Page 1523 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 4 May 2016
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MR BARR: I am sorry. I never said that, Madam Assistant Speaker. I pointed out that I thought there were three factors that were driving that change in demographics. First is much stronger family connections, the fact that there are successive generations of people who have family in this city, people who were born here now, and who want to retire here because their kids and grandkids are here. That is different about Canberra in 2016 than might have been the case in the 1970s and 1980s when, as I said, people tended to come here for work and retire back to where they came from. Now people are from Canberra and they want to stay here.
I also, somewhat amusingly, observed that the best and cheapest real estate has already been acquired on the south coast. So the opportunity of downsizing, selling your house in Canberra and being able to buy something fantastic on the south coast has been taken by a previous generation. I also observed—I think this is correct—that the health services and the availability of services here in Canberra are significantly better than what is available on the New South Wales south coast. I think that is a credit to this government. We have put in place a series of community, health and other services that make Canberra a place that people want to retire to. That is a good thing.
I was then asked what that would mean for the city’s economy. The point I made in response is that I find myself—I was then 42 but now I am 43—nearly 10 years older now than the median age of a Canberran. So it would be very important in the future for those of us who were above the median age and who wanted to retire here, wanted to maintain our enviable lifestyle, to support the next generation who will undoubtedly be providing the services and working in the jobs that will allow us to maintain that very enviable lifestyle. That, in fact, will be an economic contributor, not a burden, as has been implied by people who were not even there.
I think that is the thing I find most disturbing about Mr Doszpot’s motion. He was not there. Mr Coe was not there. Yet what they are asserting is fundamentally untrue. The fact that I got large and spontaneous applause from those who attended for my response on that question, one of the largest applauses I got out of many in the speech, is testimony to the fact that my answer was, in fact, accurate and reflected the mood of the meeting and the context of the speech.
But that there is tension between generations from time to time is something that even Bob Dylan wrote about in 1964 in his famous The times they are a-changin’ song. He said:
Come senators, congressmen, please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside and it’s ragin’
It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’
And I go on:
The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
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