Parliamentary Debates (HANSARD)

THIRTY-NINTH PARLIAMENT FIRST SESSION 2013

LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL

Tuesday, 14 May 2013

Legislative Council

Tuesday, 14 May 2013 ______THE PRESIDENT (Hon Barry House) took the chair at 3.00 pm, and read prayers. SENATE VACANCY Message THE PRESIDENT (Hon Barry House): I have a message from His Excellency the Governor that transmits to the Legislative Council a copy of a dispatch that he has received today from the President of the Senate of the Commonwealth of Australia, notifying that a vacancy has happened in the representation of the state of Western Australia in the said Senate. The dispatch from the President of the Senate reads as follows — 12 April 2013

His Excellency Malcolm McCusker AC CVO QC Governor of Western Australia Government House St Georges Terrace PERTH WA 6000

Your Excellency VACANCY IN THE REPRESENTATION OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA Pursuant to the provisions of section 21 of the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution, I notify Your Excellency that a vacancy has happened in the representation of the State of Western Australia through the resignation of Senator the Honourable Chris Evans on 12 April 2013. Yours sincerely (John Hogg) Joint Sitting of the Houses — Motion On motion without notice by Hon Peter Collier (Leader of the House), resolved — That with reference to the message reported to the Council by the President from His Excellency the Governor, the Honourable Mr President be requested to confer with the Honourable Mr Speaker in order to fix a day and place whereon and whereat the Legislative Council and the Legislative Assembly, sitting and voting together, shall choose a person to hold the place of the senator whose place has become vacant. BILLS Assent Messages from the Governor and Lieutenant-Governor received and read notifying assent to the following bills — 1. Community Protection (Offender Reporting) Amendment Bill (No. 2) 2011. 2. Criminal Investigation (Covert Powers) Bill 2011. 3. Criminal Law Amendment (Out-of-Control Gatherings) Bill 2012. 4. Trans-Tasman Mutual Recognition (Western Australia) Amendment Bill 2012. 5. Dangerous Sexual Offenders Amendment Bill 2012. 6. Road Traffic (Miscellaneous Amendments) Bill 2012. 7. Loan Bill 2012. 8. Browse (Land) Agreement Bill 2012. PARLIAMENTARY SERVICES COMMITTEE Assembly Membership Message from the Assembly received and read notifying that for the present session the Legislative Assembly Parliamentary Services Committee will consist of the Speaker and the members for Cockburn, Girrawheen, Perth, South Perth and Willagee.

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JOINT STANDING COMMITTEE ON THE CORRUPTION AND CRIME COMMISSION Assembly’s Message Message from the Assembly received and read requesting concurrence in the appointment of a Joint Standing Committee on the Corruption and Crime Commission. JOINT STANDING COMMITTEE ON THE COMMISSIONER FOR CHILDREN AND YOUNG PEOPLE Assembly’s Message Message from the Assembly received and read requesting concurrence in the appointment of a Joint Standing Committee on the Commissioner for Children and Young People. FREE RANGE EGGS LABELLING BILL 2012 Petition HON ALYSSA HAYDEN (East Metropolitan — Parliamentary Secretary) [3.08 pm]: I present a petition containing six signatures, couched in the following terms — To the President and Members of the Legislative Council of the Parliament of Western Australia in Parliament assembled. We the undersigned residents of Western Australia are opposed to the Introduction of The Free Range Eggs Labelling Bill 2012. The bill is to define and regulate the labelling and sale of free range eggs by imposing standards on egg labelling requirements, labelling of egg packages, displays for retail sale and conditions under which free range hens are kept. We the undersigned, believe consumers have the right to know about the conditions that eggs they purchase are produced in. Egg labelling for free range eggs should be market driven rather than imposing regulation. Industry wishes to achieve a uniform consistent approach to free range egg labelling across the country that will provide meaningful information to consumers. All free range egg producers have the opportunity to develop branding and packaging that will differentiate their product in the market and give consumers an informed choice in their purchases. The Model Code of Practice for The Welfare of Animals: Domestic Poultry 4th Edition (code) which egg producers adhere to outlines the conditions and stocking densities for free range egg production. We believe the code will soon be reviewed and will ensure the continuance of the highest possible welfare standards for hens in egg production. We the undersigned believe there are sufficient measures and controls in place to ensure that consumers have truth in labelling while maintaining the highest hen welfare standards. Your petitioners therefore respectfully request the Legislative Council to conduct a full inquiry into this matter and oppose the Free Range Egg Labelling Bill 2012. And your petitioners as in duty bound, will ever pray. [See paper 203.] BASSENDEAN FIRE STATION — SALE Petition HON ALYSSA HAYDEN (East Metropolitan — Parliamentary Secretary) [3.09 pm]: I present a petition containing two signatures couched in the following terms — To the President and Members of the Legislative Council of the Parliament of Western Australia assembled. We the undersigned residents of Western Australia are opposed to the sale of the Bassendean Fire Station located Parker Street Bassendean. It is part of the proud 100year history of the Volunteer Fire Brigade and houses its extensive memorabilia collected over these many years. We the undersigned Residents of the Town of Bassendean and people so interested humbly and respectfully ask that the Fire Station including the buildings, training tower and surrounding land at Parker Street Bassendean not be sold but gifted to the people of Bassendean. And further, that some of the core part of the Fire Station assets may be sold or otherwise converted into a self-funding source of funds to ensure sustainability of the said gift. The purpose of such gifting is to establish a museum under the governance of an appropriate perpetual trust or like body for the purpose of displaying evidence of the Brigade’s proud history, and to ensure that the extensive memorabilia gathered since the establishment of the Brigade in 1911 is retained and displayed appropriately.

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Your Petitioners therefore respectfully request the Legislative Council to recommend support for the request of the residents of the Town of Bassendean. And your petitioners as in duty bound will ever pray. I also note that I received a similar petition with 1 000 signatures, but as it was not compliant, I was not able to table it. [See paper 204.] ROE HIGHWAY STAGE 8 Petition HON SALLY TALBOT (South West) [3.11 pm]: I present a petition containing three signatures couched in the following terms — To the President and Members of the Legislative Council of the Parliament of Western Australia in Parliament assembled. We, the undersigned residents of Western Australia respectfully request support and state the facts or circumstances leading to the petition. Your petitioners therefore humbly pray that the Legislative Council will initiate an inquiry into the cost- effectiveness and sustainability of the proposed Roe Highway Stage 8, given the high-conservation value and significant heritage and cultural values of the Bibra Lake/North Lake area, and the expensive and elaborate measures that may be required to avoid impacts to the above values, and to consider possible alternative transport routes to this proposal that may be more cost-effective and sustainable. And your petitioners as in duty bound, will ever pray [See paper 205.] DISABILITY ACCESS AND INCLUSION PLANS — PROGRESS REPORT Statement by Minister for Disability Services HON HELEN MORTON (East Metropolitan — Minister for Disability Services) [3.12 pm]: I am pleased to present the “Disability Access and Inclusion Plans (DAIPs) Progress Report 2011–2012” as prepared by the Disability Services Commission. This report outlines the progress being made by state government agencies and local governments in implementing their disability access and inclusion plans in the 2011–12 financial year. Disability access and inclusion plans, or DAIPs, provide a formal process for public authorities to make sure that their services, buildings and information are accessible and inclusive of people with disability. Under the Western Australian Disability Services Act 1993, which was amended in 2012, public authorities are required to develop and implement a DAIP. The act also requires that the Disability Services Commission submit an annual report on the effectiveness and compliance of DAIPs, to be tabled in each house of Parliament every year. DAIPs aim to address the many barriers to access that prevent people with disability from a fully inclusive life within the community. The DAIP progress report 2011–12 details how state government agencies and local governments have applied strategies to meet the needs of people with disability. The report outlines some wonderful examples of the many ways that public authorities are increasing access and inclusion across the state. As well as providing real-life examples, the report also documents achievements in implementing access and inclusion strategies. A significant number of these strategies have been completed during 2011–12. In this financial year, reports were received from 100 per cent of state government agencies and 96 per cent of local governments. I would like to acknowledge those public authorities for their reporting of DAIP progress. It is encouraging to see how the progress of DAIPs is improving access and inclusion for people with disability across Western Australia. Public authorities have not only responded positively to their responsibilities under the Disability Services Act, but also continued to support the state’s Count Me In vision. The vision is that all people live in welcoming communities that facilitate friendship, citizenship, mutual support and a fair go for everyone. It is with pleasure that I table the “Disability Access and Inclusion Plans (DAIPs) Progress Report 2011–2012”. [See paper 77.] PAPERS TABLED Papers were tabled and ordered to lie upon the table of the house. Distinguished Visitor — Mrs Naomi Kent THE PRESIDENT (Hon Barry House): I will just break into proceedings to welcome and acknowledge in the President’s gallery Mrs Naomi Kent, who works with education outreach in the United Kingdom Parliament.

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FAIR TRADING AMENDMENT BILL 2013 Notice of Motion to Introduce Notice of motion given by Hon Michael Mischin (Minister for Commerce).

MINERAL RESOURCE RENT TAX Notice of Motion Hon Nick Goiran gave notice that at the next sitting of the house he would move — That the Legislative Council — (a) congratulates the Barnett government for its strong and determined representations against the mineral resource rent tax imposed by the Gillard Labor government on iron ore and coal producers in Western Australia and other states; and (b) calls on the Gillard Labor government to immediately scrap this complex and inefficient tax.

FOETAL ALCOHOL SPECTRUM DISORDER Notice of Motion Hon Sally Talbot gave notice that at the next sitting of the house she would move — That this Council condemns the government for its failure to provide adequate resources for child protection workers and carers to deal with the prevalence of foetal alcohol spectrum disorder amongst children in the care of the director general of the Department for Child Protection and Family Support and for withdrawing legal support for children who are abused or injured while in care.

MANGLES BAY MARINA DEVELOPMENT Notice of Motion Hon Lynn MacLaren gave notice that at the next sitting of the house she would move — That the Council — (1) notes the mass opposition to the proposed Mangles Bay marina tourism precinct development as evidenced by the petition bearing more than 8 000 signatures; and (2) calls on the Barnett government to honour the original 1964 agreement under which the land at Point Peron, including the site of the proposed development, was transferred by the commonwealth to the state subject to the condition that its future use would be restricted to a reserve for recreation and/or park lands.

CARBON TAX Notice of Motion Hon Liz Behjat gave notice that at the next sitting of the house she would move — That the Council — (a) notes that the carbon tax imposed by the Gillard Labor government has significant adverse implications for Western Australia because as the single biggest cause of electricity price increases it is, and will continue to — (i) push up the cost of living and the cost of doing business in Western Australia; and (ii) reduce our international competitiveness and cost jobs; and (b) calls on the Gillard government to scrap this job-destroying carbon tax immediately.

