Page 5197 - Week 13 - Thursday, 29 November 2018

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always helpful DLOs who assist in my portfolios—Emma the swan, Gill, Kylie, Kylie, Rowena, Karley and Kim, and to the others who have supported all of the ministers over the year: thank you for your hard work, patience and good humour.

To the Chief Minister, Deputy Chief Minister and my cabinet and caucus colleagues, we are, as Mr Parton pointed out, a united team, and your support of me, in good times and bad, has been greatly appreciated.

To the wonderful people of Kurrajong, thank you for the conversations, support and sometimes your very frank feedback. I look forward to continuing our work together to ensure that the heart of Canberra is the very best it can be. To my family and friends, everything I said about them in my inaugural speech still stands, and then some.

Finally, to all the staff and every member in this place, including those opposite, to quote a well-known card, I wish you an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low-stress, non-addictive, gender-neutral, winter solstice holiday, practised with the most joyful traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, but with respect for the religious persuasion of others who choose to practise their own religion, as well as those who choose not to practise a religion at all. Merry Christmas.

Valedictory

MR RATTENBURY (Kurrajong—Minister for Climate Change and Sustainability, Minister for Corrections and Justice Health, Minister for Justice, Consumer Affairs and Road Safety and Minister for Mental Health) (9.36): I will take this opportunity to briefly join in the annual tradition to reflect on the year that has been. Mr Parton finished where I want to pick up. It is an extraordinary opportunity that we have to be in this place, particularly to work as a minister in a government. I thoroughly love my job, even though there are moments you cannot believe, things that go wrong. There are things that you manage to achieve at times but there are also the things that happen. I have said to people that if I was ever to write a book, the subject would be: you could not make these things up. Extraordinary things do happen and humans do things that we might never anticipate.

Nonetheless, it is a tremendous privilege to be here and to have the chance to work on issues that we really care about and also issues that our community really cares about. I have had the great privilege in my time in this place to have my eyes opened to a whole lot of things you would never otherwise come across. By dint of our role, people come and talk to us, almost confessionally sometimes. But they also ask us to come to events and they tell us their stories.

It has made me a richer human and has hopefully made me much better at my job as well, because all of these people have been willing to share their experiences, their hardships, their successes, their crazy ideas, their imaginative ideas with me. Of course, I could not do it without my staff, as each of us in this place experiences.

My chief of staff, Indra, has the most extraordinary corporate knowledge. She has been in this place for quite some time and I think is known to everybody. She is chief


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