Carina Garland (Chisholm, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—It is an enormous honour to have the privilege of serving here for a second term. As I noted earlier, the last member for Chisholm to win a second term was the wonderful Anna Burke, who won her second term in 2001, so it's been some time since the people of Chisholm have returned a member. I am very grateful and very humbled by the trust that they have placed in me.

I'm really proud of what we were able to achieve as a community together in the 47th Parliament—in the first term of the Albanese Labor government. We were able to establish an urgent care clinic in Mount Waverley and to establish a headspace in Box Hill, now in a former part of my electorate but that I am sure the member for Menzies will have great stewardship over—and congratulations to him. Many sporting pavilions have been established across the electorate. And, of course, our promises of a tax cut for every Australian taxpayer have been delivered, as have energy bill relief and so many other commitments to help people with the cost of living.

Now, in our second term, I'm really looking forward to getting to work to continue to deliver for the community of Chisholm.

I'm really looking forward to establishing a new Nunawading basketball facility, which will service the eastern suburbs of Melbourne. I'm really looking forward to seeing another urgent-care clinic being established in our community, in the Stonnington Council area. And I'm really excited that we will be the first metropolitan Melbourne site for a Medicare mental health clinic, which is something that is really important for our community in the eastern suburbs. So many people, from all walks of life, have spoken to me about the importance of investing in mental health, and I agree with them. That's why it is really heartening that we have a government who takes mental health very seriously—and indeed all health care seriously.

We're going to work on new changing rooms at the Monash Aquatic Centre. The Monash swimming pools were where I first learned how to swim, so it is a very special commitment for me. And of course today we saw the introduction of legislation to deliver 20 per cent cuts to student debt for so many in our community, and over 26,000 people in Chisholm will benefit from that; we are one of the greatest beneficiaries of this change.

Throughout the campaign, and earlier than when the formal campaign began, I spoke to my community about really wanting to be a champion for Chisholm, and that is the commitment that I renew today in the 48th Parliament, and we'll hopefully be able to deliver on everything that we've said we will deliver on. I'm really proud that all the commitments I made in my first term for our local community have been delivered on. We had a redistribution in Victoria, which saw my community of Chisholm change a little. But whilst we said goodbye to areas that I loved in our electorate and communities that I will hopefully have the opportunity to continue to work with, as a representative I was able to take in and learn about new parts of the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, although they are areas that were very familiar to me.

My old high school is in my electorate now, and I've had the great pleasure and privilege to visit my old school since the election. That gave me cause to reflect on my own journey to this place. It was as a high school student that I learned the importance of involving myself in social justice. I remember spending lunchtimes at school writing letters in the Amnesty International club that I was part of. I remember spending time after school volunteering with St Vincent de Paul to tutor refugee children and students across the community. At school the teachers really instilled in all the young women there—it was a girls' school—confidence and the importance of never second-guessing yourself.

I wish I had never second-guessed myself and that those lessons were unchallenged throughout my working life. But I remember stepping out of that school environment and into university and indeed, I must admit, into the Labor Club at university and thinking that I didn't really belong there and that the contributions I wanted to make were not possible. I look back now and I look around this chamber and I see that we have a majority female government, and I hope no young women in universities or at schools or in workplaces feel as discouraged as I did back then. And I thank you, Deputy Speaker, and I thank all the women in this place and those who have come before for opening up those opportunities and helping me find more confidence to be involved in the Australian Labor Party and the broader labour movement. I want to thank the labour movement for all their support throughout my campaign.

Ours was truly a community campaign, and that is a source of great pride for me. We had over 500 volunteers. We knocked on over 60,000 doors and made over 80,000 phone calls, attempting to contact every person in the electorate. It was a campaign that brought together people from all walks of life. We focused on optimism and hope. We focused on our community and wanting to build a kinder, better country, and it's been wonderful listening to all the first speeches in this place over the last couple of days and hearing that theme of kindness resonate so strongly in everybody's contributions.

I have a lot of people I would like to thank, and I want to make sure that they are recognised in Hansard, so please bear with me. I want to thank my team for their hard work: Jarrod Panther, Matt Lawler, Meg Swain—who I congratulate on her new role in the Prime Minister's office—Evelyn Garcia, Vivian Liu, Barbara Harman, Jerry Cui, Grayson Lowe, Jordan Liang, Matt Merry, Jordon Conway, Josh Chuah and Tharun Balasubramanian.

I want to thank our amazing field organisers for all that they did leading our field campaign, recruiting volunteers and coordinating very large numbers of people and maps and taking on enormous logistical work. I want to thank Alfonso Silva from the national secretariat for his hard work and support. I want to thank, too, Paul Erickson and one of my oldest and dearest friends, who also happens to be the Victorian secretary of the Labor Party, Steve Staikos. Steve and I knew each other well before politics. This is not just a political friendship. We grew up on the same street. We worked at the same supermarket, on the check-outs, and I maintain that working in retail and working on the check-outs at a supermarket remains the best training I have had for this job. Talking to people, taking an interest in their lives and understanding that some people are going to have had a bad day and you need to treat them with kindness and empathy was wonderful training for being an MP who seeks to listen and learn from her community.