PRAYERS Notice of Motion Hon Sally Talbot gave notice that at the next sitting of the house she would move — That a revised form of prayer, as contained in the schedule to this motion, be adopted by the Council. Schedule Almighty God, we ask for your blessing upon this Parliament. Direct and prosper our deliberations to the true welfare of Western Australia and its people. Amen.

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BROWSE LNG PROJECT — INQUIRY Notice of Motion Hon Robin Chapple gave notice that at the next sitting of the house he would move — That an inquiry be established into all aspects of the West Australian government’s involvement in regard to all decisions associated with the proposed Browse liquefied natural gas processing precinct at James Price Point. ADDRESS-IN-REPLY Motion Resumed from 11 April on the following motion moved by Hon Liz Behjat — That the following address be presented to His Excellency — To His Excellency Malcolm McCusker, Companion of the Order of Australia, Commander of the Royal Victorian Order, Queen’s Counsel, Governor in and over the state of Western Australia and its dependencies in the commonwealth of Australia. May it please Your Excellency: We, the Members of the Legislative Council of the Parliament of Western Australia in Parliament assembled, beg to express our loyalty to our most gracious sovereign and thank Your Excellency for the speech you have been pleased to deliver to Parliament. HON COL HOLT (South West — Parliamentary Secretary) [3.44 pm]: I rise in support of the motion and to thank the Governor for his speech and the excellent job he has been doing in that position for the people of Western Australia. I would also like to welcome back members after being away for a long time—as shown by the amount of papers that were read in. We have had a good 45 minutes to reflect on what it is like to be back in this place—given some of the interjections during the notices of motion, we were quickly reminded. One of the significant things the Governor touched upon was the role of volunteering within our society; he made special note of it very early on in his speech. I note that this week is National Volunteer Week, and I also would like to acknowledge the very important and integral role that volunteers play in our society. Everywhere we go, in every community or town we visit, almost every hour of every day we can see volunteering in action. It is very much a part of our society that volunteering plays such an integral role. Volunteers should be celebrated, and it should be recognised that our communities cannot function without them. I am interested to see whether other members, in responding to this motion, will refer to doing more to support volunteers in our society. I think we are going along pretty well, but obviously that burden falls more and more to the more senior members of our community because they tend to have more time on their hands. I think that as the baby boomers start to move into their seniors years and retirement we will probably have quite a lot of volunteers available. But I think we can do more. It would be really useful to encourage and implement programs that get younger people more involved in their civic duty or volunteering within their communities. I think some sections of the community could really benefit from the younger sector getting involved—the emergency services sector; ambulance drivers, bush fire fighters, the State Emergency Service and marine rescue. Those sorts of organisations really need able-bodied people to get involved and help out. More could probably be done from a government perspective to encourage those younger people to volunteer for those roles. It has been my experience that volunteers in regional Western Australia tend to be fairly well connected to community; obviously in smaller communities where there might be only 400 people it is pretty hard to hide away and there tends to be a lot more opportunity to get involved and volunteer. But, again, I think we could do more in the way of policy settings to encourage volunteerism. Just thinking about the Governor again and his promotion of volunteering, he has obviously led by example in his career and the level of volunteering he has engaged in. I just wanted to touch very quickly on a policy we ran with in the last state election, which was that of a volunteer fuel card. Our proposal was to actually help those eligible emergency services like St John Ambulance, the volunteer bush fire service, the volunteer fire and rescue service, the volunteer State Emergency Service, the volunteer emergency service and volunteer marine rescue service—those sorts of groups that operate in regional Western Australia. We really recognise that they are a vital part of our communities, and if members go to any bushfire, bush rescue or search party there are always volunteers from those groups in our towns and community helping out with the search or fighting fires. There is no doubt that we cannot employ professional service men and women in every town to fill these roles, so we have to rely on volunteers. Our contribution of a $2 000 fuel card to those organisations was in recognition of the role they play and how much we value them in our communities. That was one policy we were very keen to run with because we know members of those organisations tend to use their own vehicles, put fuel in those vehicles and run around spending their hours and fulfilling the duties of those volunteer services. A $2 000 fuel card was in recognition of the work they have been doing and will do.

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I want to touch also on one section of volunteering that I know is close to the Governor’s heart. He is a patron of Foodbank WA—one of 200 organisations he is a patron of. I had the pleasure of going to Government House and meeting the Governor and many of the Foodbank organisations, where we acknowledged some of the major contributors to Foodbank over the past few years. Yesterday, I was in Albany for a breakfast with the Albany Foodbank volunteers in recognition of the work they do in that community. It is interesting to note that only two people are employed at Foodbank in Albany, but at the breakfast there were about 26, and I know that many more volunteers could not make it. That organisation could not run at all in Albany and provide that much needed service throughout the great southern without its volunteers. Yesterday’s breakfast was a celebration of the contribution they have made to that Foodbank organisation. The people who run it down there and those who lead it from Foodbank WA up here have the right attitude towards recognising and valuing their volunteers. They celebrate them at every opportunity and recognise their efforts. They know that their organisation could not run without them. We gave an award yesterday for the volunteer of the year. Congratulations to John on receiving that. I think Foodbank is the epitome of how communities help communities. Unfortunately, situations arise when people need a helping hand with food and the necessities of life. Foodbank has recognised that need and taken the opportunity to make sure that food is not wasted. Coles, Woolworths, IGA and a lot of growers regularly donate food. Foodbank uses that opportunity to minimise food waste as well as help the neediest in our community. I would like to congratulate Foodbank and, in this week of volunteering, say thank you to those Foodbank volunteers. The Governor spoke about some of the challenges this new government faces, particularly the around the unparalleled growth we are experiencing in Western Australia. He indicated in his speech that more than 1 000 new people have been arriving in Western Australia each month from either interstate or overseas. That highlights to me that pressure will be put on this government, on our infrastructure, on our communities and on our government and non-government services to meet the demands of those new arrivals as well as to look after the people who already live here. In the past four years we did a pretty good job. But no job can be completed when that sort of growth is still happening. We have more challenges ahead, for sure. We all know the pressures we are facing on housing, transport, health and education. Some of the key services government provides will be stretched. Until we find the right solutions, we will keep working on them to ensure that the new arrivals and the people who already live here are looked after as best as possible. I think also that sort of growth provides opportunities for this Parliament. As a regional member representing regional Western Australia, I see some real opportunities for our regional communities arising from this growth. I am sure that everyone in government and in this Parliament would not like to see all those new arrivals located in Perth. We talk regularly about the strains on Perth infrastructure. One of the key issues in the election was public transport and the congestion on our roads. I am sure there is an appetite to encourage some of those new arrivals to live away from Perth and live in regional Western Australia. In fact, we want to encourage them to see regional Western Australia as a place to make their home and raise their families and, obviously, to work in. Some of the opportunities that will come through getting more of those people out into regional Western Australia are the increased services that arise from the creation of a critical mass of people. Much of the economy of Perth is driven by the fact that a lot of people live here. A lot of people need access to retail shops. I am surprised how often retail centres are built. New shopping centres are being built all over the place. Where I stay in Perth I was surprised to see some vacant land levelled to build a small shopping centre that I thought would never be built in an area like that. But obviously investors see a demand for more and more retail shopping centres. That demand is based on people living here who earn an income and who are willing to spend. I think some of those same sorts of things apply to regional Western Australia. The fact that we do not have more regional cities is a bit of a missed opportunity. Along the coast of Queensland there are regional cities of 50 000 people or more. Although they may have started through different economic drivers, be they a port, mining operations, fishing or pastoral activities, part of their sustainability and growth now is around the people who live there. Obviously, things such as tourism and diversification of their underlying economic drivers maintain their sustainability. We need more people to move into regional Western Australia and we as a government need to prepare those communities for more people to be living there. We should proactively look at what might encourage them to live in regional Western Australia, or at why they would like to live anywhere. There is no doubt that with larger populations comes a sense of vibrancy and a sense of community and culture. Many people look for that when they move to a new location or even a new state or a new country. We should be encouraging our communities to take that next step. I think the previous government started that process pretty well over the last four years. During the last term of government, there had obviously been a focus on regional development, regional economies and regional communities. I can think of many programs—I am sure regional members here could think of many opportunities—whereby investment from government has brought about a change, a new development or an improvement that has helped a community become more liveable and be able to employ more people and provide the services required at a community level. I think every community of regional Western Australia has been touched by that investment. We have made a pretty good start but we need to keep going and look at how

