Page 763 - Week 05 - Thursday, 6 July 1989
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One issue which has divided the community greatly in recent times has been the question of a casino for the Australian Capital Territory. It is probably appropriate that I tell you that I have seen organised crime in its many variants in my career, and it is probably relevant that I respond to a suggestion on this morning's media that I was somehow obsessed with corruption. Let me tell you that maybe we are all facing corruption fatigue? The other and more frightening fatigue we get in this community is compassion fatigue. We stop feeling compassion for the losers in society. The losers in society are very often the people who are the victims of corruption. When I was a young person on a farm on the south coast - - -
Mrs Grassby: Is that your problem - foot-and-mouth disease?
MR COLLAERY: It is a noble occupation to grow up on a farm, I remind Minister Grassby. On that farm and on some adjoining farms owned by and willed by my father to my war-widowed mother there appeared "For Sale" signs by real estate agents. There had never been a suggestion that the land be sold. If Mrs Grassby wishes to understand the motivation of some people in this community about corruption, then I should tell her that to grow up in Wollongong is a great and vast education. In Wollongong I watched the estate agents graduate to the local council, and as a boy I watched our farms get stripped off us one by one by council resolutions.
There is a football ground in Wollongong now standing next to the migrant hostel where I grew up. That football ground is named after one of the aldermen who was part of Wollongong Incorporated, and that football ground is a monument to the dispossessions which occurred after the war to those people who lacked power in the community. It is a great introduction, as a young person, to go and look at a semitrailer and to put your head under a semitrailer and run some fingers over a tyre and feel the letters in braille. They are embedded in my mind, Mrs Grassby, the letters "CGW" - this was on a private semitrailer belonging to an alderman - "City of Greater Wollongong".
One proceeds in life through many things. The 1966 Australian taxation decisions record a decision against a person who acquired by resumption a farm at Albion Park. This was another farm owned by my family, and this farm was found to have blue metal on it. But my aged grandfather, who lived there alone, when I was up at university, could not pay attention to it and that farm found itself resumed under the soldier settlement program. It was resumed so that a soldier settler could go in there and increase the gallonage of milk - that was the argument - because - - -
MR SPEAKER: Order! Mr Collaery, the motion is that we look to ministerial and public service impropriety. I understand the logic of your explanations, but I think they
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