Rowan Holzberger (Forde, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians on the land on which the parliament sits, the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples; the traditional custodians of the land on which I grew up, the Wilyakali people; and the traditional custodians of the land on which I live and work, the Yugambeh and Jagera peoples—the freshwater people of Canberra, the desert people of Broken Hill and the saltwater people of Logan and the Gold Coast.

My two favourite organisations in Forde are Jinndi Mibunn—an Aboriginal organisation who help with housing, community, language, everything—and Gilmour Space, a company about to launch the first Australia-made rocket ship. One has a vision of ancient Australia; the other has a vision of futuristic Australia. Together they represent Forde perfectly, just as Forde represents Australia perfectly. People have lived in Forde for tens of thousands of years. It was one of the first areas in Queensland to be colonised, as English and Germans, like my family, made an industry out of timber, cattle and sugar cane. Today, we have one of the most multicultural communities in the world. Forde is ancient Australia, old Australia and modern Australia. Forde is a perfect snapshot of Australia.

As a kid, when I began to think about the world, I was intrigued to know what it meant to be human—before agriculture, before the industrial revolution. I believe many people suffer from poor mental health today because we're disconnected from the way of life that we as humans evolved to live in. I spent many years working in farming, a lifestyle little changed over 10,000 years. Sure, we have motorbikes and gyrocopters and GPS, but when you're working on a farm—as I understand you did, Deputy Speaker Claydon—you feel an infinity with an ancestor a hundred generations past. Living with the rhythm of nature is infinitely more satisfying than how we live in the industrial age.

But Indigenous Australians have a link to an even more fundamental past. I still don't grasp what that means, although I yearn to know it. In Australia we are so fortunate to share our lives with the longest continuous culture on the planet. It is just a handful of generations since the colonisation of Australia began, and our Indigenous brothers and sisters have survived; they have kept alive a fundamental knowledge and way of life that one day, I believe, Indigenous Australians will share when the rest of us are open to receive.

And then there is Gilmour Space. If there is any company that symbolises the future, it's those legends. They have taken all the elements of the earth and transformed them into a rocket ship that will take us to the stars—well, technically, low Earth orbit, which may not sound as poetic as the stars, but it's heading in that direction. In this place, we're lucky to focus on the next three years, let alone the next 100. It's been only in the past 100 years or so that we've been able to stand on top of the foundations of science and look out to our past and see our future. Only in the past 100 years have we learnt that Aboriginal culture is more than 65,000 years old and that humans are about 100,000 years old. Only in the past 100 years have we learnt that our universe is not contained in a single galaxy but stretches over billions of light-years. For the first time, it is our generation that has a clear picture of our past and a good glimpse of our future.

When I meet with people who are struggling to pay for a home, struggling to afford medicine, struggling to pay for electricity, it reminds me that we are still living in the Dark Ages. One day people will look back on how we live, just as we look back on the Romans, and will think how clever we were to make do with what we had but that they wouldn't want to live in our time. Scientists today talk of a technological singularity, a point where advanced research in robotics, biology and energy production all come together to create a whole that is infinitely more powerful than the sum of its parts.

I believe science is close to creating a world where all of us have a material abundance beyond our wildest imagination. My core belief is summed up in the line 'On one hand technology, on the other hand democracy.' Technology has the power to create material wealth; democracy has the power to share it. My time as a parliamentarian will focus on helping our inventors, innovators and entrepreneurs to create and our community leaders to share. But, even in the midst of material abundance today, people suffer spiritual impoverishment, and to that I want to return at the end of my speech.

I was advised by my good friend Cameron Murphy to do the thankyous at the beginning of the speech and was cautioned against doing too many. Well, seeing as we're not at the start of the speech, I've already ignored the first part of that advice, so I may as well ignore the second part! The first group of people I want to thank are the people of Forde, who have given me an awesome responsibility and opportunity. Perhaps because I have a margin of 1.8 per cent, I keenly feel the temporary nature of the jobs we have been entrusted to do. I want to acknowledge former member for Forde Bert van Manen and thank him for the way he conducted himself during two campaigns.

The second group of people I want to thank are the people who make up the labour movement. Sometimes people say to me, 'Sorry, I can't support the Labor Party because you're too close to the union movement.' And I think to myself: 'Well, we aren't just close to the union movement; we are the union movement. We are the political wing of the trade union movement.' The Labor Party exists because there are some things you just can't achieve on the shop floor—workers compensation, free health care and free school education. To achieve these things you need control of the parliament. And, anyway, without laws that protect striking workers from the thuggery of an authoritarian government, you can't even fight on the shop floor for improved wages and conditions.