[COUNCIL — Tuesday, 14 May 2013] 415 we can help attract people to those communities that wish to grow. Obviously employment is one of the main drivers of where people choose to live. Many people in our regional communities already have employment opportunities. We all know about the mining boom in the Pilbara and the midwest, which in itself is attracting people to live there. We also know about the challenges those communities face of fly in, fly out workers. Many people who move to Western Australia from interstate or overseas come here because of the employment opportunities. They might already have a job or they might be hoping they can land one when they are a bit closer. One of the challenges the government must face in the future is how to promote and encourage other industries and sectors of economic development to those communities that are driven by only one or two economic drivers so that we can diversify and help underpin the sustainability of those communities. It was not long ago when people moved away from places such as Goldsworthy and Shay Gap, which were basically towns built for one purpose, when the mines closed and the purpose for the town’s existence ceased. We still have some challenges to not allow that to occur. One of the modern-day challenges is Hopetoun and Ravensthorpe where BHP Billiton had a nickel mine. The mine provided a great incentive and boost for the towns in that region when it was open but there was a whole lot of community angst when BHP decided to pull the rug from under that project. A lot of people had moved there with the aim of establishing businesses that supported the mining operation or who were working on the mine itself. We need to be mindful of that and see whether we can develop other opportunities and sustainable industries that hang off the initial opportunities so that we minimise the boom and bust cycle in those communities. I will talk about some of the programs the previous government instigated. The SuperTowns program is about trying to ready regional communities to make the most of the opportunities that their communities offer. One of those SuperTowns is Collie, which in my view has a few underlying economic challenges. It is way ahead of many other communities in the south west and is often called the engine room of the south west, for good reason. There is a lot of activity there but we need to be mindful that it is based on one sector. I think Collie can really build on that. It would be good to see the Perdaman Industries fertiliser plant in Collie go ahead to add another string to the bow of not only Collie, but also the whole of the south west. Collie is recognised as a very important community sector and industry base in the whole of the south west. I would like to see the Perdaman fertiliser plant get going. I think there are some moves around tourism in Collie. Lake Kepwari is an absolute gem in Collie. It would be good for the government to sort out that issue and finally open it for recreational opportunities. The SuperTowns program is about working on not only what we have now, but also providing other opportunities. Agriculture is another opportunity that we talked about during the election campaign. The National Party put out a discussion paper on its policy position on this issue. We would like to invest in agriculture over the next four years to make the most of the opportunity it presents. I have no doubt that the regional members in this house who are involved in agriculture would say that there are opportunities locally, nationally and internationally for our clean, green produced food to be sold into large and sustainable markets. Our task is to access those markets to provide the food that they want and to make sure that our house is in order in being able to supply that food. The National Party sees the opportunities that are there. We just need to seize the opportunities by investing in agriculture and being proactive about driving investment in agriculture. I will talk about the National Party’s vision for agriculture and promote to members some of the things we are looking at and are interested in promoting to drive agriculture. I will outline and build on some of the things that we believe are important to help our agriculture sector take advantage of all the present opportunities. One area is research and development. I refer to not only scientific research to examine how new crop varieties, crop technology or farming practices can come about and be promoted, but also economic and market research to ensure that we are growing the type of food that our national and international customers want. We need to drive new technologies to make us more efficient so that we can compete on a price-per-unit-basis and people can see that Western Australia is at the forefront of providing their food security needs in the future. In the past, we have committed $30 million to establishing the Australian Export Grains Innovation Centre, which is a national centre for excellence in economics, science and innovation to improve the competitive advantage of Australian grain in the international marketplace. We are looking also at establishing new headquarters for the Department of Agriculture and Food as the lead agency to drive that sort of innovation, research and development in the sector. The government has established a new genes and environs facility in Merredin and Katanning and a genetically modified technology research and management facility in Merredin for research into conventional crops. This is supported by research centres such as the Centre for Grain Food Innovation in Bentley, the Frank Wise Institute of Tropical Agricultural Research in Kununurra and the Manjimup Horticultural Research Institute. The development of Kununurra and the Ord expansion were very big projects in the last government. Again, that provides a fantastic opportunity to produce and export food to our near neighbour to the north. The next research and development phase in agriculture is the establishment of grassroots research and development organisations. Much of the research now is done by farmers themselves through supported networks such as the Facey Group and the Mingenew–Irwin Group. There are quite a few of those types of

416 [COUNCIL — Tuesday, 14 May 2013] groups scattered throughout the agricultural regions of regional Western Australia. Farmers themselves are driving the innovation and development that they want to see and that meet their skill set and the way they work their farms to get the most out of what they do best, which is growing food. These groups have been around for quite a while now. They were first established and supported by the Department of Agriculture and Food, they are still supported to a great degree by the department, they are doing a great job and they are well recognised and well respected within the community. The National Party is really very keen to continue supporting those groups to do what they do best, driven at the grassroots by what farmers see as their greatest needs in research and development. We are also very keen to establish a northern beef industry centre in Broome and sheep industry development centre in Katanning to support those industries locally at those centres and help them to grow the best food that they can. Organic agriculture is also a growing, demand-driven industry. There are now many growers in that space and again, we should be supporting them. If organic food is what people want to buy, we will invest in an organic food industry resource centre in Bunbury to help fill that need. We are also keen to invest in Western Australian grain growers to better manage their risks; risk management has been quite a headline over the last few months in terms of how we manage the changing climate that all farmers operate within. No matter where in Western Australia people farm, I am sure that the climate is changing in one way or another, and we need to ask how we will respond to that. Again, we need to help farmers manage the risks and better understand what the risks are so they can make informed decisions about changing how they do things while still remaining viable. The second component about seizing the opportunity is around land and water. One of the key issues for anyone in agriculture in Western Australia is water availability. It is a scarce resource and probably getting scarcer in terms of rainfall. We know that it is an issue in country towns and communities, and also in Perth, but it is also an issue for agriculture. There is a well-recognised trend of a drying climate for agriculture in the south west, so how do we change and adapt to ensure that our farmers in the south west can continue to be viable and make the most of potential opportunities in the new markets that we would certainly like to pursue? We have already invested in dewatering mines in the Pilbara, which water at the moment is being used to grow hay for local cattle stations. That is just one example; when we have water, we can grow stuff. I am sure that that will expand in the near future beyond fodder crops and hay to include other food items that can be shipped and transported to other markets, to make the most of opportunities. Obviously, there are some challenges involved with that in respect of transport and in making sure that we can grow the food cheaply enough to be able to sell it for a profit without going broke growing it. We will continue to invest in the land and water sections of the industry; we want to implement a statewide food and water initiative and put some real dollars behind that to ensure that regions like the Swan coastal plain, the horticultural regions of the south west, and the initiatives that are happening in the Pilbara and the Kimberley can continue so that we can make the most out of them. In agricultural policy, we want to find ways of growing food in the best and most efficient ways we can, and to achieve the best yields we can. However, if we do not have somewhere to sell it, it is not much good. I think it is well recognised throughout the world that Asia is a developing region; countries in that region have growing middle and upper classes, and their diet and food habits are changing. We should be looking to those markets to absolutely promote the clean food that Western Australia produces. We want to invest heavily in seeking ways in which we might access those markets; not only access the markets, but also get the food and produce, whatever it may be, into those markets. We would like to provide funding to carry out a statewide infrastructure audit to find out where some of the bottlenecks are occurring or where there are some possible opportunities to invest in infrastructure that will help farmers and agricultural producers to get their food to those markets, create a sustainable industry and level out some of the peaks and troughs that we tend to experience in the agricultural sector, often based on seasonality and changes in markets. One of the biggest issues in agriculture is price-takers. Hon Ken Baston as Minister for Agriculture and Food will be well aware of the challenges around the Carnarvon horticultural basin and the fact that if a perishable food item is grown, the producer is at the whim of the marketers and the people who buy their produce. How can we level that out a bit and get more buyers into the market so that they are competing for the produce? Another plank of seizing the opportunity is about providing farmers and those who work in the agriculture sector with opportunities to improve their skills, if that is what they need. Australian farmers are already technologically advanced and quite capable of growing fantastic food; it is well recognised that they are probably among the most efficient farmers in the world. However, if we are talking about seizing new opportunities, there will probably be pressure on farmers to do things differently. That might involve changing the crops produced, changing agricultural systems, or responding to the risks of a drying climate and getting produce to market. We will be investing in farmers to make the most of those opportunities, but the government cannot do it all. Cockies are very good; give them the opportunities and the skills and they will pursue many of these things themselves.

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I have touched on only a couple of economic opportunities that we need to think about in terms of diversifying our regional communities. Tourism is often touted as a fix-all for regional Western Australia’s woes, but in my experience it is just one part of the jigsaw puzzle. Not everyone can make a dollar out of tourism; issues such as the high value of the Australian dollar are really having quite an effect on our tourism industry. I go to places like Albany regularly; what is the economic driver in a city like Albany? One would have to say that it is a service city; it has retail and all the services that governments provide. Does the member want me to wind up? Hon Matt Benson-Lidholm: No, I’m just trying to get you to suggest that there’s a wine industry down there too! Hon COL HOLT: The member should have done this with his hand instead! Albany is a pretty interesting case study. It has little bits and pieces of everything, but not necessarily a key underlying economic driver. Tourism is probably a cornerstone of the economics, so when the Australian dollar goes up in value, international tourists tend to visit less often; and when things get tighter on the economic home front, obviously people travel less often to places such as Albany. We have some challenges to pursue those opportunities for regional cities and centres such as Albany and many others and to diversify our economic drivers and employment opportunities, but that is something this government should be seriously looking at to promote and take hold of those opportunities. One of the other things we know people look for when they move to or want to stay in a regional community is obviously access to good health services. I was very pleased to visit in the recent past the opening of the coronary care unit and the cancer care unit at the South West Health Campus in Bunbury. Interestingly, the coronary care unit is a fantastic facility, but St John of God, which runs the unit, has some challenges to find cardio specialists to go there. It is a fantastic building, ready-made for St John of God to use in the best way it can. Only two or three weeks ago I was in Bunbury for the opening of the cancer care unit. Cancer care treatment has been provided in Bunbury for a while now. This is a special purpose-built facility. The many patients in the south west suffering from cancer no longer have to travel to Perth for a one, two or three-hour treatment; they can get treated in Bunbury, which is the sort of thing the government should aspire to provide. If we want people to live in regional Western Australia, we need to provide access to health services. I was also at the opening of the new Albany Hospital the week before last, which the community has been waiting a long time to see. It is a magnificent facility. One of the greatest things I noticed there was the integration of telehealth and remote access health throughout the whole state. There is a great deal of opportunity for investment or a response to be made by the government to help our regional communities, some of which are very remote and very difficult or expensive to supply 24-hour health care or doctors to. Telehealth will become a great tool for those regional communities to ensure that people with primary healthcare needs, or even emergency healthcare needs, can be assessed and treated. Through the Southern Inland Health Initiative, some really serious work is being done on and some serious investment is being made into the infrastructure for telehealth, remote health care and health care over the internet to ensure that we make the most of the opportunities that come along. We know that we can no longer do things in the traditional way; we need to find a way to provide that service that is a little outside the box. In my view, telehealth is an exciting innovation. I know it has been around for quite a while and has been talked about for quite a while, but some serious investment is starting to see it really work for remote and regional communities. Obviously, a new hospital is planned for Busselton, as well as a series of refurbishments and rebuilds of many district hospitals. Again, it is about recognising that district hospitals, or the smaller and larger hospitals in the regions, are an important part of any regional community. Health is a challenging sector. There are always changing needs. When people move to a region, they have to be provided with good healthcare services. Although we welcome 1 000 new people to Western Australia each week to be part of the Western Australian community, the health sector will obviously be stretched and strained to accommodate them. One of the other issues related to health is aged care. Earlier I talked about the baby boomer bulge of our demographics heading into retirement and into elder statesmanship. We will need to provide greater aged-care services to those people as they grow older. The Nationals and this government have been promoting the notion that people should be allowed to grow old around their family in their community and with the support of the community that they have grown up in or worked in their whole life. That presents a whole heap of challenges; we all know that. There probably will not be a perfect solution everywhere, but we certainly believe that people do not necessarily have to move away from their family or the community they love to be cared for when they grow old. Another issue I want to touch on briefly is education. As a regional member of Parliament working in regional Western Australia, I know that many people make decisions about moving away from or to the bush based on education. Every parent wants to provide their child with the opportunity to have the best education they can. Often parents see that their children need to be in Perth to get the best education. I think that belief is changing. I

