Page 2301 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 22 June 2011
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the question, just declare, “I am on their side and you are not.” In many ways it does hark back to Robert Menzies’s speech on the forgotten people. It is worth reading just the first two paragraphs. This is 1942, remember. He says:
Quite recently, a bishop wrote a letter to a great daily newspaper. His theme was the importance of doing justice to the workers. His belief, apparently, was that the workers are those who work with their hands. He sought to divide the people of Australia into classes. He was obviously suffering from what has for years seemed to me to be our greatest political disease—the disease of thinking that the community is divided into the relatively rich and the relatively idle, and the laborious poor, and that every social and political controversy can be resolved into the question: What side are you on?
When you put it in terms like that, it is easy to cast aspersions and throw the blame back on others. But it is a false war, it is a false assertion and it is a straw man from a straw leader who has nothing else to say. It is ridiculous for the Greens to simply assert that they seem to be the only ones who care.
I point back to three initiatives from when I was in government: the Earth Charter, which looked at addressing all of these issues; the Kyoto protocol, signed in Kyoto, which looked at addressing issues of climate change; and, in particular, our great initiative of putting in place the poverty task force. The poverty task force and its resultant report, much of which has not been actioned by the Labor Party since they came to office, is the clearest example of any party in the history of self-government being genuinely interested in resolving the issues of where poverty strikes. And it is not just the poverty of the poor or the most poor.
Ms Gallagher said, “Where is the evidence of all these claims of families at breaking point?”—in her sort of “let them eat cake” amendment. The evidence is out at Kippax Uniting. Go and ask them. Go and read their submissions to estimates. The evidence is just in—
Ms Gallagher: God, it is only Wednesday. I don’t think they are the same families we were talking about.
MR ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Mr Hargreaves): Order, members! Other members have time.
MR SMYTH: things like ACTCOSS, who, in their budget submission this year, said this. Let me just read one paragraph:
What is seen in this Budget is some short term solutions to what are long term problems. The opportunity for bold action, as families and communities continue to grapple with the impacts of the global financial crisis, has been missed.
And people like Kippax Uniting said last year, “What we are seeing are people we have never seen before from a sector of the community that we do not normally expect them to appear from, because they are all hurting.” That is what Mr Seselja seeks to address in his motion today. We need to have a different measure of the impact of government activity upon all Canberrans.
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