I rise to speak on the motion put forward by the member for Kennedy. The electorates of the member for Kennedy and I are very similar in many ways: in terms of dimensions, demographics, scale and the fact that a large chunk of them is cut off for a large part of the year due to floods and the variety of weather events that we get across the north and the far north. For us, the wet season is the summer, and summer is Christmas, and Christmas usually means presents for a lot of kids, and the only way that happens in places like Lockhart River, Weipa, Aurukun and the NPA is with Australia Post. It is absolutely critical every year. With the advent of Temu and Amazon and all those sorts of things, parents are getting better access to better toys and better options for the kids. But a few years back, a series of natural disasters meant that Christmas didn't arrive in Weipa because the post was held up, and there was a tough conversation for a lot of parents and a lot of families about why Santa had decided to skip out that year. That's what Australia Post means.

Australia Post is a connection to the world for a lot of our remote and regional communities. It is their ability to connect with loved ones. It is their ability to express and share that love at times like Christmas and birthdays and things like that. For a lot of our PALM workers, it is Western Union. It's how they send the money that they earn humping the bananas, working in the sugarcane and doing all the stuff in the agricultural industry that we so desperately need. It's how they get that money back home. It's how they improve the lives of their families back in the South Pacific and it's the pride that they feel in that. That's what Australia Post does.

Australia Post these days is a business, but it's more than a business. It's an icon. It's an institution. It's something that Australians hold very dear, and that's why we have to support it. It's why we've actually managed to expand Australia Post in my area of Leichhardt. Cooya Beach, some 35 minutes north of Port Douglas, is now, for the first time ever, getting letter deliveries. We're working really hard with Daintree Village and the Douglas Shire Council to ensure that they continue to get post. It looks as though there'll be some kind of arrangement with the local council—some land and possibly a building—to ensure that that service remains. We've also worked hard to ensure that Australia Post remains in the Torres Strait on both Horn Island and Thursday Island, because it is an actual life force. It is where people go to bank. In my part of the world, it's where people buy their electricity cards. It is where they know they can get some good and sound advice. In a lot of those small communities, the post office is also a source of employment—bit of economic opportunity for the people living in those spaces. It is where people go and gather. They have a chat and they talk about the things that they've just bought.

When I was in Lockhart River for the first time, I arrived at the same time as the post and spent a good half an hour with the mayor, unpacking all of the Amazon packages that had arrived. I saw how happy the community was to get their packages—to get that interaction with the outside world—because Lockhart, at the time, was cut off. I'd flown in, and we were having a chat, and he said, 'Look, we've got to go grab the things.' People were queuing up, waiting for their things, and the kids' eyes lit up, and the parents' eyes lit up because they got that blender that they needed—there's no Kmart in Lockhart River—or they got the rice cooker that they'd had on order for a while. It's these little things that are the connection to the greater world—the connection to the appliances and the life that so many of us get to take for granted because we happen to live in larger places with access to those sorts of things.

For over 200 years, Australia Post has been essential to the Australian way of life. Each year, 2.2 billion articles of post are delivered. I know that, even today, I get excited when I see something from Australia Post has arrived—provided it doesn't have a little window in it, because that usually comes out of my pocket! We continue to support our regions, and we continue to support our regions through Australia Post. I know that the member for Kennedy is incredibly passionate about ensuring that the regions, such as mine and his, continue to have access to something that has been such a big part of Australian life and is essentially a part of the Australian identity. I'll continue to fight for Australia Post not just in Leichhardt but right across the rest of the country.