Alan Ferguson,
Senator for South Australia
First Speech - 22/06/1992Thank you, Madam Acting Deputy President, and my parliamentary
colleagues. I can best express why I am here today, what I want to see accomplished
for Australia and what I personally want to realise as a senator by simply telling
honourable senators something of my past. I live near a small township called
Weetulta. I am sure no-one here has ever heard of it, except perhaps for some
of my South Australian colleagues. It is a two-hour drive from Adelaide and even
most South Australians do not know it exists. In fact, it is home to just 10 people--forgotten
people in many respects, certainly forgotten in terms of geographic equality.
The residents of many small rural towns to reach home have to drive over many
kilometres of dirt road, their main road. If we need a doctor or a chemist for
a sick child, the closest is 16 kilometres away, and we are more fortunate than
most. As a parent, to ensure that child then has access to the necessary school
curriculum and further education has become almost an impossibility without
crippling financial outlays. For many rural families, it is an impossibility,
and they watch the frustration of teenagers as they are unable to reach their
education potential.
In today's highly technological age, it is a fallacy
to believe that rural communities can survive without a higher degree of learning
than has been necessary in the past. These children have as much right to access
education as their peers in the city. The rural communities need in turn to access
the knowledge for the future that their children acquire. But it is a sad fact
that in 1992, in a country whose Government has christened it the clever country,
we practise blatant geographic discrimination. I remember my primary education
at the Weetulta rural school, a one-teacher school with seven grades and no ancillary
staff. There were between 15 and 19 students there attending at any one time.
During the middle stages of my years at that school, there were only three students
in year 7. One of those students was my elder brother, now a senior partner
in an Adelaide law firm; the second student is now the head of the psychology
department at Melbourne University; and the third became a triple certificated
sister who topped the State in her final year. In another year was my younger
sister who later studied at the Conservatorium, and as a Bachelor of Music is
now head of the music department in an Adelaide school.
I could list many
similar examples of such career successes from my fellow pupils during my years
at Weetulta. But in the early 1970s that school closed. One of the spurious reasons
given was that students of small rural schools were being deprived of opportunities
to compete and succeed. Compare the successes from the many small schools such
as Weetulta with the plight of rural students today where in rural South Australia
only one in 20 is able to access tertiary education or training. This Government
may talk long about equal opportunity but it falls far short of this when it comes
to reality. Just two hours out of Adelaide there is another Australia--an
Australia which blatantly, through government policies, is denied equal opportunity
for its citizens. That discrimination has increased significantly since I was
a boy--not decreased. I think politicians, being pragmatic, have described it
as a rationalisation of expenditure. But that is not what it is. It is actually
the systematic devaluation of the rural communities of Australia. And what hypocrisy
from a Labor Government embarking on overseas tourism promotions which describe
rural and outback Australia as the `real Australia', while at home it does its
best to make life difficult for those who live and work there.
As a farmer
from a long line of farmers, as a father who has watched three talented daughters
make sacrifices in the name of further education, and as a committed Liberal,
I was no longer prepared to sit back and let others fight the rural battle for
me. So I say: here I am, the first rural South Australian senator for many years.
I am here principally because I want to halt what is happening to rural Australia
and I want to help turn policy around. I want recognition, especially in Canberra,
that families outside the major cities are not second-class citizens. They have
the same right for their basic needs to be met as do city dwellers. The cities
need rural communities for what we produce as much as we need them for what they
manufacture and assemble, and therefore we should be treated as equals.
Surely
there is not a senator in this chamber today who can condone a situation like
one I heard of recently in South Australia. The principal of a rural high school
broke down in tears. He had a son who was clever, a son who wanted to access a
university education. But this father, with other children to support, with no
family in Adelaide for his son to live with, could not afford the large outlay
that his son would need to rent accommodation and study away from home. The amount
of Austudy available just did not provide for even the basic necessities.
So another rural teenager does not reach his potential, either for himself or
for what he could have contributed back to our society. Who knows what we are
losing for Australia because of this geographical discrimination.
I am a religious
person, and I am proud of the values that religion has instilled in me. But nowhere
have I come across anything to suggest that God has signified that the educated
should be congregated in the cities. Yet here we have a government playing God
with people's lives and making just that assumption. I do not believe that government
has that right. The other assumption that the present Government especially
has embraced is that rural communities are not really poor: they are just pretend
poor, or so temporarily poor that they are not worthy of understanding or more
than token levels of help. Let me tell honourable senators from hard and at times
heartbreaking personal experience that the sporadic good times no longer make
up for the many bad. They did at one ti
me--of course they did; that is, before
the constant low commodity prices, before the long run of high interest rate years,
before vastly increased government taxes and charges, and before the unfair trading
practices of the United States and the European Community. I suppose that,
keeping a very essential sense of humour, I can sum up life on the Australian
farm with the story of a farmer who won $1m in X lotto. When asked, `What are
you going to do with all the money?', he replied, `I guess I'll probably just
keep on farming until it's all gone'. For all of those reasons, my commitment
to redefining the place of the rural community in the formulation of policy in
Canberra is total, as is my commitment to Liberal philosophies. To me, Liberal
philosophies are about the kind of Australia we want for our families to live
in and for individuals to achieve in. It is vitally important that we encourage
the individual at every level, that we reward exceptional performance and that
we support and encourage those who want to work harder in order to produce
more and earn more in whatever field they work in, from the factory floor to the
executive suite.
