Dr Nelson’s Maiden Speech as the Member for Bradfield
in the House of Representatives
20th May 1996
Mr Deputy Speaker, in rising to make my first speech in
the parliament, I, through you, would like to congratulate the Speaker
of the House on his election to the highest office that the House can
confer upon a member and wish him the courage and wisdom that the position
requires. I also congratulate my friends and colleagues from both sides
of the House on the quality and depth of their first speeches.
I am honoured to be here to represent the people of Bradfield—an
electorate that covers what is known commonly as Sydney's Upper North
Shore. Proclaimed in 1949 and named after John Bradfield, engineer
and bridge designer, it follows the Pacific Highway from Chatswood
West in the south to Wahroonga in the north, across to Belrose in the
north-east and Castle Cove in the south-east. It is predominantly a
residential area, within which live some of the most influential and
resourceful people in the country. That is what makes it most special.
It also contains a number of light manufacturing, service industries
and commercial industries and some government administration.
From the outset, and on behalf of the people of Bradfield,
I wish to acknowledge the loyal service and hard work for over two
decades of my predecessor, Mr David Connolly, his wife, Monique, and
their family and wish them well for the future. I would not be here
now if it were not for the dedicated hard work and sacrifice of so
many people, only a few of whom can I now specifically recognise. As
I mention them, I am reminded of the words of Isaac Newton: `If I could
see further than others it was because I stood on the shoulders of
giants.'
To my father who instilled in me the value of education,
decent tolerance and respect of others and a work ethic that he thought
was always in the Australian Labor Party, thank you. I thank my mother,
Pat, for her intelligence and her empathy and for teaching me the importance
of having a passionate commitment to those things in which you believe.
My wife, Kate, married a doctor, not a politician. Yet
when I told her on 7 September 1994 that I had `had enough' and would
seek Liberal Party preselection, her response was, `I knew that some
day you would do this. It is not something I would want for us and
our children, but I will do my best to support you.' In giving up what
little financial security and privacy we had, moving interstate and
then being indirectly subjected to some rather insensitive ridicule
and denigration, she has given much more than me.
To my son, Tom, who has already told me he would `not like
to be a politician', and to my daughter, Emily, who understands that
I have gone into politics `to help other people', thank you. I would
also like to recognise a number of those people who at times, with
some courage, reached out to support me: Don Glover, my campaign director,
mentor and friend; Rhondda Vanzella, the Northern Regional Metropolitan
President of the Liberal Party, who recognised the urgency of the party's
situation in 1994 and has followed me the length and breadth of Australia
ever since to promote the Liberal message; Doug Lowe—this may
seem unusual—a former Labor Premier, my friend and mentor who
taught me that no-one has a monopoly on what is right or wrong and
to always look for good in others; Bill and Betty Flick; Peter and
Norma Beckley; Denise and Ross Reid; Tony Fox, my FEC president; Robert
Longstaff; Kathryn Greiner; Michael Yabsley; and, in particular, my
friends and colleagues from the Australian Medical Association who
in 1993 conferred upon me the privilege of leading what was at times
a dangerously difficult agenda for reform but one that was badly needed.
Also, I would not be here were it not for the courageous
foresight of a man I have come to love, respect and admire, that is,
my friend Dr Bruce Shepherd. Above all else, he has taught me the importance
of being prepared to fight for the things in which you believe and
that the solutions of life will be found in helping others to help
themselves and their families. Finally, I mention Raphael Klaesi, a
man whom I had never met but who designed the Bradfield logo, which
says, quite simply, `Put your heart in it.'
There are others whose lives have touched me and who played
a significant and critical role in making me who I am. They are people
whose names I do not remember. But when you attend a cot death at 5
o'clock in the morning, or you visit a home just after midnight when
parents have been informed that their teenage son has been killed in
a car accident, or you sit in the kitchen of a modest home where the
bank is about to foreclose due to unexpected unemployment, or you visit
the home of a young girl who has been raped by her father—although
nothing prepares you for these experiences as you struggle with your
helplessness and your inability to pro vide sufficient comfort, more
than anything else they are some of the experiences that will keep
me true to my principles and certainly not change me by the time I
finish here. Those principles are commitment, compassion and conscience
instilled in me sequentially by my parents, the Jesuits and the Hippocratic
principles upon which the medical profession is based.
