Alex Hawke (Mitchell, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Australia has some of the best natural landscapes in the world, and it's been a pleasure every year for the last 20 years, before I was in parliament, to organise Clean Up Australia Day in my community—a great initiative of that great Australian Ian Kiernan who passed away in recent years. Australia continues to produce 2.5 million tonnes of plastic waste every year, and the waste in our community and our local environment continues to be a major challenge for so many communities. That's why, on Sunday morning of 5 March, we combined in my electorate to tackle this problem. We do it every year. We had dozens of sites across my electorate. It's a strong volunteering community, and we were able to get together with about a hundred local people at Third Settlement Reserve in Toongabbie, with the great state member for Winston Hills, Mark Taylor. I congratulate Mark, who was elected on the weekend as the first member for Winston Hills. The member for Greenway was there with me on one of those booths in Toongabbie, seeing the value of a hardworking local member.

I say to my community: thank you for the fantastic turnout that we had. We had the Winston Hills Girl Guides and Scouts join us there. I thank the Scout leader, Des Saunders, for his organisation every year. I deeply appreciate the work that that community puts in throughout Winston Hills and Northmead. We saw all the different groups: wanderers groups, bushwalking groups and Lions clubs. Everyone got together to get into our local environment and make a big difference. Third Settlement Reserve is a historic location from early colonial times, and it's something that we value having. Every year, for example, it has been the site of a citizenship ceremony, which, for a very, very long time, has been taking place outside of the normal citizenship ceremonies run by councils. It has got a special quality about it, and the natural environment is probably one of its most important features.

The volunteerism that I saw there is something I want to speak to. Following the pandemic, it's good to see people coming back together as communities to take charge of their own local issues and affairs. We lean on government to do a lot, and government is doing more than ever in our society, but we—local communities, individual citizens and individual families—need to make sure that we take responsibility together for problems. That's why this vision of Ian Kiernan, Clean Up Australia Day, has been so successful, in my view. It motivates people to get out and take care of their own community, their own affairs, and their own problems and challenges, and it brings people together.

This year we saw huge amounts of rubbish pulled out of the area, including all the kinds of things that people shouldn't be throwing into their local creeks and into this waterway that feeds into the Parramatta River. I want to thank the hundreds of volunteers at Third Settlement Reserve and the thousands of volunteers across the Mitchell electorate, who visited all the different sites, making a great difference to the local environment. I want to share, again, that the support of the state members Mark Taylor and Mark Hodges, who was recently elected, was greatly appreciated at this very, very important time to get the local community back into the local environment.