Page 2842 - Week 08 - Thursday, 11 August 2016
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I especially want to thank my key staff. I thank Danielle. Danielle is brilliant and capable and my right-hand woman. She is always full of guidance and advice, which is invaluable to me, even as I had the baby and came back to work with him. I am very grateful to her for her positive outlook, which keeps me positive at times.
I started in this place with a young staffer called Peter Hosking, who I am sure we are all going to get to know more over the campaign. I believe he is a go-getter and has great ideas about what we can do better in this city. I thank Liam Devlin, who covered all matters of communications and community issues, local shopping centre visits and other engagements with me for a couple of years. I also thank Amber Gale, who made my social media profile somewhat more professional than it had been before. Both of them have gone on to other jobs. I wish them both well, especially Amber up in Sydney with her partner and her baby.
I thank Nathan and Jill, who are currently in my office—Nathan for his reliability and Jill for her great legal skills; reading and advising me on bills. And I thank Zoe, who is creating such great things for me in my office now. I also thank Greg and Tom for assisting me with electoral engagement and for their energy and stamina in this important work.
I want to mention the staff of the leader’s office—Jodie, Joe, Emily, Neil, Ian, Jess, Katy, James: all the leader’s staff—who have helped us out so often. We are much stronger for a great leader’s team. I also thank the staff of all other offices who have been assisting me in this, my first term in the Assembly.
We start out with L plates on in this place and we rely very heavily on those around us with a bit more expertise to explain to us how to do things. Maybe we could have a better training system for MLAs one day, because there is so much to learn and it is wonderful how we have been able to help each other. It has been a privilege for me to mentor various young people in my term here and to have them visit me and accompany me to see what I do. It has been a real privilege to help the 10 or so young people whom I have mentored. It also has been a great privilege to have return-to-work mums and refugee work placements in my office, who were posted. I thank my staff for being so flexible in having them in. It makes a lot of difference to people to have access to the workforce to see what it is like and to have a reference at the end of it.
I am proud to say that my team have achieved many things. This team has had around 700 reps to ministers. In particular, in my favourite area of representation—Territory and Municipal Services, now Transport and City Services—we wrote 465 reps, 100 of them to Minister Fitzharris and over 364 to Minister Rattenbury. I am sure they got sick of writing, “Dear Mrs Jones,” crossed out, with “Giulia” on the top. But I can tell you there are plenty of people in the electorate raising issues, according to the responses that we got.
I thank both of those ministers for their diligence and for taking seriously the issues raised by the opposition. I am sure you realise we get some kudos for it in the electorate. It really has been a great thing that you have taken us seriously and solved
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