So why am I here? What will drive me and what are some
of the issues to which I commit myself? I did not plan on being a politician
but there were a number of critical events that happened to me as I
went along. On 2 June 1992 I spoke to the National Press Club about
unemployment and the health consequences of it. When I had finished,
Ian Spicer, the then Executive Director of the Australian Chamber of
Commerce and Industry, was asked a question about the employment of
young Australians. He got up and gave a reply that was based then on
a survey that the chamber had just done of the top 200 employers in
Australia. Essentially he was proposing a change to the way in which
youth wages and conditions were to be negotiated.
Before he could get his backside back on the chair, Bill
Mansfield, the then Vice-President of the ACTU, sprang to his feet
and said, `Absolutely under no circumstances will the union movement
of Australia ever talk to employers about anything like that.' As I
stood there listening to this, I thought, `My God, listen to this.
Here are the people who create wealth in this country and who could
and should employ more Australians saying, "This is what the problem
is, whatever the merits of the solution," and then the Labor movement
is saying, "No, we're not even going to talk about it," at
a time when we have 34 per cent national youth unemployment and 47
per cent youth unemployment in areas like Liverpool in New South Wales.'
When I was Vice-President of the AMA, I was told by the
Labor health minister that I should `not bother telling the then government
what I thought it ought to do and that, if I wanted to change anything
that government was doing, I would have to change the government'.
I was then told by his successor that people were `wasting their money
having private health insurance' and that they ought to do what she
did. When I inquired what that was, it was to pay cash. There we were
representing a million families in Australia earning less than $40,000
a year, half a million people on health care cards and 800,000 pensioners
who still made enormous sacrifices to care for themselves and their
families, and government wasn't listening.
When I went through the preselection experience—which
I know the member for Batman (Mr Martin Ferguson) found equally character
building—one of my preselectors said to me, `Dr Nelson, you seem
to be in a bit of a hurry. Why don't you wait until you're 40 and your
wife has another baby? If you really want to be in politics, we'll
find a nice place for you to go where you do not have to cause all
this trouble.' The lady next to me suggested that I would be more comfortable
in the eastern suburbs with an earring. You are damned right I am in
a hurry.
Every hour of the day our children are going into debt,
with Australia's current account problem at the rate of over $2 million
an hour. At the end of every day there are 48 small businesses in this
country that have gone broke. There are 800 people leaving private
health insurance every day to rely on public hospitals because they
can no longer afford the premium. So despairing are they of the kind
of future they see ahead of them that every day one young Australian
between the ages of 15 and 24 commits suicide and another 50 try.
There are dozens of families who find day after day what
some of us have been on about for a number of years—that is,
unless we change the way that wealth is created we have absolutely
no hope whatsoever of providing institutional, residential or nursing
home care to the population as it ages. And we were told, `This is
as good as it gets.' For people in business, if you did not like it
you were instructed by the previous Prime Minister to go back on to
PAYE. I can tell you that that is what I am doing, but I do not think
that is what he had in mind when he gave the advice.
I have surveyed the people of my electorate to find out
the things that are most important to them. Apart from the aeroplanes
that have been pushed over our houses day after day, the broadband
cables that are being rolled out and over which we seem to have no
control and telecommunications towers popping up all over the place,
the things that are most important to them are essentially Australia's
foreign debt, taxation reform and Australia's health care system.
There was a time when Australians and others frequently
referred to us as a `lucky country'; but you do not hear that so often
these days. It seems that in many ways luck has become our problem.
Over the last 13 years in particular, every year we have sold a little
more of our country and we have borrowed more money from overseas to
maintain an unsustainably high expectation of what government can provide.
Our current account-GDP ratio, running at around 5.5 per cent, is more
than twice that of any other OECD country. We have run external deficits
in 28 of the last 30 years. Our net foreign debt is 40 per cent of
GDP. We spend four per cent of GDP servicing our debt and equity obligations,
and it is increasing. We have a miserable savings rate nationally of
18 per cent of GDP and a disposable personal income savings rate of
three per cent.
