Michael Hatton (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Another candidate, Jason Clare, was then selected and appointed through the national executive mechanism. This is exactly what happened and it is the unvarnished truth. I know just how deep the anger and hurt is for anyone who has supported me for such a long period of time as the member for Blaxland. I have effectively looked after the people in the seat of Blaxland for 22½ years: the first half by managing the office of Paul Keating and the second half in my own right as the member for Blaxland. There is no greater honour I can imagine than being chosen by rank and file ballot to represent the ALP in the seat of Blaxland. I treasure the experience. I have had opportunities to speak strongly and forcefully not only for every ALP member in this seat but for all the people who live in Blaxland.

For me, the political tragedy is that I will no longer be able to do the job that I have done to the very best of my ability in the federal parliament on behalf of the people of the Blaxland electorate. This was a job I aspired to, was apprenticed at and one for which I spent most of my life preparing. I acquitted myself as well as I could and I am proud of the work that I have done. I am also proud of the loyalty and support given to me by so many ALP branch members, despite the disloyalty of some. There have been difficult and demanding circumstances over the last decade when branch members were faced with the destruction of their branches by massive ethnic branch stacking, large-scale rorting of branch attendance books and instances of intimidation, thuggery, standover tactics and hooliganism. Genuine branch members have been rightly outraged that this has gone on unhindered, are very dejected that I will no longer continue to represent them, but are very grateful that the agent of so much destruction will not profit from it in any way. Let the matter rest there.

I said at the outset that my wife is with me, and there is no-one that I have to thank more than Mrs Shirley Hatton for the way in which she has supported me throughout my political career. I was a nice little teacher when she first met me. I think it has been downhill ever since for someone who is also a teacher and a great teacher of mathematics and the social sciences. Shirley and I decided that if we were going to make a go of this then we would do it together, and she came to Canberra with me. She has worked with me for almost all of that time and, in doing so, she gave up a great deal. She gave up the collegiality of the teaching experience. She gave up the warmth and love of her students and the immense respect that they had for her. That is an immense amount to give up, because life here in Parliament House is often very lonely, particularly for people who are staff. She has brought great gifts to this place and, as every member of the spouses group knows, Shirley has been an active member of that across the parties ever since I first came into this parliament. She will be missed for far longer and more deeply than I will be missed from this place because she has been able to straddle the divide between government and opposition and to bring true help and friendship to everyone she has met. The respect in which she is held is very deep and very sincere. I want to thank all of those in the spouses group who have helped to make Shirley’s time here such a pleasurable one. We have got to know very many people from across both of the major parties and the National Party as well.

Secondly, I want to thank my family at large—my mother, my brothers, all my aunties and uncles, the members of my extended family—for not only the faith they put in me but also the work they put into my original by-election. I also thank them for the help they have given me over the years, not only in the branches but also at election time, and for consistently, throughout the entire time, pulling me up, telling me what is right and what is wrong, how to improve my game, and what was wrong with either what the government was doing or what the opposition was doing. No-one can survive in this game without the support of their family, and my family has been a group of utterly true believers, certainly in me, certainly in the cause that I have espoused. For them, this is a matter of some particular hurt that my run will end here.

As I have had loyalty directed towards me from my family and from my wife, my staff have also been utterly loyal. You cannot ask for anything more in this game. Its greatest failing of course is disloyalty, but its greatest joy is loyalty. Mrs Veronica Webb has been on my staff since I started, but I was smart enough to grab her when the seat of Bass Hill was lost after a 22.32 per cent swing against Labor in 1986. I managed to get her to work for Paul Keating, and Veronica has been in the office of the member for Blaxland for the last 20 years after running the seat of Bass Hill for Neville Wran, running his electorate office, for 13 years. Veronica—a fantastic electorate secretary and an immense asset both to Paul and to me, as she was to Neville—has had a triple blow this year. She lost her son from cancer; a few months after that she lost her husband, Ray; and now, with this particular instance, it is a triple blow for her and very difficult. I could have not done the job I did—working for Paul for 11¼ years or in my own right—without Veronica’s immense capacity, great openness towards people and tremendous depth and her capacity as an electorate secretary and as my great friend. Thank you to Veronica.

To Shirley who has also worked on my staff and put up with me over all these years: I thank her greatly. Justin Lee, who was with me for two interesting and tempestuous years, was a fantastic staffer; he is still a tremendous friend. He is doing very well in the New South Wales public service. Ray Webb, Veronica’s husband, also worked for me for a number of years and did a sterling job carrying out many of the great mundane matters that we have to deal with. Mike Bailey worked with me for almost a year. He is now working for Bankstown council. Councillor Ian Stromborg has been with me now for a year or so and done terrific work. John Alam has been with me on a part-time basis, and now full-time. On my relief staff, Ingrid Winter is currently working on that relief staff and, formerly, both Kath Wheatley and Kath Creighton gave tremendous service to me and also to the electors of Blaxland.

