The Hon Mark Coulton has delivered his valedictory speech as the Member for Parkes. This is what he said.
Mr Speaker, I’d like to start by acknowledging you and the job you’re doing, particularly your outreach that you are taking out all over Australia. The five small schools that you visited in my electorate were very grateful. It was a two-way conversation. I’m really pleased that you’re now much more aware of the finer points of catching wild pigs, and the roles that the dogs do and the various parts of the pig’s anatomy that they grab hold of!
But I can say, Mr Speaker, that in 17 years in this place I have never been asked to leave under 94(a).
Opposition members: There’s still time!
I don’t believe it’s because of my behaviour. This is as close as I’ve ever sat to the Speaker in 17 years. You’d have to have a Speaker with ears like an African elephant to actually hear any interjection from this far back. So, except for the two years I was Deputy Speaker and happened to sit in that chair, it’s been fairly uneventful in here for me, apart from misleading the House as a minister during question time. That’s a very interesting thing to do! That walk from down there up to the dispatch box, not knowing what you’re going to say when you leave down there is a feeling all of its own. And, on my second day as Deputy Speaker, having a motion of no confidence in the chair is also something that I will remember fondly!
It is, next week, 17 years since I was elected. It’s appropriate that the member for Forrest and the member for Grey are doing these speeches today—three farmers from different parts of the country. The member for Grey’s my next-door neighbour. We’ve got about a 500-kilometre boundary fence between South Australia and New South Wales. Indeed, I’ve got one of my offices on South Australian time. So we have a lot in common.
I’d like to acknowledge that we’ve got some very special people in the gallery. I’d like to acknowledge my family. I’ve got my sister Joy and her husband, Jim; and my much older brother, John, and his wife, Kerry. My brother Bob is sitting up in the back row. Two years ago, Bob was in the intensive care ward at John Hunter Hospital after being within seconds of death from a very, very severe farm accident, so we’re really pleased that Bob’s with us. There is someone missing, though—our older sister, Viv. When I got involved in politics, she took to it like a duck to water. She was my strongest supporter in Moree, Gravesend and Warialda, and God help anyone that was critical of the National Party or me, because Viv would track them down, and she took no prisoners. Sadly, we lost Viv to cancer about seven years ago, and her husband, John, lost his long battle with dementia earlier this year. So they’ve left a big hole in our family, and I wanted to acknowledge them.
My children, Claire, Sally and Matt, were young adults just starting out in life when I was elected 17 years ago. Matt’s got Anna with him, and, our youngest grandson, Sandy, is sitting up there—there he is—and Claire’s son Will, who’s managed to wag school today, and Sally’s daughter Charlotte, who’s just about finished her first year at school. Their husbands, Dan and Bob, had to stay home and look after the other grandchildren and keep the home fires burning. I could speak about the accomplishments of my children, but today’s all about me! I wouldn’t have enough time to mention—just to say that I’m incredibly proud of the lives that you’ve built for yourselves.
I’ve got in capital letters ‘Robyn’. I do not want to forget Robyn! He’s not here today, but for some reason I can remember the member for Moreton’s speech 17 years ago. I was going to sledge him, but he’s not here, so I can’t really do that. But he said, ‘Behind every successful man is a very surprised woman.’ I remembered that. But it’s not really relevant in our case because Robyn’s never been behind me; she’s always been beside me. I like to coordinate events in our relationship with celebrations, so it kills two birds with one stone. I believe today could be the 44th anniversary of our fifth date, which involved Robyn riding around the header while I was harvesting wheat. Mind you, that level of attention didn’t last that long, but, 44 years ago, it was pretty exciting to have a pretty young schoolteacher riding around the paddock with you.
But Robyn has been with me—we had fairly separate lives. She was a schoolteacher most of her working life. We decided to do this as a team. For the last 18 years—we spent a year campaigning beforehand—we’ve travelled together, and in a big year we’ve probably spent the equivalent of 20 40-hour weeks in the front of a car, Robyn reading the emails and me dictating messages back to the office. With an electorate the size that I’ve got, you don’t have a budget to have staff with you all the time; you just cannot do that. So we’ve travelled, and we’ve done that. She’s had very sage advice and no issues as to when I’ve said the wrong or silly thing, because it gets pointed out! Robyn is very well regarded in the Parkes electorate, and, quite frankly, many people would be quite pleased if she was the member. Mind you, things would be a bit tougher if she was!