The much touted ACTU-government accord, about which the
member for Batman made great things in his maiden speech, has basically
reinforced the very things that stopped job creation. It has reinforced
and given support to budget deficits, which have put pressure on interest
rates. It has basically supported an inefficient and inequitable taxation
system. When you look at the results of the ACTU-government accord
you see that in the first 10 years—from 1984 to 1994—with
an average annual growth rate of 3½ per cent, 160,000 jobs
were created in the private sector. But unemployment still increased
from 687,000 to 850,000.
The new `cures' for unemployment—training, job subsidy
schemes, moving widows and middle-aged people onto pensions—do
not work. If you talk to people in business, including the businesses
in my electorate or anywhere else, you find that they could and should
employ more Australians, but they cannot and they will not because
the tax system is far too complex, the industrial relations environment
is far too inflexible and they are overloaded with bureaucratic and
administrative burdens. These are the things that the Howard government
is moving right now to address.
I believe it is time in Australia that we had a serious
debate about taxation reform, which has never been a sane pursuit.
The first thing we need to do is educate Australians about the language—what
is sales tax, what is payroll tax, what is wholesale sales tax or FBT.
The entire system needs simplification. The monumental size and complexity
of the Income Tax Assessment Act and the entire industry which surrounds
it are in themselves arguments for change.
We need to move away from a tax system which is focused
on the very things we are trying to encourage—employment, productivity
and savings. We cannot encourage wealth creation without simplification
and we cannot sustain government spending without broadening the tax
base. The looming impact of the Internet on tax avoidance completes
a picture of national urgency on this issue, to which I will be the
most committed during my time here.
The Leader of the Opposition (Mr Beazley) was reported
in the Australian Financial Review on 30 April this year as saying
that `revisiting the consumption tax debate would not be helpful to
the ALP'. That may be the case. It is probably not helpful to the government
either, and I suspect it will not help my personal political career.
But what about us doing something that is `helpful' for Australia's
next generation and committing ourselves on both sides of this chamber
to putting taxation reform back on the political agenda? The Business
Council of Australia's Access Economics modelling, about which the
opposition was so preoccupied a couple of weeks ago, calculated long
run gains from reform of indirect taxes and subsidies at two per cent
of GDP, or $10 billion. We could finance a lot of education, health
or Aboriginal services from that amount of money.
As the Minister for Health and Family Services (Dr Wooldridge)
said only two weeks ago and I have maintained for a long time, the
present health financing arrangements are unsustainable. Australians
need to realise that there is a limit to what governments can provide
in terms of health care. Until such time as we provide support, political
and financial, for people who wish to look after themselves and their
families by supporting private health insurance, then frankly we have
no hope. I also think it is time that we on both sides of politics
worked as much as practicable towards setting some priorities for what
the Australian government can and will fund in terms of health care.
Another area which I think more than any other during my
time here will change the political, economic and social priorities
of this country is the ageing of the Australian population. By the
year 2001, the number of people over the age of 65 will have increased
by 27 per cent. By the middle of the next century, a third of us will
be over the age of 65. At present we spend more on housing criminals
in Australia than we do on caring for people in nursing homes and residential
institutions.
Whoever is in government, and hopefully it will be us for
many years to come, there will continue to be people who are unemployed.
There are serious human and health consequences of unemployment: 50
per cent more doctor visits a year, 35 per cent more admissions to
hospital, a death rate which is 17 per cent higher and a 20 per cent
higher death rate for the wives of unemployed men.
I believe that we ought to be considering, as the Anglican
Bishop of Brisbane, Peter Hollingworth, argued unsuccessfully in 1992,
that it is time in Australia that we started to pilot on a voluntary
basis community development employment programs for people who are
unemployed as a means of maintaining a sense of self-worth and self-esteem.
Similarly, it is time that we changed the attitudes of Australians
toward those who are unemployed. Most people who are unemployed are
unemployed through no fault of their own. They are not dole bludgers
or anything of the sort.