418 [COUNCIL — Tuesday, 14 May 2013] think it is recognised that there are many fine schools in regional Western Australia that can be accessed even though people do not necessarily live in that community. This government has made a great deal of investment in the regional hostels system to ensure that there are hostels around regional Western Australia so that those people who do not want to send their children to Perth to perhaps to a more expensive boarding option can access the same level of education that would be expected anywhere in the state. There is a very good example at Merredin. Hon Peter Collier: Yes, I opened it. It’s fantastic; it’s like Club Med. Hon COL HOLT: They could not get enough kids to live there. Hon Peter Collier: Now they’re bulging at the seams. It’s a fantastic college. Hon COL HOLT: Yes. They could not get enough kids from the region to take advantage of the education opportunities at Merredin. The school was rebuilt and the associated hostel was refurbished and now it is seen as a very viable alternative. It now has a waiting list. I have some information with me, but I cannot think of the number of kids there. Hon Peter Collier: There are around 80 in the residential college. Hon COL HOLT: There are about 80. I will give those figures later. We have made some really good investments in some of the regional hostels to encourage people to send their children there. Children can still get a really good education in regional Western Australia. The other day I was at the University of Western Australia campus in Albany to see its science building. Hon Peter Collier: I opened that, too. Hon COL HOLT: Is that all the minister does? Hon Peter Collier: I was with Brendon on both occasions. Hon COL HOLT: Yes, I know. I spoke to the guys at the UWA campus in Albany and I was really surprised at how big a part UWA is playing in the provision of undergraduate courses from the first year to the third year. People can complete their undergraduate bachelor’s degree in certain areas; they can certainly do the first year for just about every course at the UWA campus in Albany. These are the sorts of innovations and investments that the government needs to make to ensure that excellent education outcomes are provided for the kids in our regional communities. We do not want whole families moving out of those regions to Perth just because they perceive that they cannot get a good education in regional Western Australia. I also visited the Great Southern Institute of Technology. I am sure that the minister has been there, too! Debate interrupted, pursuant to standing orders. [Continued on page 427.] QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION — EFFICIENCY DIVIDEND 5. Hon SUE ELLERY to the Minister for Education: I refer to the $30.431 million efficiency dividend cut to be made to the Department of Education in 2012–13. (1) Has the minister received advice that the department will not meet this target? (2) Is the minister confident that the department will achieve savings of $30.431 million by 30 June 2013? Hon PETER COLLIER replied: I thank the honourable member for some notice of this question. (1)–(2) The department has not advised of any issues regarding the achievement of its efficiency dividend savings target for 2012–13. SCHOOLS — CLEANERS 6. Hon SUE ELLERY to the Minister for Education: I refer to the 2009 “Review of the Physical Safety of Cleaners in Western Australian Schools” and the recommendation that all cleaning staff in large schools be allocated two-way radios, plus training to use the radios. (1) Given that the recommendation said all schools will have this equipment by 30 June 2010, how many schools have not been issued with security alarms, two-way radios or mobile phones as per the review’s recommendations, and why have they not been issued with the equipment?

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(2) When will the schools without the security alarms, two-way radios or mobile phones be provided with them? (3) Given that the catalyst for this review was the appalling sexual assault of a cleaner at a northern suburbs primary school in December 2008, is it appropriate that the government has taken so long to provide cleaners with some measure of security? Hon PETER COLLIER replied: I thank the honourable member for some notice of this question. (1)–(3) I am advised by the Department of Education that the answer to these questions cannot be provided in the time allowed. Hon Sue Ellery: You should have done it three years ago! Hon PETER COLLIER: Excuse me! We are talking about 771 schools. Hon Sue Ellery: It’s not something new! The PRESIDENT: Order! We are hoping to get off to a good start this year. The minister. Hon PETER COLLIER: Thank you, Mr President. The department will provide the required information for me to respond by Tuesday, 11 June 2013. However, if it comes in earlier, I will provide it as early as I get it, as always. ALBANY BUSHFIRE — MAJOR INCIDENT REVIEW 7. Hon KATE DOUST to the minister representing the Minister for Environment: I refer to the fire at Two Peoples Bay near Albany last year, which resulted in a fatality and injuries to Department of Environment and Conservation firefighters. (1) What reports, reviews or analyses have been prepared by the minister’s department or independent consultants as a consequence of that incident? (2) For each of these reports, reviews or analyses can the minister identify the purpose for which the document was prepared? (3) For each of these reports, reviews or analyses can the minister identify what action or follow-up has occurred since its completion? Hon HELEN MORTON replied: I thank the honourable member for some notice of this question. The Minister for Environment has provided the following response — (1)–(3) A major incident review of the Black Cat Creek fire of October last year was conducted by an independent consultant under the oversight of the Commissioner of the Department of Fire and Emergency Services. The review examined critical aspects of prevention, preparedness, response and recovery. The commissioner has provided the final report to the State Coroner to inform his investigation into the death of Department of Environment and Conservation firefighter Wendy Bearfoot. A draft report titled “Reconstruction of the path and behaviour of the Black Cat Creek fire and associated meteorological conditions” was prepared by a senior DEC research scientist. This report was provided to WA Police as part of its investigation and has since been submitted to the State Coroner to inform his investigation. DEPARTMENT FOR CHILD PROTECTION AND FAMILY SUPPORT — LEGAL ASSISTANCE 8. Hon SALLY TALBOT to the Minister for Child Protection: I refer to funding cuts that the minister has approved, which will reduce the legal assistance available to children who are injured or abused while in the care of the Department for Child Protection and Family Support. (1) How will the level of services provided to children and young people who have been abused or injured in care be maintained? (2) What effects and risks has the minister identified relating to the cuts to these services? Hon HELEN MORTON replied: I thank the honourable member for some notice of this question. (1) The department and the State Solicitor’s Office are now working together to ensure effective transition of civil litigation work that does not compromise the services for children in care. The State Solicitor

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has advised that it is appropriate for his office to undertake most areas of the department’s civil litigation work and that doing so will reduce duplication in legal matters regarding abuse in state care. (2) The State Solicitor considered the functions before agreeing to the transfer. This involves some changes to how the work is managed, but no compromises to having the work done, or its quality. The change process is continuing collaboratively with all officers affected, involving thorough planning and examination of issues, to manage any risks and enable effective transition. FARMERS — ASSISTANCE PACKAGE 9. Hon PHILIP GARDINER to the Minister for Agriculture and Food: Noting the Premier and the minister’s concern for grain farmers across much of Western Australia’s wheatbelt, I refer to the commonwealth’s offer of a $30 million package towards assisting the state’s farmers in 2013. (1) Is this funding available for immediate activation? (2) Is it the intention of the government of Western Australia to make part of this funding accessible to grain farmers who meet criteria laid down by the state government and the commonwealth government? (3) If so, how much of the $30 million will be made available for the critically timed seasonal financing needs that extend over May and the first half of June 2013? (4) When will applications for this funding be sought from grain farmers who require additional seasonal finance to sow their crops? (5) Have there been discussions between the state government and agribusiness lending banks that would give lenders the confidence to advance funds to grain farmers to meet essential sowing needs? (6) Are additional funds to meet seasonal financing needs flowing from banks to grain farmers as a result of these discussions? (7) If no to (6), when is it proposed that funds are likely to flow to grain growers from the $30 million package? Hon KEN BASTON replied: I thank the honourable member for some notice of this question. (1) No. (2) Yes. It is the Western Australian government’s intention that all farm businesses that meet both the state government’s and the commonwealth government’s criteria will be eligible to apply, including grain farm businesses. (3) Concessional loans of up to $200 000 would ensure access for as many eligible farm businesses as practical. Timing of availability is dependent on the commonwealth government setting eligibility criteria and providing other details that would enable implementation. At this stage the state government has had no response from the commonwealth on key questions such as the interest rate or provision for bad debts. (4) Applications from farm businesses will be open as soon as the commonwealth government has determined the eligibility criteria and signed an agreement with Western Australia. (5) Yes, there have been discussions between agribusiness lending institutions and the state government. I have been informed that fewer than 40 farm businesses have not been provided with carry-on finance this year. All other farms have had most, if not all, of their program approved. (6) I am informed that the banks are keen to support as many farm businesses as possible to prevent a collapse in property prices. The recent rainfall in some areas last week will have boosted confidence levels for both grain growers and their financial institutions. So I take this opportunity to call on all members to continue to pray for rain, particularly for the eastern wheatbelt. (7) I understand that there is intense discussion between different commonwealth departments on how to roll out these funds to the states. It seems that the commonwealth Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry may not have worked through with some of his ministerial colleagues key details such as interest rates and payment of bad debts. Hopefully, we will get something in writing by the end of May, which will allow us to accept applications over June and then commence the payment of funds in July. JACK HILLS — MINE EXPANSION 10. Hon ROBIN CHAPPLE to the minister representing the Minister for Mines and Petroleum: (1) Is the minister aware that the Jack Hills area has been granted interim listing status on the Register of the National Estate as it contains the oldest geological formations found anywhere on planet Earth?

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(2) Will the minister ensure that the recent expansion of the Jack Hills mine does not cause any disturbance to these ancient formations, such that it would make future geological research impossible? (3) If no to (2), why not? (4) If yes to (2), what will those measures be? Hon KEN BASTON replied: I thank the honourable member for some notice of the question. (1) Yes. This interim listing—place ID 18283—within the Register of the National Estate is dated 28 October 2003. (2) Yes. (3) Not applicable. (4) The Jack Hills mine expansion project is an existing iron ore mine owned by Crosslands Resources Ltd, located approximately 380 kilometres north east of Geraldton. The Jack Hills area that hosts the old zircons is not part of the mine expansion project that shares the same name; it is located about 25 kilometres to the west-south-west of the Jack Hills mine. Exploration activities around the geoheritage site are being closely managed to ensure that the geoscientific values are not detrimentally affected. The specific Jack Hills area with geoscientific values is also on the Western Australian register of geoheritage sites. FARMERS — ASSISTANCE PACKAGE 11. Hon KEN TRAVERS to the Minister for Agriculture and Food: My question without notice is very similar to Hon Philip Gardiner’s. By way of introduction, I congratulate the minister on his appointment to his ministerial position. I refer to the minister’s comments last week that he is awaiting formal confirmation of key aspects of the federal government’s multimillion-dollar aid package for farmers. (1) What are the key aspects holding up this package? (2) What action has the minister taken to reach agreement with the commonwealth on the package? (3) When did the minister raise any concerns with the federal minister about the package? (4) Will the minister table any correspondence he has sent the federal minister outlining his concerns; and, if not, why not? (5) I think the minister has already answered this question: when does the minister expect that farmers will be able to — (a) make applications for assistance under this package; and (b) receive funding assistance from this package? Hon KEN BASTON replied: I thank Hon Ken Travers for the question. (1)–(5) First of all, I had a telephone call. The first time I heard that $60 million would be available to each state was on the radio on a Saturday morning in Broome. The federal minister let the press know before the state agricultural minister in Western Australia. Hon Ken Travers: And as a government you notify him before you bag the commonwealth? Hon KEN BASTON: I actually spoke to him on the phone the next day, Hon Ken Travers, and told him it was a problem. I then attended what I call a “SCoPI” meeting in Sydney. I actually dined with the federal minister. All state ministers were there. We discussed it verbally over the table. He said it was not a problem: “Here is what the interest rate is. Just let your fellows behind the scenes know.” It was not as simple as that; not as simple at all. All the other states have a similar issue. The Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry did not even understand the ramifications of how the loan would be delivered. I wrote a letter last week to the federal minister. I am waiting for an answer. I set out our concerns in that letter. I have learnt that the state will not have to wear any losses on the loans. Members must remember this is a loan—it is not money just being given to us; it has to be paid back, with interest. We are now awaiting a response to that. I believe that DAFF and the Western Australian Department of Agriculture and Food are working together to have an outcome for that as soon as possible.

