Wednesday, 21 September 2022

Mr Atkinson

Valedictory statement

Mr ATKINSON (Eastern Metropolitan) (18:35): It is an extraordinary privilege and honour to be elected to this place and to represent fellow citizens. In many respects we are a jury representing those citizens, a jury which is invested with their trust and their hopes. Indeed in my view the Parliament is more important for those who are not here in this place than for those who are, those who have the opportunity, the rare opportunity, to give voice and effect to the aspirations of our communities. In most cases those of us in this place are far less qualified and have less knowledge or lived experience than those who are outside, those people that we represent.

So Parliament is not a place we should see as a platform for power and ambition for politicians or their parties. Indeed it is a privilege that we have that comes with significant responsibilities. The Parliament is a safeguard of our democracy and the rule of law and the guarantee of the equality, security and freedoms of our citizens. When we enter the Parliament, through the front door there is a quote from the book of Proverbs in the Christian Bible, ‘Where no counsel is, the people fall: but in the multitude of counsellors there is safety’. It is an important reminder to us of the value of the diverse knowledge and experience of the members of this place, their responsiveness to the advice of others outside the Parliament and to the expression of the citizens in choosing their representatives and their governments.

It is an arrogant and foolish government or alternative party that believes that they have all the answers and an exclusive mandate. Indeed former Speaker Telmo Languiller used to say there are two mandates in the Parliament: one for the government to pursue its manifesto and the other for the opposition—and that might well be extended to the minor parties as well—to question the government’s decisions and actions and to propose alternative propositions. I am dismayed at the diminished accountability of governments to their parliaments and to the people who have entrusted them to use that power wisely and even cautiously.

Tolerance and respect are not a one-way street, and the right to free speech is not exclusive to some citizens or organisations but rather to all citizens and organisations in a strong and robust democracy. The crucial responsibility to Parliament is to protect the right of free speech, yet all too often we are seeing instances of intolerance, bullying and a lack of respect for each other, even in this place. How many times do we see that children who come in school groups to this place are horrified to see the behaviour of members of Parliament; we are supposed to provide the exemplar of how people should behave. We are the ones who complain about bullying, we are the ones who complain about intolerance, and yet so often the behaviour in this place can be intimidatory.

Can I indicate that I think that the importance of Parliament is certainly to nurture and empower our citizens and our communities and to encourage and inspire young Victorians who will be our future leaders. We have a very significant and onerous responsibility to protect the vulnerable. My filter has always been on the future. I guess at my age in particular I reflect always on what the impact is of the decisions that I and we make on our children and our grandchildren. I often say to audiences of people about my age, ‘You know, governments can make decisions, and we can pinch you and pull you a little bit, but by and large the die is cast on your lives and it won’t change a massive amount’. But the decisions we make have such an impact on our children and grandchildren going forward. I am conscious, as some people have spoken about in this place and certainly I agree, of the way we are depleting the resources of this world and our country—that we are not actually considering sufficiently the future needs of those future generations, that we are brutal at times in the way we approach the management of our environment and that we do not recognise some of the issues of things that have actually protected and enriched our lives but on a basis where we are actually borrowing from our children, and I think that we need to do better.

Indeed I have certainly believed in this place, going back to that tolerance factor, that it is really important to listen to other people. In my 30 years I would hope that the public record would show and affirm that I have never sought to ridicule other people in this place. I think that I have tried to set a standard in the way I have behaved in this place, and I have tried to make sure that my focus is on contesting ideas, not actually trying to destroy other people, to bully other people. It is important to me to listen to what other people have to say, because I have found throughout my life that by listening to others I have actually come to better decisions. Our governments cannot afford to be arrogant and foolish in dismissing the views of other people, the views of other parties. No-one comes to this place with all the answers, and whilst we operate in an adversarial system, that does not mean that we ought to simply trample all over the views of others, and more importantly, we should not play the man—we should not be trying to ridicule somebody for the ideas that they bring to this place. Because what is really crucial in this place is free speech—the protection of free speech; making sure that we uphold the rule of law, not just in enacting those laws but in fact in the way we practise our own behaviours and the way we set examples to others.

I am asked from time to time, as no doubt many of you are, what is the best thing about being a member of Parliament. What I always answer is: the inspiring people that I meet. I have had the good fortune of meeting kings and queens, including Her Majesty Elizabeth II on several occasions; presidents and prime ministers from around the world; movie stars—some of whom I did not even know who they were—and sports stars, who I had more familiarity with. But I met these famous people, and I say to those who ask me what I find inspiring or what I have liked most about being a member of Parliament that it is the inspiring people I met in our communities: the women or men on a canteen at a local football ground who worked there for 20, 30, 50 years; the people who have been school crossing supervisors; the people who have done Meals on Wheels; the people who support palliative care programs—inspiring people, and also young people, the young people who are our future leaders.

Throughout my period in this place of three decades, I brought in school captains from my electorate every year, bar the two years of COVID, sadly. I have brought them in and shown them this place and talked to them, and in fact by good grace a number of members around this place from all parties have had the opportunity to meet with some of my school captains and talk to them as we have moved around the building. And can I say that when I meet those young people I am encouraged about the future. I have no doubt about their leadership, about their commitment to a better world and about their recognition of some of the really important issues that are ahead of us and that we must confront and their impatience with us for not addressing those issues more effectively and not addressing those issues more quickly, particularly things like climate change—contentious for some, not for me.