There’s only been one incident where we’ve had a complaint to the Electoral Commission. Peter Bartley is up there; he received that because he was my campaign manager. Robyn and a senior adviser, who’s sitting over in the adviser’s box and shall remain nameless, were manning the pre-poll at Cobar and got involved in a ruckus with a hippie that had got off the bus from Wilcannia. They forget the basic law of politics: you should never argue with a fool. Anyone that argued with Robyn and that unnamed adviser clearly was a fool because they came off second best. That’s the only blemish in her 17-year record.
For a long time, pretty well the whole time the coalition was in government, Robyn was the chair of Parliamentary Partners and Teresa Ramsey was the secretary. They ran that very important organisation for a lot of years and provided support to partners of all political persuasions for that time. Indeed, a very exuberant reporter once said the Parliamentary Partners was the most powerful organisation in Canberra; I wouldn’t be one to disagree with that!
I acknowledge my staff, past and present. There are a lot of them here; a lot of them have travelled over lots of distances, and there are too many to name. They are the true heroes in this. They are the true servants of the people. The reason I’ve been able to do this job for so long is that with everyone that rang either my electorate office or, when I was a minister, my ministerial office, their issue was treated as the most important issue my staff were dealing with at that time. They gave exemplary service. We’ve had a lot of people that have come through, and many of them have gone on to other careers and occupations. I’m incredibly grateful to all of you that have come back, and to my current staff as well, for the job you’ve done.
We had a big incident in Dubbo some years ago where a suspicious package happened to turn up. It was seeping. One thing led to another, and the Hazmat team was called and the centre of Dubbo was locked off for a couple of hours—only to find it was two bottles of organic prune juice. The constituent was coming to complain about Australia Post, and things got a bit out of hand.
I also acknowledge my National Party supporters and friends who have come from a long way; some have got off headers to come down here. It’s a very effective political organisation. I think we’ve got nearly a thousand members. They’re not zealots; they are just good people who want to be involved in the representation of their area. It’s not a room of parties. One of my executive in the Parkes electorate has a lineage going back 60,000 years, and another one is a Bangladeshi migrant that’s been in Dubbo for 10 years. They come from all occupations and all towns across the electorate. The Parkes electorate council reflects the people we represent. The general public that don’t think about these things mightn’t realise it but they should be very grateful for the work that these people do in the background, not seeking any public acclaim for the work they do. I think I joined the party 28 years ago, and I think I haven’t missed either a Gwydir or a Parkes FEC meeting in that time. I’m grateful because these people from across a big area have become my friends. I’m very grateful that they’re here today. And there’s not one beneficial billionaire amongst them. If we did have a beneficial billionaire that wanted to join the Parkes FEC, they’d be welcome! But mostly it’s just good, hardworking people that are doing their bit for democracy in their area.
I’d like to acknowledge my party room and the opportunity that it has given me. For the second time I’m the Chief Nationals Whip. What a lot of people don’t know about being the Nationals whip is that one word of command from me and everyone does as they please! But a lot of people don’t understand why we have political parties. It’s the division of labour. I’ll talk about the coalition in a minute because I am a strong coalitionist, but we’ve got people that have different backgrounds and different skillsets. The job is too big for one person. You need to rely on your colleagues to do some of the work so you’re best prepared. Our party room—I’ve seen it at the best—was only 13 members when I was elected. There was a report written suggesting that we should just fold up the kit, disappear and become members of the Liberal Party. I’m glad we didn’t. We have a role for a group of people who only focus on regional Australia. I know we have regional Libs, but we’re different in the fact that that’s all we are concerned about. And so I thank the Nats party room for their support and I wish them well. I’ve served under four leaders, and those leaders in different ways have given me different opportunities to work at a different level.
The coalition party room—I couldn’t believe the first time I sat in there with the people that I’d only ever seen on TV. As a new member, you’ve got to very quickly say: ‘Hang on a minute. I’m not here as an observer. The people that put me here don’t want me to come here goggle-eyed and watch on.’ As quickly as you can, you’ve got to know your way around so you can effectively represent those people.’ Because of the ‘Rudd-slide’ when we came in, I ended up being in the shadow ministry before I got sworn in. I was a fairly lowly rank. For those in the gallery, in shearing shed terms, I was the tarboy in the shadow ministry, but it did give me an insight in the early days and a great opportunity. So I’m very proud. I believe in the coalition and I’m proud to have served in it for this time.
I’m also a parliamentarian and I believe that, if you want to have a say in this country, you get yourself elected and you sit in here or with our Senate mates over there—and I acknowledge my Senate colleagues behind me. There’s no truth in the rumour that I said my retirement plan was to sit in the Senate for two terms! That’s being a bit facetious, because the Senate plays a valuable role, and I appreciate very much the work that it does. But, if you want to be running this country, you’re sitting here, not up there. A degree in communications at a university does not give you the right to run this country. You’ve got to sit in here. You’ve got to use this seat. I’m proud to be in this place. Not many people have got to do it, and I’m pleased that I have.