Paul Keating said that the history of the Labor Party is the history of Australia. It's little known that the world's earliest trade union activists, like the Tolpuddle Martyrs, were sent to Australia along with the convicts who were sent to Australia for stealing bread. It was because of political prisoners like them that Australia was the first country to have a secret ballot, the first country to allow men to vote regardless of wealth and property and one of the first countries to allow women to vote. It is because of union activists that we have progressed as a country today—people like AMWU state secretary Rohan Webb and executive officer Ann-Marie Allan, who have not only spent a lifetime backing in workers but also spent what seems like a lifetime backing in me! Queensland Meat Workers secretary Matt Journeaux and two unionists who have had a much bigger impact on me than they might have imagined, Harry Early and Stuey Trail, are continuing inspirations to me today. Thank you to the Labor Party's state secretary, Ben Driscoll, who, for his sins, ran my 2022 campaign for Forde, and to former state secretaries Evan Moorhead, Katie Flanders and the new member for Moreton herself.

The most important people are the ones who have showed up today. You are not only the ones who will give me the most grief if I leave you out but also some of the most important people to ever come into my life. To Emico, Ruby Rose and Riley, Lonnie and Ruth Nelson, Francis Bedford, Sharon Vallis, Elliot Lini and the Logan Afghan community, and Saeed Mujahid Hashimi and the Gold Coast Afghan community: thank you. Shannon Fentiman, Queensland's shadow Treasurer—friend, former boss, campaign director and fellow observer of the ridiculous—is here, and Joshua Lucey, campaign manager and hero of the cause, is not. Thanks also to the mighty Sharon Robertson and the Waterford branch, Kate Drysdale and the Slacks Creek Politburo, Fran van Gilst and the Beenleigh branch and Keenan McEwen and the Coomera branch. To say I couldn't have done it without you is such a statement of the obvious, but what I really mean is it wouldn't have been half as much fun. A special mention goes to the patron of Queensland Young Labor, Brianna Bailey, whose advice beyond her years and sense of humour below her years has got me through two elections and one preselection.

And there is one other person who has come along today. Advice given to us when preparing our first speech was that it wouldn't be a bad career move to put in a 'thank you' to the Prime Minister! Of course, I want to thank him for his performance during the campaign and his performance over the last term, where people came to see his vision and compassion. But I really want to thank him for being like a big brother. I met the PM when I was 14 and he was 24, when I went to my first, and his last, Young Labor conference. Even though I never really worked closely with him, he was like the big brother who'd grown up and gone off to work while I was still the kid at home. My political brothers who I did grow up with were the Young Labor president who succeeded the PM, Mal Larsen—who is a current adviser to the PM—and Damien O'Connor, a former adviser. Those two can never know the incredibly positive impact that they had on me then in the late 1980s and that they still have on me today. Like any big brother, the PM looked after me when he could. When I got a job as a 19-year-old with a former member for Makin, Peter Duncan—who I also want to acknowledge for his brilliance as a person and a campaigner—Peter told me that it was on the recommendation of Anthony Albanese. To the PM and his team, people like Tim Gartrell and Alex Mookareeka: I know I will always be the kid to you, but I stand in this place today because of you all.

While my core political belief is, on the one hand, technology and, on the other hand, democracy, it is rooted in my core political value, which I would like to explain in the context of my life. My dad met my mum in Mount Isa. I was born in Brisbane and I grew up in Broken Hill. While Barcaldine was the birth place of the labour movement—although New South Wales people will say it's Balmain—Broken Hill was for many years its spiritual home.

As a kid I got an interest in politics, sparked by the union's struggle for justice that I grew up around, and at the age of 14 I joined the party and went to my first Young Labor conference in Sydney. After school I moved to Adelaide and got a job working for Peter Duncan in the Keating government, from its glorious beginning until its spectacular end in 1996.

I went back to Broken Hill and determined to see a world outside of politics and wanted to do an apprenticeship as a fitter and machinist. I got a job as a labourer for a mining contractor, where I got my ticket in the metal workers union. Unfortunately, I couldn't fix the things I broke, and that job only lasted six months! What followed was two years of looking for work and doing odd jobs.

In the nineties the national unemployment rate got up to 10 per cent. It's hard to imagine it now, but those who were there remember what it was like. It was tough. In Broken Hill, like many regional communities, the unemployment rate was above 20 per cent. Twenty per cent unemployment is depression-level unemployment. So when a job came up in an outback pub in Wanaaring, about 300 kilometres north-east of Broken Hill, I took it.

From there I did some lamb marking on a sheep station, and the next thing I knew I had a bike and a ute, a pack of working dogs, and the will to win, and I became a station hand—the best job I ever had. It truly made me as a person.

There's something about farm work. I learnt a different set of values. My time in Labor politics had taught me collectivist values: the government has a solution to many problems. My time on outback stations taught me about personal responsibility and reliance on oneself. But it also taught me that you look after your neighbour. In the drought of the early 2000s, if it hadn't been for the government stepping in, all of those sheep and cows would have died, and all of those farmers would have gone out of business.

Then I turned 30, met a woman and we had a little baby. We moved to Tenterfield to be near her mum, and I got a job in a servo, flipping burgers and serving petrol. She gave me a book about a cashier at Woolies who got into self-improvement, got into sales and made millions. I started off thinking the book was a joke, but by the time I finished it I was hooked. It wasn't the money; it was the idea that I had so much more power over my own emotions and my own destiny than I had known.

