that before. Clearly, you're not speaking from ignorance; you are speaking from experience.' I don't know if that will change his attitudes on anything, but he was generous enough to grant me that concession—that it was heart felt and that it came from experience. Enough on that.

We'll get to the thankyous. Serving in this place is a privilege, and that electorates put their trust in individuals like me and like all my friends sitting around me at the moment is an honour within itself and is a wonderful thing. I've had wonderful opportunities to travel at least some of the world—I just spoke about Morocco before—to meet national and local leaders and the best and brightest people with plans and ideas to improve the nation. That's a privilege. I've laid wreaths on delegation at Hellfire Pass and Brunei Bay in Brunei. I've been to Menin Gate twice for the evening service which has been carrying on since about 1926, I think.

I have walked Kokoda in a private capacity and attended an Anzac Day Dawn Service at Gallipoli. On that occasion, I'd only attached myself to the delegation at the eleventh hour. It was a freezing cold day. We were sitting at Lone Pine, and I heard them say: 'On behalf of the Australian government, Mr Snowdon will lay a wreath, and, on behalf of the Senate, someone else will lay a wreath, and, on behalf of this, someone will lay a wreath. On behalf of the House of Representatives'—I thought, 'I wonder who they'll get to do that.' Then they said, 'Mr Ramsay.' I thought, 'Right!' I'm rugged up; I've got my gloves on, got the scarf on, got the coat on, and off it's all coming, as fast as I could go. I got there in my suit, so I didn't look too bad, went up and laid the wreath. That's quite a special moment.

It even got better because my sister who's in the gallery at the moment said: 'You wouldn't believe what I saw when I turned on the news after Anzac Day. The first thing that came on the ABC was my brother going down to put a wreath up at Lone Pine.' There you go. After all the best laid out plans for everyone else that wanted to get on the ABC that night, it was down to the member for Grey!

They are wonderful experiences, but I think perhaps the greatest reward for this job is actually when you fix up personal problems. From the outside, I don't think you rate it, but, people come to you when the system has chewed them up, spat them out and not taken any notice of what they've had to say or it's just—everyone's seen Little Britain'computer says no.' You can do anything you like up until the computer says no. My staff and I put our shoulders to the wheel and achieve an outcome that should have happened in the very first place, but you just know that you made such a complete difference to their life. It is a privilege.

What getting ready for a political life doesn't prepare you for is that you become a counsellor. People will tell you the best and the worst of their lives, and I think both of them are a privilege. People share some of their darkest moments with you and don't necessarily want you to fix it but to instead just listen. That you can be that person is a very rare and pretty privileged position.

I've come to thank some of the people who have given me an opportunity, but, before I get there, once again it was the member for Parkes who touched on the Rudd-slide. We were bright eyed and bushy tailed—the six new Liberals and the one new National that arrived here in 2007. Of that group of six Liberals, four have already left—actually I must have that a bit wrong because my maths doesn't add up. Three are delivering valedictories today, and there's still going to be one left. Something doesn't work quite right there, but anyway. We walked into the party room on the first morning, and, of course, there was a lot of licking of wounds going on after the years of the Howard government. We'd lost government. There were six new Liberals there who thought it was a wonderful thing—they'd just elected us—but everyone else was a bit down. The redoubtable Senator Bill Heffernan said, 'The reason we lost this election was all the deadhead candidates we had.' We all looked at each other and said, 'He must be talking about us.' We became the deadheads. For some years, we used to meet as the deadheads and get people with political experience to come in and speak to us. And, I think in fine form, we decided to appoint Bill Heffernan as the patron saint of the deadheads, and we used to have an award called the Billy for the person who had caused the most problems to the government that week or the week that we met in. It was a good time. Including Scott Morrison, after this next election, we'll be down to just Alex Hawke, who I can't see here at the moment. He will have to carry on without us.