I want to thank my very dear friend Senator Jess Walsh for her support on this campaign, and I want to thank her team for volunteering on their weekends to come and help me: Courtney Zavalianos, Lucy Skelton, Sean Doherty, Steven Blacker, Maddison Lewis, Riley Geary and Atticus Corr.

I am a very proud member of the United Workers Union, like so many in this chamber, and I want to thank the union for all their support. In particular, I want to thank Paddy Keys-Macpherson, Felix Sharkey, Corey Matthews and Gary Bullock for all their work.

I've received incredible support from the Young Labor movement, so I want to thank all the students involved in Deakin Young Labor, Monash Young Labor and Swinburne Young Labor for their efforts. I want to acknowledge the support of Michael Miao, Nos Hosseini, Winnie Huang and their teams. They phoned many people in our community and spoke in language with our wonderful diverse community.

I want to thank every volunteer who gave up their time to help our campaign—and it really was our campaign; it was not simply my campaign. Every day I'm in this place and every day I'm in the community, I will remember that I owe so much to the people who have put their faith in me and who worked so hard to see a re-elected Albanese Labor government. We knocked on so many doors and we spoke to so many people because we believed in the Labor movement and the Labor cause and in what we could do together as a re-elected Albanese Labor government.

I want to thank people who turned up time and time again to knock on literally thousands of doors in teams every single week: Campbell Frost, Bayley Mackie, Angus Duske, Marko Mrksa, Simone Milhuisen, Meghan Williams, Rod Carls, Alex Gilders, Rudy Blums, James Lintott-Southwell, Gavin O'Loughlin, Geoff Rundell, Jason Zhao, Mark Warburton, Zhiyuan Pan, Thomas Campbell, John Nihill, Gail Hall, Phil Ryan, Shaoting Yan, Julie Vine, Mandy Li, John Morter, Hayden Makmur, Tristan Walde, Alessandro Papleo, Esther Fan, Oneja Jayaweera, Radha KC, Chloe Davies, Tanmay Kabir and Emily Mao. It's been amazing to have met all of you and to have worked with you. To Deb Pidd, Lisa Carpenter, Bruce Carpenter, Graeme Bond, Rod Short, Todd Moore, Noah Blumhoff, John Milhuisen, Angus Reynolds, Anton Grodeck, David Higginbottom, Diane Hardidge, Evelyn Clarke, Greg Hughes, Huifen Xiao, Julie Dickson, Lesley Hardcastle, Manfred Xavier—who I first met volunteering on the 2007 Bennelong campaign for Maxine McKew, so we go way back—Melva Austin, Michael Murray, Paul Halliday, Rob Grimmer, Phil Robinson, Susanna Mason and Veronica Davies: thank you.

I thank the booth captains that helped make sure that we were able to hand out how-to-vote cards and ensure that everyone in our community participated fully in our democracy: Naveen, Robert Lowe, Garry Dirks, Jimmy Li, Paul Ting, Jonathon Wight, Peter Spriggins, Ava Howard, Rangika Iddamalgoda, Dustin Kim, Xavier Andueza, John Watson, Peter Fiske, John Burgess, Jeremy O'Keeffe, Harrison Valentine, Thomas Nash, Michael Schaefer, Jacob Clifton, Harsha Guneratne, Carlo Buratto, Michael Gotze and Mithun Rajan. I thank all the scrutineers that we had helping us out too: Tessa Jones, Peter Bearsley, Harmon Barrett, Parsa Ghodsieh, Kurt Liffman, Julie Dickson, Hamish Welte, Dominic Burns, Jackson Walmsley, Alessandro Papaleo, Anton Grodeck, Jim McCabe, Kevin Adlard, Tess Robb, Herb Ramselaar, Janie Sue Brooks, Mark Sims, Gillian Davenport, Edwina Kay, Tom Whiteside, Elijah Buckland, Shara Teo and Nick Richardson.

In my final few minutes here, I want to thank my family for their support over the years. I don't know if they quite realised what me being a member of parliament would involve, but I'm really grateful that they have been so understanding and supportive. I do miss the time that I would otherwise have spent with them. It is hard not seeing the children in your family always at those special moments, when you'd like to, but I think all of us do what we do because of the people that we love and the people who support us. It is right that I take this moment to thank them for all that they do for me. I always do seek to find those moments that I can spend with them.

To my colleagues here, both returning—I don't want to say old—and new: it has been an honour so far, and I am sure the privilege and honour will only grow as our numbers have. We are going to be able do some amazing things for our country together. We know that Labor builds the things that our nation needs, whether it is universal health care through Medibank and then Medicare, whether it is the superannuation system, whether it is the NDIS, whether it is making sure we have paid parental leave programs for people. I know there is always going to be work for governments to do. The job is never done. It never will be done. But I'm so proud to be part of a team that puts shoulder to the wheel, will seek to solve the problems that present themselves to us and won't shy from the challenges that are thrown our way by a changing global geopolitical context.

I'm proud that I have this opportunity, but I don't ever want to take this opportunity for granted. My word to my electorate is that I will work as hard as I can with every day that I have in this place. Throughout my first term, I would say to people, 'I don't know how long I get the privilege of being the member for Chisholm, so every single day I have is an extra day of work I get to do to deliver for the community.' For however long I get to keep this privilege and this honour of being the member for Chisholm, I will work as hard as I can, every day that I have, to make my community proud.

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