There was one book I read—and I still remember it today—that talked about DEB and AAG, that you can either live in denial, make excuses and blame others, or you can take action, be accountable and be grateful for what you already have. And I thought: 'Well, that's fine for an able-bodied white guy like me, but what if I was born into real disadvantage? Wouldn't I have a right to make excuses and blame others?' I remember the night it hit me. I was scrubbing out the deep fryer at the servo in Tenterfield at 2 am in the morning and I had an epiphany: someone has every right to make excuses and blame others, but what good does that do them? The moment you blame others is the moment you put the solution onto others and the moment you disempower yourself. That single night, above all others, scrubbing out the deep fryer, was where my political values were formed, where it all came together.

The Left takes a collectivist approach. We think we can solve other people's problems, which is partly true. But sometimes we on the Left use that as an excuse not to empower the person with the problem to fix it themselves. The Right takes an individualist approach, that we all have the power in us to solve our own problems, and that is partly true. But that can be used as a justification by people on the Right to turn a blind eye to suffering. The answer—and everyone here probably worked it out earlier; it was just me that took so long—is not collective responsibility and it is not individual responsibility; it is individual responsibility for the collective. The greatest satisfaction that we can get comes from the greatest contribution that we can give, which is to help other people. So, seized by that idea, I moved with my young family to Southport on the Gold Coast, determined to live and spread that message.

I started a sales-coaching business. I wanted to learn how to sell, and because I knew the best way to learn is to teach—again, with the will to win—I went knocking on doors. There was one point I remember. I was walking across Scarborough Street in Southport and I had this amazing sense of freedom. I had no clients. I was on YouthStart. I'd just sold the ute and the bike, and I had nothing except this incredible sense of freedom. I didn't need the security of a nine-to-five job. Somehow I knew that I was going to be able to survive on my wits alone.

I went doorknocking on Scarborough Street and Ferry Road in Southport and got a hairdresser as my first client, and then a real estate agent, a telemarketer, an aquarium store, a second-hand store and a mechanic. Then I got a construction company in Beenleigh as a client and did more and more work for them until I ended up being their director and running the company. Along the way, I learnt that good businesspeople aren't attracted to the money. In fact, truly successful businesspeople are more likely to live frugally, drive an old car, eat at home and holiday in Australia, but they have this amazing passion for an idea, an idea for something that helps other people. The money is a way of keeping score, but it's the act of creation and of following your passion and dream that is what entrepreneurialism is—because we are all different and we all have gifts that we have been given by our creator. As someone said, 'Gifts are things that we give to other people.' A life where we find and follow our passion is an indescribably fulfilling life, whether in business, politics, community service, raising a family, art or doing all of those things at the same time.

Here, at the end of my speech, I return to the point I left off at the start: that, in the midst of material wealth, many suffer from spiritual impoverishment. That is why I believe in, on the one hand, technology and, on the other hand, democracy; building public housing, like we used to; subsidising electricity, like we used to; protecting our environment to keep our air and water clean; and a health and welfare system that looks after the sick and vulnerable. And then, like Maslow's hierarchy, once those elemental needs are met—clean air, clean water, healthy food, shelter and energy—people can self-actualise with an education system that mentors not just kids but adults as well to find our passions and follow our dreams. We can become who our creator intended. I believe in an education system that teaches life skills, learning things like living frugally and within your means because, for most people, doing that is more than half the economic battle. None of us worked that out for ourselves. We all had mentors; we all had someone who showed us the way. That's what our education system should be about. These are the practical things that we can do as a parliament. If we get the material conditions right and mentor people to follow their dream and find their purpose, we get the spirit right too, just like the men and women at Gilmour Space. As we shoot to the stars, we can also nurture the spirit of what it means to be human, just like our Indigenous brothers and sisters at my other favourite organisation Jinndi Mibunn.

Just to completely break the rule of thankyous in a first speech, I'd like to end with two more: one to my mum, and the other to my dad. My mum taught me the lesson of frugality. How she managed to run a household on very little stunned me as a teenager and inspires me today. My dad lived to 93 and passed away two months ago. Just after I was elected, a journo asked me who my political heroes are. I was stumped! I've never really made a hero out of any politician. Then I remembered something my dad said to me when I was a kid. I said, 'Wow, it must be hard to be a pilot,' and he said, 'I bet it's not as hard as being a bus driver.' Another time, I said, 'Wow, it's amazing how radio presenters bring their shows to an end just in time,' and he said, 'Not as amazing as a teacher who brings their lesson to an end just in time.' Bus drivers and teachers—they're who my political heroes are. The FIFO worker who leaves his family to work on a mine for two weeks at a stretch and the childcare worker with small kids of her own who comes home and looks after an ageing parent are my heroes, so to are the folks who put their bodies on the line every day they get up and go to work—because, if you have to get up to go to work to pay the bills, whether you're a doctor, a childcare worker, a fitter, a machinist, a station hand or a small-business owner, if you have to be there or you don't get paid; you're working class. If you need to sell your labour to live but can't do that because of age or disability, you are working class. The working class are the people that we have been elected to represent, and, in my first speech, I make this commitment: I am here for us.

See this speech in context