Just on the three valedictories today—the three from this side of the chamber—I must say it is very fitting that we give them together. We came in together and we're going out together. Nola, from day one, a pocket rocket or—and I know you won't mind me saying this—a pint-sized milking maid! But don't get on the wrong side of Nola. She was determined for her electorate every time, and I am a great admirer—and she's a great friend, and we will remain friends.

To Mark Coulton: we have so much in common, Mark. We're both life members of Apex. We're both farmers. As farmers, we both understood that if you wanted to droughtproof your farm you had to marry schoolteachers! They are sitting together behind me at the moment, Robyn and Teresa. Together they piloted the parliamentary partners association for six years, and I think that is a very important organisation. If we could get more of the partners to come more often to Canberra and share in their partner's experience, we might be able to keep them together on a bit more of a regular basis, rather than having so many of them split up. I think anything that brings you closer together through those times is a very good and important thing, and I thank them both for that.

To the electors of Grey—six times they've seen fit to appoint me to represent them: thank you so much. I don't say that lightly. To the more than 400 members of the Grey Liberal Party who journeyed up to a 1,000-kilometre round trip back in 2006 to preselect me: thank you so much. And they've just gone through that process again. If I'd never been the Liberal candidate for Grey, I would never have had the opportunity to be the member for Grey. To the 800 people who make up the membership of the 22 Liberal Party branches across Grey: thank you for your work each and every election, keeping the flame alive in the community—because we all believe in the same things, even those we have differences with across the chamber. We all believe in a better Australia. A lot of us just believe in a different pathway to get there. I'm absolutely thankful for their support. To my home town of Kimba and my lifelong friends who have supported me—some of them that are here today, some of the most important; not all of them—certainly, through that period of the radioactive waste management facility.

I'm just the third member for Grey from the Liberal Party. The seat of Grey was formed in 1903, and I'm only the third Liberal. In fact, from 1943 to 1993, we held it just once. That's 50 years. We held it for one term in the 1966 parliament, when it was won by a fellow called Don Jessop, who later had a career in the Senate. In 1993 Barry Wakelin won the seat for the Liberal Party, and I succeeded him. Now we've held this seat for the last 31 years. Barry is from exactly the same home town as myself, Kimber. I think that's quite a remarkable outcome. So, for 31 years, my small community on the northern edge of the Wheatbelt has provided the member for Grey.

It's a community of just over a thousand people. I think we punch above our weight right around South Australia. The current chair of the South Australian local government association is the Kimber mayor, Dean Johnson. And, with Caroline Schaefer and her father, Arthur Whyte, Kimber has contributed a member of parliament at either state or federal level for 40 of the last 48 years, and for 17 of those years we had one at state level and one at federal level. I think that's quite remarkable. It's something about living on the edge. It's not easy making a living in Kimber, and I think it's always attuned the people of the town to what the exterior threats are and why we need to have a common purpose when we come together as a community and work for those outcomes.

One of the great joys of the job is the plethora of new friends we've made right around the electorate, people that we would have never, ever met in another life. Obviously, there are too many to mention. But a special call-out today for Anthea Kennett up there in the pink—thank you, Anthea—who's come here from Wallaroo today. She and her husband, John, committed no greater sin than being our friends when we took our kids to boarding school together. I managed to recruit them into the Liberal Party and rebuild the local branch there. They weren't on their own, I must say, but thank you for making the effort of being here today, Anthea.

The team from Kimba, Jo and John Schaefer, Jeff and Jenny Baldock, Graeme and Heather Baldock—Heather was my first campaign manager—are still here with me, 17 years later, backing their local boy. I thank them so much. They are just such wonderful, valuable friends. There's another couple who couldn't be here: Bert and Barb Woolford. Barb is a ball of energy and will throw her shoulder to the wheel on any attempt.

