FIRST SPEECH
Senator GATENBY (Tasmania) (17:02): I'm immensely grateful for the opportunity to give my first speech in the Australian Senate. It's an extraordinary honour to serve the great people of Tasmania and the Liberal Party and to put service above self and to put people first. Friends, Australia is the greatest country in the world, and Tasmania the best place within it.
We may be small in size, but we have been a mighty contributor to the Federation. But loving your country does not mean pretending everything is going well. Hard times require hard truths, and the prosperous Australia we know is under pressure and, with it, Tasmania.
We are being led by a government that sees the answer to every problem as more spending, more control and more bureaucracy. Young people question whether they will enjoy opportunities that their parents had. Costs and inflation are rising.
Productivity has stagnated. Government spending and debt keep growing. Migration has run ahead of our capacity to provide homes and infrastructure.
Too many Australians feel they cannot get ahead. One of the most energy-rich nations on the earth has its own people paying too much for power. But I do not accept decline, not for Australia, not for Tasmania and not for the next generation.
We must leave them more opportunity, not more debt. We must back Tasmania's industries of the future while becoming more self-reliant by making, growing and building more here at home. I believe Australia can thrive again, and I intend to help make that happen.
Sir Winston Churchill was often paraphrased as saying that he never suffered indigestion from eating his own words, and I hope that that applies to me in this speech. Colleagues, I deeply believe in the Liberal values of dignity, freedom and individual potential, and we need to provide a compelling vision for Australia's future. Yes, government has an important role, but government should empower people not seek to control them.
Former prime minister John Howard put it simply in his first speech: The individual's success is the community's success. So, when someone gets a job or a business succeeds or a farmer makes a buck, the country is stronger for it. And I believe we need to give Australians something to believe in again—not the belief in government as the answer to every problem but belief in themselves but the belief that, if you work hard, you take risks and you make sacrifices you and your family can get ahead.
That was the promise of Australia: your beginnings do not determine your destination; success should be celebrated and hard work rewarded; equality before the law; a government that trusts its people; a country where young people can own a home and build a future; where families are given more choice in childcare so they can better determine their life and career balance; and where starting a business is encouraged, saving is rewarded and freedom comes with responsibility.
If Australia is to thrive, we must solve our productivity problem. Higher productivity is how we sustainably lift wages, improve living standards and fund better services. I recently spoke with Dion, who works overtime to try and get ahead for his family, but he's despondent as tax eats into his overtime, diminishing the reward for extra effort.
I want us to examine ideas on how we reward those making the extra effort, like Dion, like a capped annual tax-free overtime incentive of a certain amount that allows people to quarantine more of their genuine overtime income each year. This could apply also to pensioners and younger people, without affecting their other supports. It's also time to consider reducing the small business company tax rate.
More than 97 per cent of Tasmanian businesses are small businesses. They are the backbone of our economy, and I believe we should bring the small business tax rate down further, rewarding those who take risks, employ Australians and invest in their communities. We should also consider the concept of a higher personal tax-free threshold for business owners who, for example, employ people, stay in business for a certain period or meet certain criteria, as a mechanism to reward the investment made by our small-business owners.
Australia will not tax its way to higher living standards. Before the government can spend a buck, somebody has to create it. We must back the people who grow the economic pie: the farmer, the small-business owner, the manufacturer, the miner, the forester and the entrepreneur.
Recently, a small-business owner in Launceston told me lower paid workers may now be receiving more from mandatory pay increases, but small-business owners are now the lowest paid in this country. Owners often get paid last, while carrying the risk. I've worked in small businesses and helped my wife in her previous business.
Businesses do not absorb costs; people ultimately do. The owner pays, through lower earnings; the worker, through reduced hours or fewer opportunities; and the customer, through higher prices. But I want Australia to be the best country to start and grow a business.
The person who creates the job must never become the forgotten person in our economy, which is why we should reduce small business taxes. If we're serious about productivity, we need a tax system that rewards work, investment and enterprise. As the party of lower taxes, we have already developed policies to tackle bracket creep, and, as talent and capital are mobile, we need more competitive personal tax rates to help drive investment, enterprise and productivity into the future.