The climate has been changing since the day the world started, but there are real issues now in how we are compounding some of that change and certainly for us in terms of, if nothing else, what we need to do to mitigate some of the impacts of that change—in this country obviously bushfires and droughts—leading on to things that we have got to consider, like food security.

One of the great privileges that I have had has been working with multicultural communities. It has been a passion. Those communities have contributed so much to this state and its advancement. I get annoyed, really annoyed, at how patronising some people are, some members of Parliament are, let alone people in the community, to those multicultural communities. So many people talk about their food and their festivals and think, ‘I’ve ticked the boxes. I’ve recognised our multicultural communities’ contribution’. Hey, that does not even go close. What we really need to appreciate in these multicultural communities is the extraordinary diversity of those communities, the knowledge, the experience and the ideas that they bring, the enterprise that they bring. People from multicultural communities are far more likely to start a new business than Australians, probably because the biggest decision of their life was actually to leave their home country to come here, and once you have made that sort of a decision, starting a business is a cinch. But those communities give us so much. I know there are a number of members in this place, particularly Mr Tien Kieu, who I have shared many platforms with in multicultural communities, and I know that he and I particularly appreciate the great possibilities for these communities to take our state and our country forward. It is not just about the food. It is not just about the fashion. It is not just about the festivals. It is about the real strength that they bring in enriching our community.

When I came to this place in 1992 the state debt was a little over $30 billion, and we were really worried about it. Today the state debt is six times that and headed north. The excuse is COVID. To some extent, yes, there is some legitimacy in that argument, but really there has been too much ignorance in terms of what we are doing in this state in our spending. The reality is that at $170 billion already in the forward estimates, this state cannot possibly pay back that debt. It is not possible with the taxes that we have. The federal government might be able to recover the excessive outlays that were made over the last couple of years, again in the shadow of COVID, because of the taxes that are available to them and the growth of the economy, but that is simply not possible for the state government when you look at the range of taxes that we have available. So going forward our state governments need to be very careful about their spending and about the sorts of projects that they manage and make sure that that management is a lot tighter than it has been in recent times, because the challenges that face this state are significant. Economic growth is stifled where that debt is excessive. Opportunities for young people are stifled where that debt is excessive. The challenges of things like climate change have price tags, and the ability to meet those costs, the ability to pay those prices, is restricted if the debt is excessive. It is extraordinary to think back to the concerns that we had about a $30 billion debt, and the way that was addressed was by the sale of some enterprises in particular. Those opportunities are not available to us today.

I have had a remarkable career in this place, and I have worked with some extraordinary people. There are many people who have been with me on this journey over the course of that 30 years who have certainly enriched my life, who have taught me a lot and who have given me a perspective on life that perhaps I would not otherwise have had but that I have certainly appreciated. I thank all of the people who work in this place, the staff of this Parliament—I will not go through names because the danger is I could leave people out, and they all know who they are anyway—and certainly all of those people who have supported us in this chamber and beyond in this Parliament; my staff in my electorate office over that 30 years; people in community organisations; people that I have worked with in so many different organisations as an adjunct to my parliamentary career; obviously family and friends, who have underpinned the work that I have done and to whom I owe a great debt of gratitude; and of course my colleagues in the Liberal Party.

I join with Cathrine Burnett-Wake in some of the remarks that she has made, because what I have appreciated is those people who have aligned with the values that I have seen as important as a Liberal and that I think my community has valued in my party’s philosophy. I know at times there are people in the Liberal Party who get into all sorts of strife, and you can tell when they are in strife because they evoke the ghost of Menzies. Most of those people do not really read their history very well, because as Cathrine Burnett-Wake pointed out, Menzies brought together two components, conservatives and Liberals, and melded them into an effective party. There are those people today who dismiss the Liberals and who believe that the way forward is purely conservative. That is not the way forward. We need as a party to be responsive to changing community needs and aspirations. The Liberal Party has been very good at that for more than five decades, back to the 1940s in fact, so it is considerably more than five decades—maths is not my strong suit. But the party has always been responsive, and it has therefore been electorally successful. It is important that it remains a broad-based church, that it remains responsive to a community, that it remains socially progressive and economically responsible, which goes to the points that I made about state debt here in particular.

There are many challenges going forward: energy, housing for young people, transport—changing circumstances there, obviously the environment and so forth. Future parliaments are going to continue to have challenges. Whilst Jaclyn Symes as the Leader of the Government has indicated this was probably one of the most, if not the most, challenging parliaments, no doubt the future will bring its own suite of challenges, and some of them may well be greater than those we have faced.

I wish those who follow us every success and every wisdom in the decisions they make to ensure that this state continues to be one of the great places in the world to live, to work, to invest, to raise a family, to in fact create the sort of future that we want our children and grandchildren to have and the sort of future that those people from multicultural communities came to this country to achieve. I thank you all for the extraordinary privilege that I have had to serve in this place.

Members applauded.