Of course, one of the things you need to do is try and get some people up on the APY Lands when you're having an election. Barb was often at the forefront of leading a delegation or being part of a delegation to go and hand out for Rowan Ramsey. One particular afternoon, she and my wife, Teresa, were there—I think they were at Mimili—and there was a fair kind of raucous going on about 50 metres away from the voting station, as sometimes happens in these communities. Just when they thought things might really get out of hand, this big bloke walked in, in traditional dress, with a spear. He went over and, in no uncertain terms, told them they should disperse and get about their lives, which is pretty much what they did. Then he headed towards the voting box with his big spear. Barb and Teresa thought, 'Oh, gee, what do we do when he gets over here?' Teresa said, 'Hold your nerve.' He came up and put his spear down on the ground and then—as he should—he took a 'How to vote for Rowan Ramsey' card and went in and executed his democratic right. Barb's has been a very special contribution. One year, someone from the Electoral Commission got sick and they only did half the booths, so she headed back up and did the second week. I always say, incidentally, that to get to the Lands it's a thousand kilometres without going out of my electorate, from my gate to the turn-off, and then, if you want to go to the WA border, it's another eight hours. I try and do that a couple of times a year.

To my staff, Gen Wells, Fiona Duffield, Neil Sawley, Courtney Stephens, Katie Patterson and Meredith Westbrook, who are all here today: thank you. And thank you to Deb Darby, who came down ill and couldn't make it. They've all been outstanding. Leonie Lloyd-Smith—the reason I just put her on the end is that she's someone most of you in this place would know. She has come to Canberra with me virtually every week for the last 10 years or so. She's the chief organiser of the staff nosh-up on Wednesday nights, so they may well miss Leonie's services. Vicki Manderson is also back in the Port Pirie office today holding the fort. They are a terrific staff—terrific because not only do they serve me loyally, as they should do, but they serve the electorate loyally. When people come in with their problems, they have the time, the patience and the compassion to sit down and talk through those problems. Both the electorate and I are well served by them, and I thank each and all of them. Some of them—in fact, three—have been with me for the entire 17 years, and one, Gen Wells, just a few months short of that.

In the chamber today, we have Teresa's sister, Jackie, and Jackie's husband, Peter, as well as my sisters Beth and Janet and Janet's husband, Andrew. My other sister, Anne-Marie, is watching from home. Thank you, all, for being here and your support throughout my time in this parliament. My three wonderful children are all here today: Alex with her husband, Ben, and our grandson, Arthur. Can you give me a wave, Arthur? There you go! Good on you, fella. To Courtney and Lachlan, wonderful supporters: I thank you. I know you've given up a bit for me to have this career. I hope it's been rewarded in other ways. Certainly one thing we haven't done is lose touch. At the time we made the decision for me to have a go at this job, Lachlan was actually at university in Adelaide and living in our unit. While they always needed us, they didn't need me to drop them off at footy and netball anymore, so it was a good time for us, and for me.

This brings me to the last and most important person, my beautiful wife, Teresa, my soulmate of 46 years plus. In Mark's terms—he treaded the platform before me—many people consider her to be the second member for Grey. We get two for the price of one. She has driven some of the countless kilometres that we've travelled around the electorate, has dealt with behind-the-scenes things like donations—we look forward to those; there'd be a lot of requests coming in for those—and, particularly in the early years—she's an art teacher by trade—set out the materials that come out of the office.

We've been each other's sounding board, not always in furious agreement, sometimes just furious! It proves the strength of our relationship that we can have a very vigorous discussion about things and then just move on. Because there's no doubt we still love each other. I love Teresa, and I'm so privileged to have had her in my life. Many people have said to me over the years, 'You've got a driver, haven't you?' because we do about 80,000 kilometres a year, and I say, 'Yes. I had to marry her.'

It's been a wonderful journey. We made the decision to embark upon it together. We are ending it, I guess in a privileged way, in that we were able to choose the time of our leaving. I'm working on, like I said, being a long time in that first group before I get to either of the second two, and going off and enjoying everything. Thank you all for your friendship and support.

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