Tasmania is a wonderful place to live and call home. Across Tasmania, towns, sporting clubs, regional shows, volunteers, schools and local businesses give people identity and belonging. Tasmanians deserve their fair share from Canberra for infrastructure and other investments and programs.
But from Bell Bay to irrigation and decisions like Rushy Lagoon, too many decisions by federal Labor have failed Tasmania and our productive industries. Many here tonight will recall the former Labor-Green government and what happened to Tasmania. I'm here to stand up for our state's future and ensure those dark days are over.
Tasmania cannot become a museum for the enjoyment of interstate and local armchair activists who treat our state as their fundraising whipping boy. We simply cannot allow an anti-investment mentality that opposes productive development at every turn. What we need is balance and jobs.
More than half the state's forests are already within the broader reserve estate. We have highly regulated world-class fisheries. We can and do still protect what makes Tasmania special while remaining a state that grows, mines, builds, makes and exports.
We must continue to do this to help keep jobs and, most importantly, keep young people in Tasmania. I am enormously optimistic about Tasmania's opportunities. We have energy; strategic industrial lands, such as Bell Bay; world-class agriculture and biofuel opportunities and other opportunities in areas like soil carbon and advanced manufacturing; world leading industry, such as Incat; and outstanding research and education organisations like the Australian Maritime College.
We have a world-class tourism sector and the potential to be a strong events and convention destination. We have a new football team. We have a planned stadium and, hopefully, a gather round.
The challenge of all these opportunities is to turn those advantages into investment and jobs backed by good education. We also need to build more houses to help keep young people in Tasmania, which is a priority of mine. All three layers of government should work together better to identify the land, streamline the approvals, invest in essential headworks infrastructure and let the private sector get on with it.
Let's not have another discussion paper or houses stuck in bureaucracy across multiple levels of government. Let's just do it. The Gatenby family has lived and farmed in Tasmania for over 200 years, including over that time breeding stud sheep and Angus cattle and producing wool, flour, horses and broadacre crops.
My forebears were equestrian enthusiasts. I pity the horse should I have ventured into that foray! My great grandfather Jack Gatenby notably owned Phar Lap's full sister Nea Lap, who sadly wasn't as successful—sorry, everyone!
While it is commonplace to hand-wring about the past, I'm immensely proud of my family's history. Hannah and Andrew Gatenby took a gamble and arrived from England via Wales with four sons, three daughters and millstones ready to create a water powered mill at the site of their first homestead, Barton, on the Isis River or the Penny Royal Creek, near Campbell Town.
They were ready to get to work. My children are now the eighth generation of our family living in Tasmania but sadly the first generation not to grow up on a farm. Even so, I want Tasmania to continue to be Australia's agricultural innovation island.
Innovation begins with the fundamental ingredient of water. Reliable water unlocks high-value agricultural options for farmers. It unlocks investment.
It unlocks stronger regional communities, especially in dry times. I want the Tamar Water Scheme progressed, with Commonwealth backing to back farmers and industry, along with the remaining statewide tranche 3 irrigation schemes that Labor has walked away from. I also support new incentives for farmers to build or expand on-farm water storage, including to prepare for droughts and particularly where major schemes may never reach them.
Our ambition should not stop at growing world-class produce. We should process more in Tasmania, add value, create jobs and sell it to the world. But to do that one thing what we need is real freight equalisation across Bass Strait.
Bass Strait should be a body of water, not a barrier to Tasmanian ambition. Too often, it is said to be cheaper to ship goods from Europe to Melbourne than from Melbourne to Tasmania. Both Woolworths and Lion have pointed to Bass Strait freight costs as key contributing factors to their recent detrimental decisions, yet Labor's promised action on freight equalisation by mid-year has simply not arrived.
It must be fixed to secure our export future. In terms of my time with the UK-Australia chamber of commerce in London, I believe Tasmania must take its exports to the world and attract investment. As an example, with the relatively new Australia-UK Free Trade Agreement opening the market and tight cattle supplies in both the United Kingdom and the United States, more Tasmanian beef exports to Britain are on the menu.
Health policy is personal to me. When I was 18, my father passed away from acute myeloid leukaemia a week after my final exams. I remember my 18th birthday with family at the local pub, knowing dad was in hospital.