My constituents in Parkes—half of New South Wales. It’s an economy underpinned with agriculture and mining, and that’s very important. We are seeing probably one of the biggest grain harvests in the history of the electorate being harvested at the moment. There are massive crops out in Western New South Wales, averaging six tonnes to the hectare—unheard of a few years ago. Largely because of the techniques, the efficiency, and the professionalism of the farmers, we’re now growing crops in places like Walgett, Coonamble and out west of Moree.
There are also the miners. We’ve got coal. We’ve got silver, lead, zinc, copper, and massive reserves of gold but also the new minerals: the cobalt, the lithium, the magnetite, the scandium and the rare earths that will be dug near Dubbo. All these minerals that people are talking about with our new economy, our technology, are in the Parkes electorate.
But it’s more than miners and farmers; it is all the people who serve those industries. I get very frustrated when we talk about a health crisis in the west. Sure, we need more doctors, nurses, and aged-care workers, but don’t forget the ones who are out there. You can get good service. Those people—our teachers, all of those people—are out there doing their bit. I say to my staff: ‘Our job is to represent the people who aren’t thinking about us, who are just going about their daily work.’ If I’m doing my job, I’m not on the front page of the paper. You should be largely invisible if you’re doing your job properly, because people then are settled. Sometimes your successes with issues become invisible, because if you fix the problem people stop talking about it.
And so to innovation. A lot of people wouldn’t realise that you could be in one of the top hospitals in Europe or America getting a heart valve inserted, not through open heart surgery but through an artery in your leg, and that biomedical device started its life in a lab in Dubbo. The coalition government put money into developing that lab. Biomedical pieces that are saving lives all over the world are coming out of Dubbo.
There’s been a lot of talk during the last term of parliament about our Aboriginal people. I believe I represent the second highest Aboriginal population, by percentage, in an electorate of this parliament, after Lingiari. As to the way the Voice in Canberra has been portrayed—and I don’t want to be too negative—I just want to remind people that at the local government election in the Parkes electorate we got a mayor, a deputy mayor, a general manager. Most of the councils that have Indigenous populations have Aboriginal councillors on them. You go to our schools and we’ve got teachers and we’ve got healthcare workers. We’ve even got a young bloke from Goodooga who, at 18, went to New Zealand and beat the Kiwis at shearing. The Aboriginal constituents in the Parkes electorate are just people. Sure, we’ve got some disadvantage, but your DNA doesn’t predict your disadvantage. We should be addressing disadvantage at the individual level, not making assumptions about an entire cohort of people from here. I’m not being a Pollyanna; we do have some issues at the moment and we need to address these issues of disadvantage. But we need to deal with them at an individual level.
In my first speech here I mentioned education. The Clontarf Foundation is in my electorate, and I was actually one of the first people to be involved with Clontarf. I think we’ve got 11 or 12 academies, maybe 13. In that time there would be more than a thousand young Aboriginal boys who have finished school and gone on to employment. We’ve got girls academies. We’ve got SistaSpeak. I was at the senior college graduation in Dubbo a couple of weeks ago. Seventy-seven of the graduating class were Aboriginal students doing year 12. So when we talk here about some of the things that go on, we mustn’t forget about our successes, because these young people are really cracking on. I’m incredibly proud of what they’ve done.
The temptation in this job is to point to shiny things as to your worth. That’s a pretty good thing to do, but my job hasn’t been to go home on weekends with beads and blankets and curry favour with my constituents. I think it’s deeper than that. But there are some examples of shiny things that I’m very proud of. The Western Cancer Centre in Dubbo now is world class. It has the only PET scanner west of the range in New South Wales. It’s treating people who formerly would not have taken treatment. They would have chosen to die rather than go through the trauma of going to a capital city. They’re now getting that treatment in Dubbo, and we’ve had medical professionals come from all over the country to work there.
The Inland Rail—just build it, for God’s sake. I’ll say this one more time: the Inland Rail is not a train; the Inland Rail is a railway line of 1,700 kilometres from Melbourne to Brisbane. It will give cheaper freight—it will make items on the shelves in those two cities cheaper for those people to buy. It will take trucks off the road. It will lower emissions. But it will mean that western New South Wales through to the Parkes electorate will have the benefit of being connected to every capital city in Australia in the opportunities for our grain farmers and our cotton farmers but also for other businesses to be established on rail. History shows us that, wherever rail is built, prosperity follows. We had a report by Kerry Schott last year. It did not say to halt construction. If I’m not here next time and I don’t see a bit of action, I’m going to park at Aussie’s every sitting day and harass whoever’s in charge of infrastructure, okay?