I had immense privilege serving on the committees of this parliament, initially the Joint Statutory Committee on Public Works and the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs, to which I added the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Resources and then, when it was broken up, the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Science and Innovation and the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Industry and Resources. In this parliament, I am a member of the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade, where I am deputy chair of the Defence Subcommittee and I am also on the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee. In this parliament, of course, I am the Deputy Chair of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Industry and Resources and I am on the Joint Standing Committee on the Parliamentary Library. Throughout a number of years now, I have been on the Presiding Officers Information Technology Advisory Group, of which I am deputy chair at the moment.

In all of those committees and all the work we have done, the strongest part of this parliament has been proven: in working with people across the parties one gets to know that, one, we are all human beings and, two, the essential benefit of the nation is at the core of just about everybody who comes into this place. In working together on common problems we are in a position to try to solve those problems and to put forward reports for the benefit of the nation as a whole. Also it is a test of just how deep this parliament’s resources are, not in cross-party debate but in that immensely useful work that happens in committees. None of it could happen without the committees’ resource staff, who do the lion’s share of the work, as is the case with the clerk and the clerk’s staff in the Department of the House of Representatives. We could not exist and do our work were it not for them and the way in which they facilitate the House and the Main Committee operating. Likewise the Parliamentary Library—if that were not there, we would be all very poorly off.

I want to go to the very broadest of the questions with these appropriation bills and some of the things that are missing. This is a salt and pepper budget. It is a sprinkle here and a sprinkle there—a something for everyone budget, as the member for Hume said. It is almost like Joh when he was feeding the chooks. Take a handful of wheat, throw it out and hope that a bit will sprout up here and there and not only the chooks might be fed but they might be happy and then do the right thing later.

This is a budget that does those sorts of things but it is also a budget that is expressive of the decade or more in terms of what happened before. To go to the core of what this government is about and why it is in trouble at the moment, you only have to go back to the National Commission of Audit, that yellow covered book that told the story of the decade afterwards. The fundamental line in it said that the Commonwealth government’s role was such that it should not deliver a single direct service to anyone in Australia. That was the fundamental philosophy of the National Commission of Audit. The government spent a hell of a lot of time trying to expressly put that into place. They have not been able to run away from it fully, but they have run as hard as they could over a long period of time.

You get the end product of that over a decade where people see what is really missing. The two fundamental areas were picked up in the deputy leader’s speech. One was the whole question of skills and skilling Australia. You cannot do it on an ad hoc basis. At the moment we have an adhocery where we are pulling in people under the 457 visa. We have hundreds of thousands of people who have been filling the gaps that are there in Australia. The initiative announced by the member for Griffith of the insertion of trade schools and trade training facilities into every school in Australia is directed towards the fact that we need to train young Australians, as I have said many times in the past. We need to put our minds to it. We need to realise that it is the most significant thing we can do, not only for all those young Australians who otherwise will not have a trade in the future but also to regenerate Australia’s trade and professional base. We mightily need to do that because the crisis is here—and it is grave—and it is still growing. But we need to tackle that with a greater intensity.

The second thing that the government has attempted to address is the area of broadband. Countries like Korea and the Netherlands are way in front of Australia in terms of putting in effective broadband big pipes to enable information to be pushed from one end of the country to the other. Labor’s proposal is for fibre to the node. The Netherlands has already got fibre to the node, and it is now going beyond that to the next major step of taking fibre to every household in the Netherlands. Every household will have the capacity not only to receive services and information and so on but also to be a potential small business. Australia has a long way to go to catch up, but I think the Labor plan will do that. What we have not seen from the government over 10 years is a concerted program to address the problems in relation to broadband. Everyone has seen lots of sporadic and ad hoc attempts to deal with this, but nothing has got to the core of what needs to be done to make us competitive and to keep us competitive.

George Hegel in his book entitled The Philosophy of Right, which was written in the 19th century, said: ‘So ist die Philosophie ihre Zeit in Gedanken erfasst,’ which means, ‘Philosophy is its own age apprehended in thought.’ For a government, its philosophy is expressed in its budget. This is a pepper and salt budget, spraying bits all over the place to try to get this government re-elected. It does not have the fundamental vision that we need for tackling the skills crisis or the crisis in broadband provision. The federal opposition does have that vision. I wish them well at the next election, and I wish the member for Griffith well in his—(Time expired)

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