It was a difficult time for all of us. I remember the call from my mother, who's here today, in his final days, telling me to come quickly, before we lost him. I remember thinking to myself how my life would just never be the same again.
Some treatments available today simply did not exist when Dad died in 2002. Perhaps he'd still be here now, not gone at the age of 64. That left me with an enduring interest in Australians accessing new medicines and medical breakthroughs, which I will pursue in this place.
On broader health access as our population ages, we should make far greater use of telehealth, nurse practitioners and other health professionals in regional Tasmania by maximising their scope of practice, something I pursued when I worked in the pharmacy sector. Patients should not have to close up shop and travel across the state for a 10-minute, non-critical appointment or test result that could be delivered safely online or in a nearby portal.
We can get the remuneration right to make this a better reality. In more recent times, we have seen attempted cost shifts from the Commonwealth to the state government in Tasmania, including on primary care access, and the cuts to health on rebates for older Australians over 65 years of age will put even more pressure on our public hospital system—another cost shift.
We have seen it in aged care. We must also address the intersection between hospitals and aged care. Right now, about 80 older Tasmanians who should be in aged care are languishing in public hospitals.
Not only does this block beds from those who need them; the hospitals do not provide the right care for these individuals. The Tasmanian government estimates that this will cost about $432 million over the forward estimates, and now they've also taken to building more facilities for older Australians themselves. The Commonwealth must urgently provide the aged-care places and support required.
The person should come before the jurisdiction, and the Commonwealth needs to meet its responsibilities. Australia needs a strong public and private health system, but Tasmania cannot realistically provide every highly specialised treatment locally. That's why the Commonwealth should consider what more it can do to help Tasmanians access that care, as part of meeting its promised 45 per cent of health funding.
The journey—the joy and journey—of having children can be paved with heartbreak, and IVF is sometimes the only avenue for some to try for that miracle. It was for my family. Victoria provides some access to public IVF services.
The Tasmanian government's $2,000 IVF support rebate is to be applauded, but a small state cannot be expected to carry this alone. The Commonwealth should work with the Tasmanian government to help navigate a better supported, on-island public fertility pathway, because your postcode or Bass Strait ideally should not determine your last chance to start a family.
Where we come from shapes what we believe. Some of my earliest lessons in life came from growing up on our family farm at Creekton on Brumbys Creek just outside of Cressy in the northern midlands. We had the freedom to roam, explore and go on adventures.
There were dogs, chickens, horses, sheep, a goat named Snowflake, a 1930s Dodge fire engine and the Black Angus cattle in which my father took great pride. There were cold winter mornings under the Great Western Tiers, evenings when we came home covered in mud and long summer days riding bikes. We fed cattle from the ute with Dad bellowing out the window, and ours was a home with a revolving door of family and friends.
It was all topped off by a 45-minute to-and-from drive each day to school with our neighbour Maggie, who was also a teacher, with old Roxette tapes blaring away. They were great days. My parents encouraged us to have a go if we wanted things, so much so that one of my first entrepreneurial ventures involved bagging sheep manure from beneath the shearing shed and selling it at school for $2 to unsuspecting parents who didn't realise how much they needed this for their gardens, although Mum always claimed she did most of the work.
My family's story also told me about adversity. Although everything is relative to your own circumstances, in our case, the difficult years of the 1990s meant that we had to sell our farm, like so many others, off the back of hard economic times. As a boy, I remember seeing my father badly affected because he felt he'd let everyone down.
What stayed with me was that he was not principally worried about himself. He was worried about everyone else. I believe he would have benefited from our greater willingness these days to discuss mental health and from services such as Rural Alive and Well, which is based in Tasmania and does so much good work in our regional communities.
Dad taught me responsibility, humility, to care for others and the importance of leading by example. I wish enormously that he'd been given more years and that he could be here today. At his funeral, I read Kipling's If.
A copy of the poem that Dad received from his father and handed down to me I have in my office in Launceston. An important approach to public life from the poem is: 'If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,' which will help guide me. After Dad died, Mum carried much of the responsibility and gave us stability.
Now living in town, she continued to work multiple jobs. She volunteered at my junior football club, the North Launceston Football Club; the school clothing pool; and the library. She always put us children first.
