Page 916 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 20 April 2021
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
Last week I attended an ACT for Bees event with Minister Vassarotti. We learned about pollinator corridors in our suburbs. It was great to hear from Cormac Farrell about how to plant a bee garden and why we need habitat right through Canberra. Our bees do not travel very far. Depending on the species, they may only cover a few hundred metres. The bees in your garden fertilising your tomatoes are hyper-local. If you want a tomato harvest, you and your neighbours need to plant for the bees in your patch.
Yesterday I attended a natural resource management plan consultation and I heard from some local Landcare experts like Rosemary Blemings. There is so much expertise here in Canberra, but we are still lacking that strategic coordination and the sufficient resources to bring it all together.
This role is a great privilege, but it is also a great responsibility. I really hope our land and waterways will be here long after me. I would really like my daughter, and her daughter after that, to learn to care for it better than I did when I was growing up.
Mental health—veterans
MS CHEYNE (Ginninderra—Assistant Minister for Economic Development, Minister for the Arts, Minister for Business and Better Regulation, Minister for Human Rights and Minister for Multicultural Affairs) (6.41): Finally, finally, the federal government has listened. Finally, the federal government has listened to hundreds and thousands of voices who have all been calling for one thing: a royal commission into defence and veteran suicide. Nothing less. Finally, this has been achieved.
Many of us hope that this will be a beginning: a beginning where veterans’ voices and experiences will be heard and understood, a beginning where issues and truths will be uncovered and addressed, a beginning to save lives—the lives of those who have already sacrificed so much on behalf of their country—and a beginning that is overdue.
But it also closes one chapter, a chapter of intense, difficult, tireless campaigning by so many—by too many, because it should not have had to take a campaign. The facts spoke for themselves. The stories spoke for themselves. The lives and the lives lost, spoke for themselves. It should not have had to take a campaign, but it did, and central to that campaign was Julie-Ann Finney, whose son, Dave, a proud veteran and a Canberran, committed suicide in February 2019.
I was the very first politician that Julie-Ann spoke to, following Dave’s death. She gave me permission to speak in the Assembly that April about Dave, to speak about his extraordinary life and his extraordinary contribution. We met in person a few weeks later, when she came to lay a wreath for Dave at the War Memorial, ahead of Anzac Day, and to be there at the dawn service. Julie-Ann made clear to me in our first conversation and later when we met that she wanted a royal commission, nothing less. She said she would not let herself grieve until a royal commission was announced. And every single day over two painful years she has held true to that commitment, working tirelessly for her son and for all veterans.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video