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GOVERNMENT DEPARTMENTS — VALUE-FOR-MONEY AUDIT 12. Hon LJILJANNA RAVLICH to the minister representing the Treasurer: I refer to recommendation 8 of the Economic Audit Committee’s 2009 report, which recommends that major agencies undertake a value-for-money audit at least once every five years. (1) To date which agencies have had a value-for-money audit? (2) Who undertook those audits and at what cost? (3) Will the Treasurer table those audit reports; and, if not, why not? Hon HELEN MORTON replied: I thank the member for some notice of the question. The Department of Treasury advises — (1)–(3) The Departments of Education; Health; Commerce; Environment and Conservation; Western Australia Police; and the Departments of Housing; Planning; and Transport have had a value-for-money audit undertaken by PricewaterhouseCoopers, KPMG, Deloitte Australia, and Ernst and Young at a cost of $2.291 million. MANGLES BAY MARINA DEVELOPMENT 13. Hon LYNN MacLAREN to the minister representing the Minister for Lands: I refer to the state’s agreement with the commonwealth on the transfer of land at Point Peron for recreation and/or parklands and I refer to the minister’s undertaking to “provide more detailed advice once a resolution is reached” in response to my question without notice 1072 asked on 24 November 2011. (1) Has the issue of whether the agreement remains binding on the state been resolved with the commonwealth? (2) If yes to (1), will the minister please provide detailed advice regarding that resolution? (3) If no to (1), when is this issue likely to be resolved and will the minister please table all correspondence to date between the state and the commonwealth in relation to this issue? Hon KEN BASTON replied: I thank the honourable member for some notice of the question. (1) Yes. The state’s position is very clear and has been conveyed formally to the commonwealth, which in turn has acknowledged our position. (2) Advice has been received from the commonwealth that recognises that there is no encumbrance registered on the certificates of title that impedes the land for its proposed use. (3) Not applicable. ELECTRICITY — COST-OF-LIVING ASSISTANCE CONCESSION 14. Hon MATT BENSON-LIDHOLM to the Leader of the House representing the Minister for Finance: I refer to the cost-of-living assistance electricity concession. (1) Has a mechanism been put in place to allow consumers living in retirement villages and caravan parks, who are not directly billed by Synergy or Horizon, to be able to claim the cost-of-living assistance payment? (2) If no to (1), will such a mechanism be in place by 1 July, when electricity prices will rise again? (3) If no to (2), when will consumers in retirement villages, caravan parks and the like be able to claim the cost-of-living allowance? Hon PETER COLLIER replied: I thank the member for the question. (1) The Liberal government made a commitment to extend energy concessions to households receiving electricity services through onsellers as part of the 2013 state election campaign. The Department of Finance has since been working to develop systems to deliver concessions to this group. An announcement will be made shortly on how eligible households can access the extended concessions. Eligible permanent residents of caravan and long-stay parks can already access energy concessions by making an application to Synergy or Horizon Power regardless of which electricity retailer serves the caravan park.

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(2) The mechanism to provide energy concessions to households receiving electricity services through onsellers will be in place to provide payments to eligible households by 1 July 2013. (3) Not applicable. DEPARTMENT FOR CHILD PROTECTION AND FAMILY SUPPORT 15. Hon LINDA SAVAGE to the Minister for Child Protection: How has the $1.217 million reduction in expenditure on the procurement of goods and services in 2012–13, approved by cabinet last year, been allocated across the following service areas: supporting children and young people in the chief executive officer’s care; protecting children and young people from abuse and harm; and supporting individuals and families at risk or in crisis? Hon HELEN MORTON replied: I thank the member for some notice of the question. The Department for Child Protection and Family Support has addressed the one-off reduction in 2012–13 by deferring non-critical property maintenance as well as deferring planned enhancements to ASSIST, the department’s client management system, which contains all client information and case management approvals, and manages payments to carers. The notional allocation of the $1.217 million reduction across the department’s services is: a $580 000 reduction to supporting children and young people in the chief executive officer’s care; a $400 000 reduction to protecting children and young people from abuse and harm; and a $237 000 reduction to supporting individuals and families at risk or in crisis. SOUTH WEST CHILD AND ADOLESCENT MENTAL HEALTH SERVICE — FUNDING 16. Hon ADELE FARINA to the Minister for Mental Health: I refer to the 2012–13 state budget and to the south west child and adolescent mental health service and the business case it submitted in early 2011. (1) How much growth funding was allocated to the south west CAMHS in the 2012–13 budget? (2) How much additional funding over and above growth funding was allocated to the south west CAMHS in the 2012–13 budget? (3) In relation to (2) — (a) how has the additional funding been allocated or spent; and (b) is the additional funding intended to be recurrent or for the 2012–13 financial year only? Hon HELEN MORTON replied: I thank the member for some notice of the question. (1) There was $222 000 in growth funding provided. With this funding, an additional 1.75 full-time equivalent CAMHS staff have commenced delivering services in the south west. (2) No additional growth funding was provided to south west CAMHS in the 2012–13 budget. (3) Not applicable. ROAD SAFETY — STRAYING LIVESTOCK 17. Hon ROBIN CHAPPLE to the parliamentary secretary representing the Minister for Transport: My question is in regard to regional road safety in circumstances where highways traverse the paddocks of pastoral lease properties and where these are either unfenced or the fencing is poorly maintained. (1) Is the minister aware that there are large numbers of cattle roaming on Great Northern Highway, especially in the section between the Broome–Derby shire boundary and the Derby turn-off? (2) Is the minister aware that this poses a hazardous, costly and potentially lethal situation for motorists and stock? (3) If yes to (1) and (2), what actions is the minister taking to address the situation in order to make driving safer and reduce stock losses? (4) Will the minister consider emulating the Queensland government’s solution to a similar problem, whereby the Department of Transport and Main Roads construct and maintain highway fencing? (5) If no to (4), why not? Hon JIM CHOWN replied: I thank the honourable member for some notice of this question.

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Main Roads Western Australia advises — (1)–(2) Yes. (3) An advisory group for the management of straying livestock in pastoral regions was set up in 2012. It is chaired by Main Roads and includes members from the Pastoral Lands Board, the Pastoralists and Graziers Association, and state and local government agencies. The group has been looking at a range of initiatives to reduce the incidence of stock-related crashes on the state’s road network in pastoral regions. (4)–(5) Although Main Roads’ fencing policy is already similar to that of its Queensland counterpart, the advisory group is looking at further aligning with the fencing policies of other states. DEPARTMENT FOR CHILD PROTECTION AND FAMILY SUPPORT — CHILD DEATH 18. Hon SALLY TALBOT to the Minister for Child Protection: I refer to media reports that a disabled child who was in the care of the Department for Child Protection and Family Support died after his care workers lost him in bushland on the Dampier Peninsula on 14 March 2013. (1) What went wrong with arrangements put in place by the minister’s department to care for this child? (2) What will change as a result of this tragedy to ensure that such a thing never happens again? Hon HELEN MORTON replied: I thank the member for some notice of this question. (1) The child was 15 years of age at the time of his death and was registered with the Disability Services Commission due to an intellectual disability. He was in the care of the CEO of the Department for Child Protection and Family Support at the time of registration with the commission and continued to be under DCPFS’s care until his death. In 2011, DCPFS contracted a placement option for the young person with a non-government organisation, jointly funded by DCPFS and the commission. The commission’s local area coordinator and the DCPFS staff on Dampier Peninsula and the case manager had regular contact with the young person for the duration of his registration with the commission and while he was in care. Prior to the day of the child’s death, DCPFS had no issues with the level of care he was receiving from his carers and the organisation contracted to provide the care. The child left the carers, against their advice, to go to the water. His carers responded very quickly, pursuing him, but lost sight of him and raised emergency services within an hour of him going missing. (2) The department constantly reviews its placements for vulnerable young people. It looks forward to the results of the investigation by the Ombudsman and the opportunity to receive any recommendations about any policy and procedures for children in care with high needs. MANDURAH LINE — NEW TRAIN STATION 19. Hon SUE ELLERY to the parliamentary secretary representing the Minister for Transport: Will the Barnett government build the Karnup train station and all the associated facilities for the 50 000 to 60 000 people living between northern Mandurah and southern Rockingham in this term of office? Hon JIM CHOWN replied: I thank the honourable member for some notice of this question. The Liberal-led government has committed $80 million to increase the number of stations on the Mandurah line by building the Aubin Grove station. FREMANTLE PORT — LEAD SHIPMENTS 20. Hon LYNN MacLAREN to the minister representing the Minister for Environment: I refer to the transport of Rosslyn Hill Mining lead carbonate through Fremantle port. (1) When will these shipments commence, and when will they cease? (2) How many shipments are expected this year? (3) What is the total estimated volume of lead carbonate to be shipped? (4) In what locations has lead contamination been detected along the transport route from the Wiluna mine? (5) In what ways do the conditions set by the government for the transport of lead by Rosslyn Hill Mining differ from the conditions set for the transportation of lead by Magellan Metals?