Over the last 13 years we have created a world in which
many Australians expect that the Australian government will provide
for them and we have cut a whole range of people out of the economic
mainstream. I think it is time that we said to every Australian, whoever
they are or wherever they were born, `There is a place for you. We
will care for you, but we want you to make some kind of contribution
to our future.'
On average, as I said earlier, one young Australian commits
suicide every day, and there are another 50 who try. There are many
reasons for it. It would be wrong to say it is entirely the fault of
government, but government plays a big role in determining what kinds
of values and priorities we have. In looking at the problems young
people have we find 30 per cent of those who are looking for a job
cannot find one and 60,000 young people in this country are long-term
unemployed. There are 22,000 homeless children whom we know of, and
we have 600,000 kids living in poverty. We have countless numbers who
are remaining in the education system beyond their natural abilities
for jobs that they think are not likely to exist. The threshold of
resistance to despair has been lowered for a generation that have really
lost confidence that we who profess to lead in public life either do
not understand or perhaps do not even care about the sorts of problems
they face.
Like my colleague the honourable member for Kingston (Ms
Jeanes), I will be arguing for a national office for children and for
youth, to put all kinds of legislation up for scrutiny in terms of
what it will do for children, to give young people a political voice
in the system so that they feel their future is not simply the subject
of political exploitation, and to coordinate and advocate programs
for young people.
One of the other issues to which I remain deeply committed
is that of the health of Australia's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
people. Life expectancy is 15 to 20 years less than that enjoyed by
non-Indigenous people. We are unique amongst countries in the developed
world in that we are not reducing the gap between life expectancy for
Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. I spent time in Kenya and in
Tanzania for World Vision. People asked me what it was like. Of course
it was terrible, but I can tell you that, with the exception of AIDS,
I did not see in those countries anything as bad as I have seen in
Aboriginal Australia.
There are many reasons for it, but I think the former health
minister, Graham Richardson, gave us some insight into the cause of
the problem when, whilst visiting the Kimberleys—a trip for which
I declined an invitation, by the way—Charles Woolley of the 60
Minutes program asked him, `Why, Minister, after 11 years in government,
is the situation still so bad?' He said, `I have spent a lifetime reading
polls, and concern for Aboriginal people is not in the top million
issues worrying the voters.' Amongst the numerous solutions which need
to be undertaken and which our government has already commenced, I
think we need to work with Aboriginal people, as Noel Pearson said
in 1994, to see whether in fact welfare payments can be changed in
some way to provide resources to Aboriginal people in a different way
which might provide better outcomes.
Yes, I am one of those people who watch A Current Affair
at 6.30 and I am one of those people who read the Daily Telegraph—please
don't tell Phillip Adams that—and my blood pressure goes through
the roof. You ask yourself how one person can make a difference. How
can any of us as individuals here, whatever side we are on, make some
difference to it? I am not what you would call, I suppose, the orthodox
person to be privileged to be the Liberal member for the seat of Bradfield.
I did not learn Liberalism the way many of my colleagues did. But,
as far as I am concerned, it is the political expression of a life
that is spent amongst people. It is about familiarity with hard work,
self-sacrifice and idealism in everyday life. It is about asking yourself,
as Ronald Reagan used to say: is the government the problem or is the
government the solution?
The real challenge for us is to see that we confront controversy
in a constructive and a considered manner, to keep challenging the
nation's thinking on a range of fundamental social, health and economic
issues. In doing so, I think we need to question whether we are relating
decisions we make to values that society has. Over the last 13 years
we have become a selfish country of people who think that their rights
are more important than their responsibilities and value is more important
than values. The Prime Minister (Mr Howard) is here tonight and he
is a man who represents what leadership is all about—not the
drivel that was fed to us in the election campaign from the other side.
Real leadership is about trying to evoke in people a genuine desire
to overcome our own self-interest, to support things which are best
for the community and for the country. Creating common ground and trying
to find solutions to intractable problems are far more difficult tasks
than ideological invective and party political abuse.
I want to see this country become one in which we value
the health and integrity of human life, as the Prime Minister has demonstrated
in the last three weeks, as much as we do achieving our economic objectives.
In the end it is what we believe, our sense of values and the way we
behave which will determine our destiny—not some of the things
which have preoccupied this House in recent years.