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Before I call the honourable member for Griffith, I remind the House that this is the honourable
member's first speech and I ask the House to give him the usual courtesies. The honourable
member for Griffith. Mr Deputy Speaker, politics is about power.
It is about the power of the state. It is about the power of the state as applied to
individuals, the society in which they live and the economy in which they work. Most critically,
our responsibility in this parliament is how that power is used: whether it is used for
the benefit of the few or the many. In this my first speech I want to speak on the fundamental
principles that I believe should govern the exercise of political power and the reasons,
therefore, that I am a member of the Australian Labor Party and why I have sought election
to this parliament. I want to speak on how these beliefs shape my approach to some of
the great policy challenges now facing the nation. I also want to speak on some of the
practical problems facing the local community that it is now my privilege to represent in
this place. I believe that ideas are important. Ideas
shape behaviour—the behaviour of governments, of bureaucracies, of business, of unions,
of the media and of individuals. As Keynes wrote in hisGeneral Theory:
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are
wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little
else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be exempt from any intellectual influences,
are usually the slave of some defunct economist. Debate, therefore, about fundamental ideas,
particularly ideas about the proper role of the state in the economy and society, is critical
to an informed discussion about policy. For nearly a decade now it has become fashionable
to accept the death of ideology, the triumph of neoclassical economics, the politics of
convergence and the rise of managerialism. Put crudely, it is the view that, because
parties of the traditional Right and traditional Left have now moved to some mythical place
called the `Centre', all that is left is an essentially technocratic decision between
one team of managers against another, both operating within a common, or at least similar,
mission statement. Politics on this argument becomes little more than theatre—a public
performance necessary to convince the shareholders at the AGM that the company needs new management.
I disagree, and I disagree fundamentally. I believe that there remains a fundamental
divide between our two parties on the proper role of the state in a modern economy and
society. This government's view is a minimalist view of the role of government. It is a view
that holds that markets rather than governments are better determinants of not only efficiency
but also equity. It is a view that is often described as neoclassical, but on closer inspection
there is much less Smith and much more Hobbes and his particularly bleak view of human nature.
It is Friedman, it is Hayek and most recently it is popularised in Daniel Yergin's tract
celebrating the demise of government at the hands of the market.
It is a view that now dominates the treasuries of the nation—both Commonwealth and state—and
their combined orthodoxy that a good government is a government in retreat—retreat from
any form of ownership, retreat from most forms of regulation and retreat from responsibility
for the delivery of as many services as possible. It is a view which says, in effect, that governments
are the enemies of freedom while failing to reflect on the fact that markets look to governments
to regulate them to ensure their proper functioning. It is a view that is Thatcherism writ large,
including her most infamous proclamation that there is no such thing as society. And it
is a view that labour markets are like any other market that should be deregulated because,
according to this view, labour is no different from any other commodity.
This is not my view. Nor is it the view of the Australian Labor Party, of which I have
been a proud member for 17 years. I started attending meetings of Young Labor as a school
kid in the Nambour cane growers hall in 1974. Nambour, for those of you who are unfamiliar
with it, was not a major centre of revolutionary socialism in the 1970s—the cane growers
hall even less so. I was the son of a share farmer—a member of the Country Party, although
I think not a particularly active one—who worked a 400-acre dairy farm just outside
the neighbouring town of Eumundi. I happily attended the local primary school and high
school. But when my father was accidentally killed
and my mother, like thousands of others, was left to rely on the bleak charity of the time
to raise a family, it made a young person think. It made me think that a decent social
security system designed to protect the weak was no bad thing. It made me think that the
provision of decent public housing to the poor was the right thing to do. When I saw
people unnecessarily die in the appallingly underfunded Queensland hospital system of
the 1960s and 1970s it made me think that the provision of a decent universal health
system should be one of the first responsibilities of the state.
When the kids I went to school with—most of them the daughters and sons of good Country
Party families—were unable even to begin to realise their potential because of the
abysmal levels of funding to the Queensland school system during those halcyon days of
the Bjelke-Petersen government, it made me think that there was something fundamentally
crook. If equality of opportunity does not begin in the school system, it begins nowhere
at all. We are all the product of our own experiences
and the ideas with which we have been confronted. These are the simple experiences and unremarkable
beliefs which cause me to sit proudly here rather than on the benches of those opposite.
I believe unapologetically in an active role for government. I believe that this activist
role should have as its foremost guiding principle a commitment to equality of opportunity that
is real rather than rhetorical. It is a principle that should permeate all that we do in education
and health. I also believe that governments must actively look after those who, through
no fault of their own, cannot look after themselves. I believe that governments must regulate markets.
Competitive markets are massive and generally efficient generators of economic wealth. They
must therefore have a central place in the management of the economy. But markets sometimes
fail, requiring direct government intervention through instruments such as industry policy.
