Page 475 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 8 March 2011
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MR HARGREAVES (Brindabella) (11.53): This debate is about self-determination, this debate is about basic rights enjoyed by Australians and this debate is about fairness. This debate is also about discrimination and it is about the class of sovereignty that different citizens enjoy. This debate is about insult and this debate is about ignorance.
Who remembers the days when we were administered not by someone who lived here but by a grazier from Queensland or a lawyer from Tasmania, disparagingly referred to as the mouth from the south? Who remembers the days when the commonwealth treated us as a colony? Who remembers the days when we were taxed without proper representation? And who remembers the days before the self-government act and the frustrations we had because we dealt with a single member of the House of Representatives who was a notional minister? There was little difference between the way we were perceived and the way the colonies were perceived in the days of yore.
And has anything changed? We are now told that the commonwealth parliament, nay, a federal minister, is wiser than a body of elected representatives. But who says so? Who says that the commonwealth parliament is wiser than the body of elected representatives put here by the people of the ACT?
Why can’t people just understand that the people in the ACT are not overpaid, overfed and affluent public servants, that mythical creature which has never existed in numbers in this town? Why is it that people deciding our future do so with such hideous prejudice after experiencing little more than the night-life of Kingston and Manuka? Why is it so that these so-called wise men and women can determine our destiny when they do not, by their own admission, know where Spence is, know where Waramanga is or know where Conder is? Indeed, you will hear said in the house the suburb of “Condor”. For their information, a condor is a bloody big black bird and Conder was a painter.
Why do these people fear allowing us the same rights as those in the states have, notably Queensland, South Australia or New South Wales? Did the commonwealth overturn the socially progressive laws of Don Dunstan? I do not think so. Yet there is a senator from South Australia who would like to do that here. A senator did not overrule the progressive stuff that Don Dunstan pioneered. What gives a member of the House of Representatives or a senator for Queensland the right to deny us the same rights as Queenslanders or those in South Australia?
I have got a brother who lives in Calwell and I have got a brother who lives in Jerrabomberra. I ask those opposite and I ask those people in this place that oppose self-determination, “What am I going to tell my brother who lives in Calwell when it is suggested that he is a less responsible person than my brother who lives in New South Wales? What am I going to say to him? ‘No, you’re not trusted like my other brother in Jerrabomberra.’”
What am I going to say to my daughters, one of whom lives in Fadden and the other lives in Boorowa? Do I tell my daughter who lives in Fadden that she is not as responsible as her sister, that she cannot be trusted but her sister can? I do not hear any suggestions on what would be the response.
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