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Hon HELEN MORTON replied: I thank the member for some notice of the question. The Minister for Environment has provided the following response — (1) Shipments commenced in April 2013. Rosslyn Hill Mining has approval to ship through Fremantle port until July 2017. (2) This is a commercial and operational matter for the company to determine. (3) Rosslyn Hill Mining is permitted to mine one million tonnes of ore per year. The volume of lead carbonate shipped will depend on commercial and operational matters determined by the company. (4) Of the 251 soil monitoring sites along the transport route, nine have recorded low levels of lead due to natural occurrence or historical uses. No Rosslyn Hill lead concentrate has been detected at these sites. (5) Rosslyn Hill Mining Pty Ltd became the proponent of approval statement 905 following a name change by Magellan Metals Pty Ltd in November 2012. The conditions of statement 905 remain the same. EMERGENCY SERVICES LEVY 21. Hon KATE DOUST to the minister representing the Minister for Emergency Services: I refer to the impending rise in the emergency services levy of an additional 7.8 per cent as of l July 2013. (1) What is the additional amount that will be collected by this measure? (2) How was the figure of 7.8 per cent calculated? (3) Have the additional funds been earmarked for specific projects or work; and, if so, what? Hon MICHAEL MISCHIN replied: I thank the honourable member for some notice of this question. The Minister for Emergency Services advises — (1) The emergency services levy charges will raise $270.899 million in 2013–14, an additional $21.022 million—8.4 per cent—on 2012–13. (2) A 7.8 per cent increase in the average residential ESL charge in the metropolitan area was estimated in March for the 2013–14 tariffs, fees and charges review, and based on property data and valuations available at that time. That modelling indicated that ESL collections of $270.899 million across all Western Australian property owners would translate to a 7.8 per cent increase in the 2013-14 average residential ESL charge. (3) Yes. ESL collections totalling $270.899 million will fund the majority of the Department of Fire and Emergency Services’ 2013-14 operating costs, which include financing costs associated with approved capital works projects to be undertaken in 2013-14, totalling $20.471 million. The PRESIDENT: The Leader of the Opposition has indicated she wants to ask a question; she gets priority. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION — BUILDING CONDITION ASSESSMENT REPORT 22. Hon SUE ELLERY to the Minister for Education: I refer to the Department of Education’s building condition assessment report. (1) Has the 2012 building condition assessment been completed; and, if not, when will it be completed? (2) Has the minister received the building condition assessment report; and, if so, when will he table this report in Parliament? Hon PETER COLLIER replied: (1) The building condition assessment was due in the second half of 2012, but it was delayed to allow for a review of the asbestos audit process. A building condition assessment is currently underway and is anticipated to be completed by October 2013. (2) Not applicable. HON JIM CHOWN — ROLES 23. Hon KEN TRAVERS to the parliamentary secretary representing the Minister for Transport: Thank you, Mr President. I am not that brave and I do not expect you to be! I congratulate the parliamentary secretary on his appointment. (1) Can he tell us what he does as Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Transport?

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(2) What is the difference between comments he makes as the parliamentary secretary and comments he makes as the member for Agricultural Region? (3) If he believes there is a difference, how does he intend to deal with any conflicts between the two roles? The PRESIDENT: I do not think sections of that question are in order. Several members interjected. The PRESIDENT: Order! I want to make sure I get this right. Standing order 103 reads in part — Questions may be asked of — (a) a Minister or Parliamentary Secretary relating to public affairs with which the Minister or Parliamentary Secretary is connected, to proceedings in the Council, or to any matter of administration for which the Minister or Parliamentary Secretary is responsible; … The parts of the question relating to the member’s role as a member for Agricultural Region are out of order, but the parts of the question relating to the parliamentary secretary’s role in relation to public affairs and his representative role are in order. Point of Order Hon SUE ELLERY: Mr President, will you give consideration to perhaps making a ruling on what you have just advised the house. It seems to me that that part of the question that asked—I am paraphrasing—what is the difference between Hon Jim Chown’s role as the member for Agricultural Region and his role as the parliamentary secretary indeed go to his role as parliamentary secretary. I wonder if in fact that can be ruled out of order. Hon Ken Travers: I am asking whether it is a conflict. The PRESIDENT: I will take that point of order and make a statement at some later stage. Hon SUE ELLERY: Thank you. Questions without Notice Resumed Hon JIM CHOWN replied: Thank you, Mr President, and I thank the honourable member for the question without notice. (1)–(3) I consider my role as parliamentary secretary to be at the behest of my minister and I will do anything he wishes me to do with regard to fulfilling the requirements of a parliamentary secretary, including answering questions in this house and putting forward any appropriate pieces of legislation on his behalf. Several members interjected. SAWMILLS — INVESTMENT SECURITY GUARANTEES Question without Notice 328 — Correction of Answer HON KEN BASTON (Mining and Pastoral — Minister for Agriculture and Food) [5.04 pm]: On Tuesday, 17 May 2011 Hon Giz Watson asked question without notice 328. The answer provided contained an error. The correction is tabled and I seek leave to have it incorporated in Hansard. Leave granted. [See paper 206.] The following material was incorporated —

(1) Auswest Timbers Pty Ltd; Blueleaf Corporation Pty Ltd; Yornup Mill Pty Ltd and ND and BJ Holdsworth, trading as Greenacres Mill; Gunns Ltd; Middlesex Mill Pty Ltd; Nannup Timber Processing Pty Ltd; and Hexan Holdings Pty Ltd, trading as Whiteland Milling. (2) Not applicable.

SAWMILLS — INVESTMENT SECURITY GUARANTEES Question on Notice 3977 — Correction of Answer HON KEN BASTON (Mining and Pastoral — Minister for Agriculture and Food) [5.05 pm]: On Tuesday, 24 May 2011 Hon Giz Watson asked question on notice 3977, which referred to question without notice 328. The answer provided contained an error. The correction is tabled and I seek leave to have it incorporated in Hansard.

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Leave granted. [See paper 207.] The following material was incorporated —

Total full liability Sawmill Contract of Sale ($) Auswest Timbers Pty Ltd 2773 $14,192,187 Blueleaf Corporation Pty Ltd 2771 and 2765 $18,582,383 Yornup Mill Pty Ltd 2679 $1,885,215 Gunns Ltd 2770 $32,480,767 Middlesex Mill Pty Ltd 2778 $674,406 Nannup Timber Processing Pty Ltd 2772 $6,244,500 Hexan Holdings Pty Ltd (Whiteland) 2777 $2,509,665

SENATE VACANCY Joint Sitting of the Houses — Statement by President THE PRESIDENT (Hon Barry House): Members, before we resume orders of the day I wish to make a short statement. With reference to the motion passed by this house today on the fixing of the day and place for the joint sitting of the Legislative Council and the Legislative Assembly to fill a Senate vacancy, I advise that I have received agreement from the Speaker of the Legislative Assembly that both houses will meet in the Legislative Council chamber at 11.00 am on Wednesday, 15 May 2013. ADDRESS-IN-REPLY Motion Resumed from an earlier stage of the sitting. HON COL HOLT (South West — Parliamentary Secretary) [5.06 pm]: Before question time I was just about to talk about the Great Southern Institute of Technology, and I will give some examples of actions taken by the previous Liberal–National government and what the new government needs to work on to ensure that regional communities are places where people want to move to and remain. Not everyone who moves to Perth sees Perth as the ultimate destination. I visited the Great Southern Institute of Technology yesterday where I was given a rundown of the campus and its activities. I was extremely impressed with the professionalism that campus portrayed and the role the people running the institute see themselves playing in the education sector of the great southern. The institute undertakes a lot of activities not only in the great southern, but also elsewhere around the state and even interstate. It is pursuing opportunities it needs to pursue as an institute, but it is also providing great educational outcomes for those students who want to engage in the institute of technology system. I would like to draw members’ attention to the institute’s annual report, which I am sure has been tabled or will be tabled. I encourage members to look at the breadth and depth of the activities of the Great Southern Institute of Technology, which I am sure are carried out around the state by other technical colleges. Under the key performance indicators reference is made to student contact hours. In 2009 the institute planned for 855 000 student contact hours, which seems quite incredible to me. It achieved 971 000, about a 113 per cent achievement. In 2012 it planned to achieve approximately 1.134 million student contact hours and it achieved 1.142 million contact hours. That seems an incredible amount of engagement for an institute in meeting key performance indicators and shows me what a vital role it plays in education in our regional centres. When touring that facility I was quite impressed with how it is maintained, how the teachers engage with the students and how they obviously have to be able to deliver flexible learning outcomes for students with a range of ages and backgrounds and to be able to play a vital role within the education sector. That is another reason people can live and be educated in a region without having to necessarily go to Perth. Earlier I talked about secondary school education and touched on school-age education. One great challenge I would like to work with the Minister for Education on is developing more special education programs into regional Western Australia. There are children with a range of special needs but also children with extraordinary ability. I will briefly touch on the gifted and talented education program, which I have spoken about before in this house. We took a policy document to the last election on how we would like to expand the GATE program into regional Western Australia. I will share with members some of the background to that. I might have done it before, but I will touch on it again. There are 16 schools throughout Western Australia that offer gifted and talented education programs, covering a whole range of streams from the academic streams, such as mathematics, science and humanities, to language and arts programs, such as arts media, dance, drama, music, music theatre and visual arts. They are all part of the gifted and talented education stream. There are 16 schools