There are also areas where the public good dictates that there should be no market at
all. I also believe that governments should not
just turn in on themselves, but instead have a fundamental responsibility to pursue the
public good internationally in the promotion of regional and global security, democracy
and economic development and the protection of the planet.
These are the fundamental beliefs that continue to drive the modern Labor Party. Ours is a
dynamic, not a static, movement. Our beliefs are continuing but their application to the
policy challenges facing the nation require creativity and experimentation. Our party
is a combination of experience and youth. Through this it possesses the intellectual
horsepower and the policy craft necessary to carve out an alternative vision for the
nation as well as a program of action for the realisation of that vision.
We are not afraid of a vision in the Labor Party, but nor are we afraid of doing the
hard policy yards necessary to turn that vision into reality. Parties of the Centre Left around
the world are wrestling with a similar challenge—the creation of a competitive economy while advancing
the overriding imperative of a just society. Some call this the `third way'. The nomenclature
is unimportant. What is important is that it is a repudiation of Thatcherism and its
Australian derivatives represented opposite. It is in fact a new formulation of the nation's
economic and social imperatives. Together with my colleagues who have spoken here today
and those who have been here for some time, I look forward to participating in that policy
challenge. As we enter the new century, the nation is
confronted with an array of opportunities and challenges of bewildering complexity in
the economy, in education, in our international engagements, in the environment, in the collapse
of our local communities, in the structure of the federation and, perhaps most importantly,
in the deepening contempt with which the institution of parliament itself is held. We are at present
in a period of unprecedented global economic uncertainty, driven by fundamentally unstable
international financial markets. As the Australian Reserve Bank Governor stated most recently
and starkly: Given the bigger role for economic contagion,
more and more people are asking whether the international financial system as it has operated
for most of the 1990s is basically unstable. . . By now, I think the majority of observers
have come to the conclusion that it is, and that sudden changes have to be made.
This is perhaps one of the most significant public statements by a Reserve Bank Governor
in a decade. Governments around the world, including this one, now struggle with what
new regulatory structure should be put in place, as the market has apparently failed
adequately to apply its own disciplines. Despite this profound instability, we have
a government dedicating its political and intellectual energies not to this but to the
introduction of a tax that the literature demonstrates will at best have a marginal
impact on growth but a tax that, at its core, transfers wealth from the poor to the rich.
There will be few greater tests of the leadership of this government than the calibre of its
contribution to establishing the new international architecture referred to by the Governor.
For if the government fails, the price will be paid through the jobs of ordinary Australians.
A second fundamental challenge facing government lies in our nation's education system. Education
is both a tool of social justice as well as a fundamental driver of economic development.
I believe that the nation needs a revolution in its education system. We have state curricula
of highly variable quality and a decline of critical subject areas such as science. We
have a demoralised teaching profession whose energies are now dissipated in school administration
rather than in syllabus delivery. We have state government, not to mention non-government
systems, collapsing under the sheer weight of the funding requirement for the comprehensive
introduction of information technology into the curriculum, syllabus and daily classroom
teaching. As a nation, these problems need to be tackled head on. Because of the funding
imperative, they must be tackled jointly by the Commonwealth and the states.
I believe we need to do something radical about teachers' salaries and the overall status
of the teaching profession. I believe we need to do something equally radical about quality
assurance of school curricula. I also believe that, if we are serious in our national rhetoric
about having the next generation of Australians selling their skills across the world through
every medium of electronic commerce, then we must, through the school system, equip
them to do that. I understand that my remarks will be met by the inevitable chorus of, `We
cannot afford it,' but I ask the question: `As a nation, can we afford not to?' I believe
that equity and economic development demand it. In a global economy, a first-class education
is one of the few forms of real security that the state can provide to its citizens.
I would also like to address the nature of Australia's international engagements. In
foreign policy, Australia's challenge, as we all know, is compounded by its history
and its geography. In Asia the task is complicated by the fact that, as the previous foreign
minister so aptly put it, `we are the odd man in'. We have no option other than one
of comprehensive engagement, both in rhetoric and in reality. We need not dwell here on
the incalculable damage that has been done to the nation's standing in the region over
the last three years. Despite the enormous changes to Australia's
ethnicity since the war, we are still seen in the region as an essentially European enclave
in a region of non-European cultures. All of these cultures, during the last several
centuries, have been colonised by one European state or another—some in the ugliest of
fashions. When the region looks at us, it is often through
the deep cultural prism of their respective national experiences of European colonisation
over a long period of time, experiences that for them were almost universally negative.