The Australian Opal Centre—it’s a big hole at Lightning Ridge that’s going to have this magnificent building that’s being constructed now. The Baaka Cultural Centre at Wilcannia—I chaired the first meeting of what can be quite disparate groups in that town, and they decided that this was going to be a game changer. So, instead of a burnt-out old shop when you cross over the Darling River now, there will be the Baaka Cultural Centre, a magnificent building. It will be open by Christmas time. There’s the library in Broken Hill—and even smaller ones. I see the former mayor of Gunnedah and the best damn candidate for the next election, Jamie Chaffey, sitting up there. Don’t worry folks; he has been doorknocking for eight weeks, and he’s allowed to come down here today! We had a road, the Grain Valley Way—it was dangerous, there was a lot of production on it; the school bus and all that. The local government, the federal government, the state government—it’s fixed. No-one talks about it now because it’s a good road.
We talk about pork barrelling in the bush—$10 million to the Bourke council to help with the infrastructure for a small animals abattoir. It’s now owned by Thomas Foods. Now, there are 150 people working in that abattoir in a town that had shocking unemployment levels. Not only this; they’ve brought more workers in. The people that have come with those workers have now opened businesses. There’s not an empty shop in the main street of Bourke, because of that. Now tell me if that’s not a good investment by the Australian people into a disadvantaged community. They’re the shiny things—some of the ones I can point to.
But, on some of the things I’m probably most proud of, I just want to premise this by saying I did this as part of a team. We had wonderful ministerial staff. We had public servants. We had our party and our backbench committees. Everyone worked towards these things. But a lot of the things that are achieved here are done without recognition. If you’re only seeking recognition, it’s not going to go particularly well. The generalist pathway, which is training doctors with more skills to work in rural areas—general practice is still languishing with the number of young doctors wanting to go into it. The generalist pathway, on which I worked with ACRRM and RACGP—we significantly increased the numbers with the rural health commissioner of the time, Associate Professor Stewart— is now oversubscribed. The medical school at Dubbo had over 520 applicants for the 30 places, so we’re training local doctors in the area. People don’t talk about that now, but it’s just happening. The single-employer model, for which I set up five trial sites, where we are getting a better cooperation between the federal government and the state government with funding medical practitioners in small regional areas, has now been taken up by New South Wales as a broader policy. We did the trial work on that. We transitioned the training of doctors from the RTOs to the colleges, ACCRM and RACGP.
With these longer term ones, it’s difficult. When someone comes to you and says, ‘We haven’t got a doctor in town,’ and you say, ‘Don’t worry; it’s under control, and, in 10 years’ time, it’s all sorted,’ that’s not the answer people want to hear. But, in an attempt to fix that in the short term, we’ve made bigger problems. We’re now paying doctors who go to work in a town part time as a locum twice the salary of a doctor that wants to go there and hang up their shingle and work full time. So we’ve created a bigger problem. We’re seeing that now in aged care, where we’ve got agency nurses getting paid more than the local nurses to fill the gaps in aged care.
Decisions that are made here make a difference. When the distribution priority area changed straight after the last election—where doctors can now declare Wollongong, Geelong, and Newcastle to be regional—western New South Wales lost six doctors from some of the most disadvantaged communities in the country in that week. So decisions here can make a difference.
I graduated the rebate for Medicare. I don’t know that anybody here even knows that if you’re a doctor working in the higher MM areas you get a higher rebate for every patient you see than the ones in the cities. Frankly, when the current government increased Medicare, that increased exponentially, and it has made a huge difference.
Trade—that was an amazing thing to do. And I see my trade adviser sitting up there. I was involved in, I think, six rounds of the RCEP, Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, negotiations in the ASEAN region, forming a trade relationship with our emerging nations to the north. I represented the country a couple of times at APEC on tourism and trade. I was at the first ministerial meeting of the TPP-11, which was the biggest trade deal done in the history of the world. I was fortunate. I don’t know where the trade minister was. Clearly, it was fortuitous that I got sent there. But what people wouldn’t realise, when the farmers are going to the silo and looking at the price of barley, is that one of the buyers now is Mexico. They’re buying barley to make beer in Mexico because of that agreement that we made. They’re not thinking about that. When they’re having their big crop and filling up the grain storages that they got off their tax in one year, as a policy to prepare farmers for drought so that they can store their grain and manage it better, they’re probably not thinking that that was a decision and a discussion that came out of our party room—or a backbench committee in the first place. But those sorts of decisions are making big changes for people. So going to Tokyo and signing that agreement in a room chaired by Shinzo Abe was a pretty good thing to do for a bloke that had stepped off a tractor to come to parliament.