Looking back now as a parent and as a husband, I understand far more about the strength and the sacrifice that mothers make. Thanks, Mum. My sisters, Sally and Emily, have challenged me more than I'd like to admit, supported me and kept my feet firmly on the ground.
Many of the strongest people who have shaped my life have been women, including my grandmothers, especially my paternal grandmother, Granny Bonnie, who lost both her sons and her husband after he survived as a prisoner of war on the Burma Railway and returned from World War II, all in her lifetime. No-one should have to endure that much pain, yet she remained the strongest person I ever knew.
At 41 years old, politically I am the product of the John Howard years. He remains my political hero. When at ANU, I regularly came here with now Senator Bragg, Dave Bold, Isaac Levido and friends to watch Howard and Costello wipe the floor with Labor in question time instead of attending commerce lectures.
I was drawn to the arguments about the economy. Australia's place in the world, individual responsibility, aspiration and the limits of government. I think this was when I first knew I wanted to be in politics.
I was later fortunate to work and campaign in Britain, including volunteering on the Conservatives' 2010 election campaign and Boris Johnson's 2012 mayoral campaign at the generosity of Sir Lynton Crosby. I also met Margaret Thatcher, an extraordinary experience for a boy from Blackwood Creek. I always admired her determination to do what she believed was right, and I was lucky enough to work for her biographer, former Telegraph editor Lord Charles Moore, and many incredible people at the thinktank Policy Exchange while he was chair.
It was a place of great policy development and contest of ideas. We also welcomed Prime Ministers Howard and Abbott and Minister Chris Pyne as speakers when I worked there. Whilst not political, another influence was my late godfather, Christoph Altenburg, a silversmith and a great family friend from Braidwood with a fascinating Austrian lineage.
He had a saying that has always stayed with me: 'Blessed are the flexible. They shall not be bent out of shape.' No-one arrives here alone. I thank the Tasmanian Division of the Liberal Party and its members for placing their trust in me as a member and state president, twice as a state candidate in Bass and now as a senator.
I thank the Senate preselectors for selecting me just five and a half weeks ago. Perhaps my standing here today is some evidence that nice guys can come first. I acknowledge my Senate ticket colleagues Sarah Courtney and Jacki Martin; Senator Colbeck, my former boss; Senator Chandler, who's not with us; and Senator Duniam.
I acknowledge former senator Wendy Askew, whose casual vacancy brought me to this chamber and, I believe, the deputy whip's role. I acknowledge, while I'm making acknowledgements, our deputy premier and former senator Guy Barnett, who was with us this afternoon, and our state president, Michael McKenna, who's in the gallery. To the former ministers and parliamentarians I've worked for; mentors; volunteers; colleagues; party members; my home branch of Trevallyn and former branch of South Esk; the state director and state executive; and schoolfriends and ANU friends who have supported me, whether in the early days or more recently—you know who you are—I say a sincere thank you.
To the members and friends who have travelled from Tasmania and afar to be here today: it means more than you know. I thank my staff, who are here tonight, for all of their support. I thank you for the warm welcome to this place, all of my colleagues.
To my mum and sisters: thank you again. To my parents-in-law, Jane and David: thank you for being here, for always supporting our family and for instilling so much curiosity and adventure in our children. To my wife, Libby: public life may put one name on the ballot paper, but the sacrifices are shared by the whole family.
Thank you for believing in me, for your patience and for tolerating the occasional madness that comes with politics. You are my everything, and I love you. Finally, to my children, Jack and Florence, who are also here in the gallery, as you may have heard—before I came to Canberra, Jack, who's not quite four years old, asked me: 'Daddy, will there be any baddies in Canberra?
If there will be, I'll bring my sword.' I told him that wouldn't be necessary—although, President, after the first few weeks, I reserve the right to revisit that advice! Jack and Florence, I am the luckiest man in the world to be your father. I know I'll be away a bit more, but your country needs your daddy.
I love you both. As I've outlined, Australia faces serious challenges. But I do not accept decline.
I have come here to fight for practical policies, to make things better for all Tasmanians and Australians and to help deliver a better tomorrow for the next generation. To be here to represent my state and the Liberal Party is the greatest honour of my life, and I intend to make it count.