Being Liberal is not about winning for the sake of winning.
It is about winning to deliver an industrial lifestyle conducive to individuals
having the freedom from government and union shackles to succeed in their place
of work. It is about winning to deliver taxation reforms--bold and controversial--so
that families take home more of what they earn, with the choice of whether to
spend or save. It is about winning so that our society can be economically restructured
with fairness, right away from the excesses of the 1980s where so many suffered
because of the actions of a few; where evil did, for a time, triumph over good;
and greed triumphed over commonsense. The two words which drew me into the
Liberal Party in the first place--`freedom' and `family'--are still the core of
Liberal policy development. To me, as I determined to seek preselection for the
Senate, it seemed they were, unfortunately, also at the very core of Labor
Government policy, but that it was bent on their destruction. The freedom of choice
to exercise one's rights is surely so fundamental in a Western democracy that
I cannot come to terms with a government which supports and encourages compulsory
unionism; destroys the basic right of freedom of speech by banning political advertising;
and now intends to conscript by legislation the payment of wage increases through
increased superannuation contributions by employers. That is not government in
the best interests of the people.
We have not seen government in the best
interests of the family unit either. I am prepared to wear the hat of `old fashioned'
if that is what it takes to fight for what I sincerely believe is the soul of
any community--the family. My family is here today. They mean a lot to me, and
their support and encouragement are vital to me. I do know how fortunate I am
to be part of a happy family unit. But I also know that I am delivering this
speech against a backdrop of family unit disintegration right across Australia.
Every welfare organisation in the country is indicating that marriage has been
one of the most catastrophic casualties of the present recession. A lost job,
the colossal stress that goes with it and, in many cases, also the loss of the
family home have created tensions many previously happy marriages have just not
been able to survive.
As we know from the horrific youth unemployment statistics,
many families are trying to cope with a double blow as their children leave school,
often to join their parents in the lengthening dole queues. I looked at the bankruptcy
statistics in the light of the welfare agencies' comments and I wondered how many
of the 13,556 bankruptcies in the first nine months of the 1991-92 financial year
will translate also into broken marriages and how many more distressed children
there will be. Much of the blame for such disintegration of the family unit
lies at the feet of Labor economic policy. I strongly believe in, and will
fight for, a taxation system which recognises and even displays a preference towards
the family unit. I have long admired John Howard's stance on this issue and agree
totally with him that a taxation system which is neutral when it comes to family
dependence is economic purity gone mad.
Those who support members of their
family should get taxation help for doing so. If we believe in the value of the
family unit in our society, it is not enough just to say so. We have to act to
help to preserve it in policy formulation across all areas of government. That
has been totally ignored. The subsequent erosion of that unit during a decade
of Labor has been substantial. It will not, unfortunately, be able to be redressed
quickly but it is important to me, what I believe in and what I was brought up
to believe in, to ensure that it is redressed. It is quite obvious to me that
the breakdown of the discipline of family life has been a contributing factor
to the many social problems confronting society today. It is only too obvious
in South Australia. As everyone in this chamber knows, unemployment in my home
State is at 12.4 per cent, the worst of any State and the worst State figures
on record--all this from the joint efforts of a Federal and a State government
which claim a policy of social justice. In the past decade of Labor rule in South
Australia, all social justice has meant is the delivering of more overwhelming
poverty to a greater number of families, destroying many in the process.
Forty-five
per cent of our youth in South Australia are unemployed. The rural youth unemployment
statistics are often hidden because of those young people who have, frequently
in desperation, left the area to try their luck in Adelaide. But most do not have
the luck to find work there either. There are many other factors of Federal
and State Labor rule in South Australia which indicate the destruction by poverty
of the family structure. Housing Trust waiting lists have almost doubled
to more than 43,000 since John Bannon became Premier. Rent relief recipients have
increased by a massive 72 per cent--many of those are single parent families.
South Australian child-care centres say they receive between one and 10 cases
each day of children who are either malnourished, inadequately clothed or otherwise
neglected. I have been told that child poverty in South Australia would now exceed
some 30,000, courtesy of a party which promised us no child poverty by 1990.
Our electricity is the second most expensive after Western Australia. A national
report indicated that our public transport system was the worst of any State.
Our State taxes and fees under Labor have increased at a rate 34 per cent faster
than Australia as a whole. Is it any wonder that so many South Australian families
are just not surviving as a unit with all those pressures and abysmal and expensive
government charges and services? As well, Labor policies--or perhaps I should
say a decade of lack of policy--for our manufacturing structure have left
us the most economically vulnerable State. Economic research indicates that we
are the State least likely to weather any further economic downturn and the State
least likely to be able to recover significantly as the economy picks up. We have
both Federal and State Labor governments to thank for this mess.
It seems
to me, as I have watched from the political sidelines for a number of years, that
Labor governments have quite forgotten or deliberately ignored the fact that their
policy formulation is affecting lives, children and families. I want in my time
in the Senate to make a significant contribution to try to aid those families
across Australia. I thank honourable senators on both sides of the chamber
for the warmth of their welcome to Canberra. It certainly makes up for some of
the sub-zero mornings that I am not quite used to. As a new senator, I would hope
to live by a saying that has stayed in my mind for many years: `The service we
give to others is the rent we pay for our place on earth'. I certainly hope
no-one here ever has cause to tell me that my rent book is not up to date. 
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