Local government—I was previously a mayor. With my colleague in front of me, the member for Riverina, when he was infrastructure minister, using the Local Roads and Community Infrastructure fund and local government— 527 local governments across the country—to deliver that money into those communities during the pandemic quickly, without bureaucracy, was a masterstroke. We should keep doing that. This government has stopped it. I think we did six rounds of LRCI.
I wanted to reform federal assistance grants. I was not so successful there, mainly because of the reluctance of some of the larger regional local governments. But, thankfully, the grants commission in Queensland took that on, and now those smaller councils in western Queensland are getting a much fairer cut of the pie because of that change.
I was minister for regional communications for a while. The Regional Tech Hub is now helping people with this transition. Communications is no longer a static thing. You can no longer sit at home and expect that the government is going to supply all of your needs. You need to be out there and understanding that it’s evolving. Our need for data and communications in the regions is growing exponentially. It’s actually growing faster than the way to deliver it. We are seeing innovations—the low-orbiting satellites. I once said rather flippantly that in 10 years’ time our Telstra towers will just be used at Christmas time to put lights on, because that’s evolving. You can drive around Australia now with a thing on your roof and get connectivity in every square inch of the country. That’s all changing.
I just want to leave with maybe a little bit of a message. I think we’ve lost our way. As a country we’ve been very successful, but I think that sometimes we’ve forgotten some of the basics. When we were in school we learnt the three basic needs of human beings: food, clothing, and shelter. I spoke, in my first speech 17 years ago, of my concern that we had lost the ability with the shelter bit, because we’d lost the timber industry out of the Pilliga forest—incidentally it now burns nearly every summer since it’s stopped being managed. But the food and clothing bits are important.
Since the day I turned up here, emissions reduction has been the undercurrent. It has seen prime ministers come and go, and it has seen governments come and go. I’ve been called a denier across the chamber; I’m not. But we talk about 2035 and 2050—what about 2100? What about 2200 and 2500? We’ve got to remember what developed this country. Our forebears cleared land to grow crops. They went out and found mineral resources and developed them, at considerable effort and expense, and we seem to be taking that for granted.
So when you take your family to Disneyland and tick the box that you want to offset your carbon emissions and pay a bit more money, and that money goes to plant trees on a productive farm, you are then sending a future generation to have to worry about food security. And if you want to put solar panels all over farmland it’s the same thing. My electorate was adopting solar before anyone was talking about it. Three-quarters of the houses in Dubbo have got it on their roof. Every farmer in my electorate would be pumping water with a solar array and shearing their sheep with solar, but they don’t want to see the whole of the countryside covered up.
We’ve got some environmental champions in this place. I do get into trouble sometimes, but I once did say to a certain member of a certain minor political party—that might sit over there—that my dung beetles had actually done more for the environment than he had. And it’s true. These words have consequences, and if we’re going to treat regional Australia as a magic pudding, that every time we want to do something we just pink a bit away, and every time you lock up a western New South Wales sheep farm and turn it into a national park or you buy water out of the Murray Darling Basin, then you are subjecting future generations to have to worry about food security. It’s not just us. We feed 50 million people outside of Australia, so we’ve got to keep that in mind. We need to have a more holistic, broader approach to what our future generations need—not this narrow approach at the moment of trying to meet targets on emissions, because it will be a problem.
The other thing that I’ve noticed is we’re making our children fearful of their future. Every generation of mankind, humankind, has had issues. Quite frankly I don’t think the issues that we’re facing today compared to what our forebears did when they dealt with the Depression or the world wars, or even before that. Encouraging our kids to superglue themselves to a railway line is not going to create the future for this country. We need to be telling them that this country will offer them all the opportunities—they need to work hard, they need to study hard, they need to apply themselves, and they can do whatever they want. We shouldn’t be making them fearful about their future. I’ve seen speech, after speech, after speech in this place that have done nothing but scare the life out of our young people, and it’s got to stop.
I said in my first speech that I have a deep and unshakeable belief in inland Australia; I still believe that today. It holds the keys to the future prosperity of our country. There would be no better place to live in the world than Australia, and no better place in Australia to live than in western New South Wales. It’s been an honour and a privilege to serve as the 129th member—I beat Nola by a few—elected to the Australian parliament. It’s time to move on, and I thank you very much.