428 [COUNCIL — Tuesday, 14 May 2013] within Western Australia that offer one or two of those streams in the GATE program. However, until this year, only one of those schools was outside Perth. Of the 16 schools, 15 are in metropolitan Perth and one school in Bunbury just started an academic program this year. It is great that the program has been expanded into Bunbury. It offers only an academic stream and has 13 students at the year 8 level. This information might need to be updated, but at the time I put this information together, 13 students were engaged in that program in Bunbury. There is no reason why this program cannot be expanded into many more regional high schools. I will give members some background to this. Most of the students who would be identified to take up the GATE program come through the Primary Extension and Challenge system in which children are identified in primary school. Statewide, 75 per cent of the students in the PEAC program are in metropolitan Perth and 25 per cent are from regional Western Australia. As a rule of thumb, why are 25 per cent of regional schools not offering the GATE program? I know it is more complex than that because the schools are spread across regional Western Australia and we probably cannot offer a GATE program to each regional school. However, we should be targeting some key schools and regions and targeting a range of the streams that are offered. I can think of some models that would be rolled out very easily. The visual arts or dance programs are about having a coordinator situated in the school. Albany, for example, could have a coordinator in the school who engages with technicians and members of the local community and invites them as guest tutors. That is what occurs in many of the metropolitan schools in the arts streams. It is about a coordinator bringing people from the arts to teach art skills to the children who are enrolled. I would like to work with the minister to implement a program so that our children with a special talent are offered a GATE program in regional Western Australia. On the other side of the coin are children with special needs. Many deaf children, for example, do not get support in many remote schools. I would like to see whether we can work together to implement those sorts of programs in the future. I want to talk about a couple of other things before wrapping up. I have talked about some of the key ingredients for why people might want to live in a regional community, which are the basic needs that we all look for such as employment, health and education services. They are at the top of the list of reasons that people choose to live in certain places. However, there is much more to the reasons that people choose to live in regional towns and even in the city. Many of those reasons are wrapped around the liveability of the community, including the sporting facilities and events or the whole gamut of cultural events that people want to experience and enjoy. Through Eventscorp funding and royalties for regions event funding, the last government did a very good job of making sure that people living in our regional communities have at least some improved access to those programs being offered. I am sure, and would hope, that some of the regional members have taken the opportunity to go to the local community resource centre and watch the podcast of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra or have visited a touring performance that has been funded to take its performance into regional Western Australia. The Minister for Tourism recently announced a whole new suite of regional events. There are 55 of them in total. Usually just a small amount of funding goes to local groups to help run their local event. I am sure that everyone agrees that one of the greatest things in any community is to work with, see, be involved in and enjoy the local events that local groups organise. These events are run by the locals and it is great to support them in what they do for their community. Often they do it because they enjoy doing it but they also do it for the enjoyment of other people in the community. The list of 55 events—I will not go through them all, although I know some members would like me to—are spread from Kununurra to Esperance. They include the Mowanjum Festival at Derby; the Dardanup Bull and Barrel Festival; the Karri Valley Triathlon at Pemberton; the Cable Beach Polo Festival in Broome; and the Bridgetown in the Winter Festival, which is coming up. Members should go to that festival. It is a unique event. All the buildings are lit up with blue lights at night-time and it is quite good. The Truffle Kerfuffle is held in Manjimup, and the list goes on. I encourage members to make the most of those types of events that the government is funding and will continue to fund. They provide really good outcomes for us. I will make some personal reflections and thankyous. I recognise that a number of members will be leaving this place. I acknowledge Hon Matt Benson-Lidholm, Hon Linda Savage, Hon Jon Ford, Hon Ed Dermer, Hon Helen Bullock, Hon Giz Watson, Hon Alison Xamon, Hon Philip Gardiner and Hon Max Trenorden for their contributions to this chamber and the Parliament and people of Western Australia. Thank you for your passion and the abilities you have brought to this place. I hope that I have not missed anyone except Hon Norman Moore, who obviously needs a special thanks for the outstanding years of service he has brought to this place. I think all of Western Australia owes him a great big thankyou and gratitude for the insurmountable service he has given. I have been here for four years and I cannot imagine serving for the length of time Norman has. He is still as passionate and energetic as ever, I am sure. I congratulate and thank Hon Norman Moore for his contribution. I will finish off with a personal reflection. I have been here for around four years, and now we are going to embark on another four years. When this journey began for me in 2008, my boys were 12 years old and about so tall, I reckon! We had to buy them suits that were probably three sizes too large so they would grow into them and we would not have to buy them new ones every week! Four short years later—short for us, but not for them, obviously; that is 25 per cent of their lifetime—they are 16-year-old young men who are now taller than I am and who are undergoing the transition through year 11 to become the men they are going to be. My daughter,

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Ebony, at the start of my journey here, ran off into the sunset and then came back—which was awesome! She bought a house, she bought a business and she got married, and she is still only 22; she is a young girl in a hurry. My other son has spent the last four years that I have been a member doing an apprenticeship in Karratha; he is two months away from finishing his heavy diesel mechanic apprenticeship and he is not even 20 yet, so the world is going to be his oyster in a very short time. I wanted to use those little personal examples to bring home to members in the chamber and anyone else listening that life goes on outside these four walls and that our focus should always be on the life that exists outside these four walls. We should strive to give our kids and the kids of everyone else in the community the greatest opportunities we can, through our work in this place. That is what drives me every day, and I hope it drives you, too. HON SIMON O’BRIEN (South Metropolitan) [5.21 pm]: I support the Address-in-Reply, and in doing so I would like to express my appreciation of the quite outstanding job that His Excellency the Governor continues to do in his role, and the contribution that he, supported so ably by his wife, Tonya, continues to make to the functioning and dignity of the community here in Western Australia. There have been many changes since the last time we sat, before the day on which we received the Governor’s speech; a very long time indeed since late last year, before the general election. Since then, we have had the opportunity to welcome some new members who have filled casual vacancies, and I welcome them again and express my anticipation of working together with them as they embark on their parliamentary careers. Indeed, after 16 years I have come to what will probably be at least the halfway mark of mine! Of course, a number of members are retiring, either through their own volition or perhaps through the vagaries of confronting the electorate, as we all have to at the time of a general election. In due course a number of new members will again fill those vacancies and the whole system will go on and on, as it should. A general election produces many surprising outcomes, and for everyone here there are new challenges to confront, whether they are new duties to perform, or the challenges of moving on. Sometimes it is hard to deal with the forces that impact on us when we are in public life; if one has done anything in politics, one will have suffered wounds and will have acquired scars. We all collect some bruises along the way; I know I have. If a member has not yet collected any of those scars, do not worry: you will! I have found it best, though, to receive the bruises and setbacks with equanimity. I look forward to continuing to work with members in this place, and whether they are moving on or remaining here to acquire some more scars, I wish each and every one of them all the best for the future. I would like to associate myself closely with the sentiments expressed just now by Hon Col Holt when he made some observations about his first term in this place and the changes that had occurred with his children. A lot of us know what that means; when we look through those words, it is not simply the fact that someone who was 12 is now 16. It is all about whether a parent is there all the time, as much as they would like to be, for their child going through those critical years. It is about making sure that you get a balance between the calling that you have as a member of the Parliament of Western Australia, and the absolutely pre-eminently important role of being a parent of a young Western Australian. All of us who have been here for a while know what Hon Col Holt was alluding to; we all get it and we all identify closely with it, I am sure. I want to take members back to an event around four years ago, on 16 May 2009. There are a couple of reasons why I remember and celebrate that date. The first of those is that it was my birthday. Nothing extraordinary about that; I have a birthday around the same time every year, but on this occasion it occurred several months after an event in my life which made it an active question as to whether I was going to have another birthday, so I was very pleased about that. I remember on that Saturday morning going through the ritual of sitting down with my wife, reading the paper, having a coffee and enjoying the Saturday morning swap of the news and planning the day, at a time when others were up a lot earlier and were a lot busier, because there was an election on that day. But for once, I did not have to be up before sparrow’s, working all hours on an election, because this was a referendum. The referendum was about daylight saving, so the second reason I am very, very pleased to remember Saturday, 16 May 2009 is that yet again, Western Australians overwhelmingly rejected the daylight saving question that had been put to them. The third reason I liked 16 May 2009 is that there was another electoral event that day—a by-election, in my region, but my party did not have a candidate. So again, I was enjoying the morning paper. The by-election was held in a place members might have heard of: Fremantle. Without any effort on my part at all—I was sitting at home, reading the paper—the Labor Party was, for once, defeated in the state seat of Fremantle. We did not have to lift a finger. That is another reason why I particularly enjoyed Saturday, 16 May 2009. Just as an aside, it is interesting that, up until that day, in all previous elections that I am aware of, the ALP would typically put up some union hack as its candidate and would win the seat. On this occasion in 2009 it put up someone who was a moderate, well-respected local businessman in Fremantle with a well-established family and an Italian surname, and he lost it for the Labor Party for the first time. Subsequently, at the recent election, it

430 [COUNCIL — Tuesday, 14 May 2013] put up another union hack and won back the seat. That gives me cause for concern. Perhaps Martin Whitely and Alannah MacTiernan do not have it right at all; maybe there is salvation for the ALP in its union roots. Fremantle is a theme that I want to talk about in my remarks tonight. It is a theme that I want to return to as I canvass government activity and success in a number of different areas. In doing that, I will go back to about 1970, when, as a young child, I moved with my family to Fremantle from north of the river and became a south of the river boy through and through—a Fremantle boy through and through. It had always been exciting to go to Fremantle to look at the port or to see some of the other things that were a bit different about this particular suburb, because it certainly was different. It was different from Claremont; it was different from Perth itself—or town as we used to call it. It also had some new attractions to go with the old. It had a thing called a Coles New World supermarket, emphasised by the fact that there was a really pathetic three-dimensional rocket ship stuck up near the Coles New World sign on the front of the building. It was a very good and innovative supermarket; it was a sign of changing times. There was also, to my mother’s delight, a brand-new Myer emporium—a huge brand-spanking new square building, bringing civilisation to the west. It even had a Harrods or a Selfridges look- alike food hall at one of the entrances to the store. That Coles New World has been replaced by other shopping options. I think it dropped the “New World” some time ago, although Coles still has supermarkets here and there. The Myer food hall is long gone—that was, apparently, a failed experiment—and, sadly, Myer itself has packed up and left. That is a significant change for Fremantle. In a world of change, that is a significant thing for a town such as Fremantle. What does it really mean? I hear occasionally from people sentiments such as “Freo is dying. All the shops are closing.” Betts and Betts went the other day. That is something I have heard; I do not know whether Betts and Betts has gone, but I have heard that Betts and Betts has sold up. Hon Liz Behjat: It’s just Betts now. Hon SIMON O’BRIEN: It has dropped a Betts. It is halfway gone if it is already just Betts, as my friend and colleague tells me! There is not even a Betts now, apparently, in Fremantle; it has gone. I am told that there is a lot of other retail space in Fremantle. I hear people say—I do not like to hear this—things such as “I don’t go into Fremantle anymore to shop because it’s not safe.” I can tell members from virtually a lifetime’s experience that that is probably not the case; in fact, if anything, it is probably safer now than it might have been when I was a child. But it does show that people have either suffered, or observed others suffering, some incident, perhaps an isolated incident, which of course has a marked effect on them—something caused through antisocial behaviour or an unfortunate crime committed against them. Just yesterday at my request I had a meeting with the Mayor of Fremantle, Dr Brad Pettitt. I have a lot of time for Mayor Pettitt. Even though he is a greenie and a bit different, I have a lot of time for Mayor Pettitt and I support him in what he is trying to do. I will tell members about some of the things he is trying to do. We were joined, at my request, by Tim Milsom, who is the CEO of the Fremantle Chamber of Commerce. I asked to meet those gentlemen because I wanted to pursue something that we have all been working on for some while, and that is how we set the right course for Fremantle and, more to the point, how a parliamentary member with the best interests of the place at heart, who associates closely with it, has personal links to the place and has suddenly found that he has a bit of spare time on his hands, can contribute in a constructive way to ensure that Fremantle transitions to the place that it needs to be as we move through the twenty-first century. Make no mistake about it; Fremantle is a place that is ripe for redevelopment now. It is overdue for it. It is crying out for it, and it is going to get it. I just want to make sure that it does not happen as some sort of hotchpotch, whereby buildings and other infrastructure are put in place that will be perhaps in the wrong place for the next 60 or 100 years. That is why I want to work closely with other community leaders in seeing the way forward for Fremantle. Let us look at where Fremantle is now. I am told that when Mayor Brad Pettitt was born in 1972, the place had about 31 000 or 32 000 people. During the last decade the population declined somewhat to around 26 000, but now it has picked up and, by my estimate, it would have cracked 30 000 now, observing that it was nearly 30 000 in the figures published in 2011. We are just up to where we were 40 years ago. Does that mean that the place has not really changed much? No. On the contrary, it has changed quite dramatically. How has it changed? The make-up of the workforce that inhabits the area and the demographics of the city have, of course, evolved over the years. I do not propose to give a demographic breakdown, but the information is surveyed on an annual basis. We can see that there are changes occurring. The sorts of changes that have occurred over the years have been in response to a range of stimuli, such as the changes in practice in moving maritime freight. A late nineteenth century river-mouth port such as Fremantle used to rely on a lot of manual labour living locally or, indeed, adjacent to the port. That labour would be required to manipulate a whole lot of loose cargo at ship side onto nearby rolling stock or into local warehouses. None of that happens now, of course. Since containerisation, most stuffing and unstuffing of containers occurs in places well removed from the immediate wharf site; indeed, that is the whole purpose of containerisation. We have seen a massive change in what has happened with the evolution of maritime trade, but there have been other changes as well. Fremantle, like every other place, is not immune to experiencing change, but perhaps because of its location and its role, it is a little different and a little special.

