Mr BAYLEY (Clark) – Deputy Speaker, I thank the member, Mr Wood, for bringing this MPI forward on stability and economic future. I will make the point up front that stability is completely relative to who you are, where you live and how your circumstances are. In the leaked report from Saul Eslake that we were talking about in this place last week, he makes the point that the disparity between the regions and the cities are getting ever greater in this state. If you are on the housing wait list, if you are one of the 4700-plus applications – which may be massively more than that if you are a family – you have no stability. If you are waiting 80-plus weeks for a housing support, you certainly have no stability. If you are waiting for dental care or healthcare or elective surgery, you have no stability. If you are the neighbour of a precious part of Tasmania that is threatened or is having stitch-up reviews like the kunanyi review introduced out of the blue, you have no security for your place.
If you are an Aboriginal Tasmanian who cares for your Aboriginal heritage, your ancestral heritage, and you know that the Aboriginal Heritage Act does not work, because the minister tabled a report in here three years ago that said it does not provide effective protection for Aboriginal heritage, you have no stability. I want to make that point upfront because we in this place should always be all about people.
When it comes to the stability of this parliament, I want to reference yesterday. It was quite a red-letter day for this parliament, and indeed for the legislative reform and future of this state. We had two non-government bills passed by this parliament, a really important bill from the Labor Party in relation to industrial manslaughter and a bill from the Greens to repeal begging. They did not have the support of the government but were passed thanks to long-running campaigns to get these issues dealt with. They do not have a majority in this place because the 35 of us vote according to how we want to and the numbers do not dictate it, and they finally got through. It was indeed a red-letter day for this parliament and people absolutely celebrated that. For the begging bill, it was the third or fourth time it had been introduced here. This had been aerated and spoken about a lot in this place and it finally got through. It is very welcome.
We hear the word collaboration from Minister Barnett regularly, we hear the word commonsense regularly and my advice would be for this government to drop the culture wars when it comes to policy and legislative agenda. I am talking about things like opening up 40,000 hectares of protected forests for a logging industry that does not even want it; things like a youth strike force to come down hard on youth crime when the Children’s Commissioner makes it abundantly clear that it will not work and it is not what the state has needed – ignoring the commission of inquiry’s recommendations around closing Ashley, for example, and pushing out the date to close Ashley. These are all issues that not only impact on us as people, but they impact on our brand and our liveability. There is nothing stable about stimulating culture wars, and there is nothing stable about ignoring social and environmental concerns.
We had an interaction in Question Time about salmon, the Maugean skate and market campaigns ‑ people resorting to the market and speaking to consumers. That is what people will do when they do not get uptake from a government, when they see regulatory favour, and when they do not see the government responding to those failures and making amendments.
It has happened before in relation to the forestry industry; it is happening at the moment in relation to the salmon industry. I am sure it will keep happening as long as this government continues to ignore people’s concerns and regulatory failure continues to dominate those industries.
Saul Eslake has made it very clear that:
“We appear to have entered another one of those cycles like the 1990s of slower population growth, slower economic and employment growth, and more working‑aged people leaving.”
We do need to be looking to the future. We have an education system that is clearly not delivering for Tasmanian children and, therefore, Tasmania’s future. We mentioned those regional disparities and I mentioned that people cannot get the kind of services we need. If we are going to deliver stability for the Tasmanian people, political stability is one thing, but actual outcomes are what Tasmanians are looking for and that is what we all should be collaboratively focused on.