When you add to that the particular overlay of the White Australia policy and the fact
that the White Australia policy has been taught in most of the region's school history texts
for several generations, it becomes easier to understand why our place in this region
can sometimes be delicate. There is, of course, no reason for this nation to apologise for
its heritage. We are proudly Australian and should remain so. But as a nation we need
to understand how others perceive us, because that helps us in our behaviour towards the
region. The nation cannot afford a repeat of the mistakes of the last three years. The
damage is already great; the stakes are now too high. The repair work will probably take
a decade. There is also the question of Australia's
engagement in multilateral agencies. There is a sense around the region and beyond it
that Australia is retreating from the vigorous multilateralism of its past. Australia has,
for a long time, prided itself in punching above its weight in international fora. For
a small nation of 18 million people we have prided ourselves, from Evatt to Evans, in
the shaping of major international institutions and the resolution of international problems—political,
economic and strategic. Not only have we prided ourselves on our achievements,
but we have also been respected as an effective international citizen. This represents the
cumulative capital of successive Australian governments, ministers and officials. This
capital must be husbanded and harnessed for the future. That requires leadership—leadership
that the current foreign minister is demonstrably incapable of providing. Our future challenge
is to build across this nation a robust domestic constituency in support of Australia's future
international engagement, one that will not be hijacked by the periodic outbreak of local
populism. I am in this place, first and foremost, as
a representative of my local community, which has done me the great honour of electing me
as their representative. I represent the inner southern suburbs of Brisbane. In my local
community the first problem we face is that of unemployment. Parents in the southern suburbs
of Brisbane, like parents everywhere, want their children to have a job, to have a good
job and to have job security. One of the major employers in my electorate
is Queensland Meats, which—together with several associated processing facilities—is
responsible for nearly 1,000 jobs. These jobs were thrown into jeopardy by a unilateral
decision by the previous Queensland coalition government to have the facility closed down
without any effort to make the business viable and without any effort to retrain or redeploy
the work force. For many months now I have been working with
the local state member and state government to try and undo this disaster and to assist
and identify new investment into the facility. Time will tell whether we succeed but, if
we do, it will mean 1,000 jobs saved through industry policy, which would otherwise have
been lost. Mr Deputy Speaker, in the less than four weeks
that I have been the member for Griffith I have visited 23 of my local schools. The cost
of out-of-school-hours care programs in my schools has ballooned as a result of changes
in the funding formula of the Howard government. It has made OSHC less affordable for average
working families. In the case of vacation care, it is now 100 per cent more expensive
than it was last year, causing one of my vacation care programs to close, after having been
in operation for the previous 13 years. The southern suburbs of Brisbane have also
experienced significant cutbacks in other government services. The most notable of these
has been the closure of two of our three local Medicare offices, and now we have the cutbacks
to Centrelink. Finally, people who live on the south side
of Brisbane value greatly their quality of life. They love their `Queenslanders', and
they love their verandahs. They are incensed at the proposal by the Brisbane Airport Corporation
to construct a parallel runway, which would have the effect of doubling the volume of
aircraft over the suburbs. By 2006 it is projected that Brisbane airport will have as many aircraft
each day as Sydney has at present. The opportunity presents itself not simply to repeat the mistakes
made in Sydney but instead to learn from them. We in this place are the product of our families,
our friends and our communities. Without them we would be nothing. I would like to thank
my wife, friend and partner, Therese. I would like to thank my three fantastic kids, Jessica,
Nicholas and Marcus, for reminding their father of his human frailty and for making me laugh.
I would like to acknowledge my father, Bert, who died nearly 30 years ago. He was the classic
Australian, whose response to every question of, `How are you, Bert?' was, `I've been battling.'
I would like to thank my mother, Margaret—who is here today—for her support over a lifetime.
I would like to thank my brothers Malcolm and Greg and my sister Loree, who returned
from living in Moscow to work on my campaign. I would like to thank my campaign team of
Sharon Dryden and David Brennan—who fought the good fight despite a periodically irritable
candidate—and all the branch members and volunteers.
In politics, I would also like to thank a number of individuals: John Buchan, a family
friend of more than 50 years who went to his maker only last month and who, despite our
political differences, always encouraged me to pursue a career in public life following
the death of my father; and Bob Callandar, former editor of the then Sydney Sun, who
in the seventies left the rat-race in Sydney, went to grow pineapples—badly—in Nambour,
failed, and introduced me to the Australian Labor Party. I also thank the former Labor
member for Griffith, Ben Humphries, as a friend and for being a great local member. I would
also like to thank my colleagues in this place: Con Sciacca, Arch Bevis, John Hogg and my
longstanding friend Wayne Swan. Finally, I thank my friend of more than 10 years standing,
Wayne Goss—whom history will treat well as a Queensland Premier who restored decency
to the public administration of his state following decades of indecency.
I do not know whether I will be in this place for a short or a long time. That is for others
to decide. But what I do know is that I have no intention of being here for the sake of
just being here. Together with my colleagues it is my intention to make a difference.