Page 32 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 27 November 2012
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lives. We will in some cases make it into the top echelons of the boardroom and the parliament and in some cases we will not. This is not a failure but a victory of personal choices mixed with life circumstances. It means that sometimes one of our many priorities has won out against another. It is no-one’s fault; it is okay, it is a product of our freedom. What we want is the ability to choose our lives, not a guilt trip about the choices that we make. More often we need to hear “well done” instead of “not good enough”.
Feminism has changed. Feminist fighters of older generations have had great successes and now we are building on them in a different, more natural way—with that change, embracing men and the equal but different attributes we bring to solving the life matrix. So looking at the generations of women in my family, I have drawn inspiration from them but I am also profoundly grateful to live beyond 2000 and I am full of hope in the future.
Madam Speaker, after three election campaigns I have a number of acknowledgements to make. I pay tribute to my husband, Bernard, who, as an Army officer, has served his country in Indonesia, Iraq and Afghanistan and has tirelessly served our family throughout my years of hard work to be elected to this place. My election to the Assembly is Bernard’s victory as much as it is mine.
I extend heartfelt thanks to my campaign advisers across three campaigns whose unstinting efforts, innovative strategy and unshakable belief in my ability to win helped propel me to victory. Of course, no political campaign can exist without the legions of workers whose unflagging support made everything possible. To the scores and scores of supporters who came from all over Canberra, and especially those who worked the early, early morning shift, and from all over the country to help me, thank you from the bottom of my heart. I pledge myself here today to prove worthy of your faith and your support as a member of this Assembly.
To the people of the mighty electorate of Molonglo who have shown confidence in me by electing me to this Assembly, to all those I spoke with at shopping centres, at community meetings, at my campaign office and on your front doorsteps, I give a solemn undertaking that I will do my utmost to represent your wishes and best interests in this place.
Madam Speaker, I am also here to represent the forgotten Canberrans—the decent, law-abiding, rate-paying families using all they have to fund a mortgage or saving for a house deposit, the hardworking public servants and business people who strive every day to make our city run and the retired Canberrans who deserve to enjoy their retirement in peace and safety. For their sake we must protect a society that rewards effort with prosperity.
Walter Burley Griffin envisaged a safe, well-run national model city. However, if we are not vigilant the society that our parents and our grandparents benefited from will no longer exist. We cannot take for granted the freedom to live our own lives and raise our children according to the dictates of our own consciences, because good intentions do not always make good policies.
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