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The other thing that has happened lately is that about 20 000 metres of retail space have disappeared. So in addition to space that is standing idle because landlords cannot get tenants who are prepared to pay some of the outrageous leasing costs that are being sought for some of the commercial retail sites in Fremantle at the moment, other tenants have upped stumps and have moved out. I have mentioned Myer. A substantial number of square metres was involved in that building. But others have moved out too. The Mayor of Fremantle was bemoaning the fact that if he wants to buy any form of boxed goods, as he calls them, he has to go out of Fremantle to get them. I remember not only as a child who first moved to Fremantle with a Coles New World and Myer-struck mother in tow, but as a young married man living locally, that if people who lived out of the CBD needed to buy something substantial, such as a new fridge for their new marital home—I still have that same fridge — Hon Alyssa Hayden interjected. Hon SIMON O’BRIEN: It has seen some action over the years, too. If people needed some furniture, or if they needed some other large bulky goods or electrical goods and so on, what they did was go into Fremantle. That was the term we used—“I’m going into Fremantle”—and everyone understood. That is what people did. People do not go to Fremantle now if they need those sorts of goods, because they cannot get them in Fremantle. There used to be a big Parry’s store in Fremantle—a really big one. That has gone—it has long gone. Myer I have mentioned a couple of times. There are any number of stores that have gone. Why is that happening? What are the forces? The fact of the matter is that as the time has progressed, other competitors have opened up that are just as handy to people in terms of access and that may in some cases seem to be a bit more shopper friendly— places like Garden City in Booragoon, which is now a mega shopping complex, and places like the South Street– Stock Road precinct in O’Connor, where there are massive emporiums selling all manner of what Mayor Pettitt would call boxed goods. Hon Alyssa Hayden: Bulky goods. Hon SIMON O’BRIEN: Yes, bulky goods—electrical items, furniture and what not. So there is a lot of competition there. Fremantle has to seriously consider, after considerably more than a century of pre-eminence locally as a retail service centre, what role it will play in the future and what levels of retail will be required to enable it to do all the things that it needs to do as a community to attract and retain a population that will of itself sustain an ongoing viable commercial retail presence. I want to make sure that that does happen, and that is why I will be working with the council and the chamber, and other parties, to make sure that we achieve that. The council of the City of Fremantle has released a number of strategic plans and economic development strategies and so on. One of its goals is to set a target of 1 500 additional dwellings in the central city area of Fremantle. I am not talking about the whole municipality. I am talking about the central area of Fremantle. Another of its goals is to provide about 70 000 square metres of A-grade commercial office space, and about 20 000 square metres of additional retail floor space. Members will recall that I mentioned that there has been a significant loss of retail space in the Fremantle CBD in recent years. In addition, the Fremantle council is looking to encourage a range of industry sectors, building on existing attributes, assets and skills. That will include arts and culture. Fremantle has some issues to work through there. There is a controversy in Fremantle about the provision of leases for artists—commercial working artists—in the J Shed precinct and whether they will be allowed to continue to operate in that environment or whether they will be forced out. In the larger scheme of things, some might see that controversy as a sideshow. But I see it as a very important matter, and I will be pursuing that matter, perhaps even publicly, in due course. That just shows us the challenges that a city facing redevelopment has to come to grips with. Of course Fremantle is already seen as a leader with its arts centre. The Fremantle Arts Centre near Hampton Road, near the corner of Skinner and Tuckfield Streets, is very famous and very well established. There are other arts centres throughout Fremantle as well. There is an important role for government to play here. I know that it was very warmly welcomed when I, as the then Minister for Finance, announced that the government would be relocating the entire headquarters of the Department of Housing to Fremantle in due course as one way of assisting in stimulating the resurgence of this particular centre. Clearly, there is a role for the maritime sector to play. There is also a role for new investments in education. I was speaking with the Minister for Education just today about some initiatives in Fremantle that I look forward to pursuing with him and discussing more fully after this debate. But there are also questions about property development, and about the future of tourism in Fremantle. Fremantle is now a different place from what it once was. If we want to keep the things that make Freo Freo and that make it valuable and that make people want to live there, and if we want Fremantle to be different—as it should be—from some of the other new suburbs, which just seem to be mass produced off a production line, all to a very similar formula, we need to acknowledge that Fremantle has always been different and it has different potentials. I have seen in the course of my life a change in mood from where everyone went into Fremantle during the day to shop and to hang out and to walk over what was then called High Street. It is now called High Street Mall. There were so many

432 [COUNCIL — Tuesday, 14 May 2013] pedestrians in the middle of the road when it was High Street that they gave up on traffic in the end and just paved it over. I remember those days when everyone went to Fremantle. Schoolkids used to hang out in Fremantle on their way home from school. But no-one went into Fremantle after dark, because it was a bit rough. Now of course the trouble is that not enough people are going into Fremantle during the day. But at night, the whole thing has totally changed. If members have not been to Fremantle of an evening—any evening of the week—lately, they should go and have a look at the strip and at the vibrant nightlife, the restaurants, the bars and the cafes. Yes, Fremantle is in a state of evolution, and it is going to continue to evolve. We need to support Fremantle to make sure that the special attributes of Fremantle are retained and built upon. Yesterday, I deliberately picked a time of 12 o’clock for a light lunch with his worship, the Mayor of Fremantle. He said, “I’ll put on some sandwiches.” I thought, “Fair enough.” Something rather interesting happened. It was interesting because I think somewhere in the civic chamber there might have been a miscommunication as to what sort of meeting or, more to the point, what size meeting would be held. There were only three of us on deck in the event. Maybe the girl at the office who sent the order over to Culley’s Tea Rooms—another famous Freo institution in High Street—got the size of the meeting wrong. It was a bit like that scene out of Father Ted when Mrs Doyle says, “I’ve prepared sandwiches, Father”, and comes out with a platter that is piled up so big! We had a large number of sandwiches. I think the entire staff of the municipality of Fremantle probably ate well that afternoon! We decided to have our sandwiches out on the first-floor balcony by the committee rooms. While we were doing that, we heard a disturbance downstairs. There are some public toilets in St John’s Square at the back of the library, opposite the church. It is quite a thoroughfare. The mayor apologised and said, “We get this every single day”, and off he went. Next thing you know, Mr Milsom and I were sitting there mid-sandwich and we heard the mayor remonstrating with some antisocial elements downstairs. This is late morning on a Monday, if you don’t mind. Hon Jim Chown: It wasn’t a Greens protest, was it? Hon SIMON O’BRIEN: It was close. It was better organised than that! The mayor, to his credit, showing civic concern and genuine leadership, went down to confront these people, probably not for the first time. He said, “It is not on that you are here blocking the passageway. Families need to walk past and you’re sitting here getting on the grog and getting argumentative. That is not the sort of thing we want here. Move along and behave yourselves because otherwise you’re letting Fremantle down.” I thought it took a lot of guts to do that. They actually said, “Yes, yes; we’ll move on.” He came back. In due course we heard the sound of raised voices, and then ultimately the sound of a siren. Why did it have to get to the stage where someone got hurt, when everyone knows that is what happens every day of the week in St John’s Square with the same offenders? Everyone knew what was going to happen. Where were the police? We now have available prohibited behaviour orders. They have already been used—I believe about 15—including one in Fremantle, but not to one of the people involved here. Why are those orders not being employed? Where were the police before something happened, when everyone knew something was going to happen? I have spoken with the honourable Minister for Police about this. She is very receptive, as she is with all members, to reports and concerns being expressed about this. We are going to see what can be done. There have been other police operations in Fremantle. If, in a CBD environment, we cannot get an appropriate climate, in broad daylight, under the mayor’s nose, literally, where people are safe to sit and enjoy the sunshine or a coffee in St John’s Square, between the church and the town hall, then we are going to have a problem. That is why I have spoken to the Minister for Police, and I indicated that I will be speaking to her again. This city needs some support in this area. From what I can see, it is not getting it. Okay, I am not going to only use that as a point of criticism. The reason I raise it is to say this is recognised and I want to make sure we make arrangements to fix the problem. It cannot be that hard to intervene, if we have people behaving in this sort of antisocial fashion almost by clockwork in the same location every day. Yes, I know it is a CBD area. Yes, I know it has a range of services that attract people who might have all sorts of issues. Yes, there are courts just around the corner. Yes, there are the regional offices of a number of service agencies, state and federal. Yes, I know there are places that attract some people with a range of issues, because they hand out free food and other support mechanisms. But given that that is the case, all that infrastructure needs to be supported by a social infrastructure that also maintains the peace and the dignity of the locality. Another thing needed is the resolve to ensure this great city of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries becomes a stronger city, an evolved city, in the twenty-first century. I do not want to hear people say, “We don’t go to Fremantle in broad daylight because we don’t think it’s safe.” I do not want to hear any of my constituents say that, because it should not be the case. By and large, it is not the case, but perceptions are important and if you are the person who gets accosted by some drunken antisocial element outside the public toilets in the square, it will have a disproportionate effect on you. It might encourage you to make sure you go somewhere else in future. I will talk with the police minister again. I have already said that I am talking to the Minister for Education. He has been very receptive. I have mentioned that the housing area needs some support in Fremantle, and it will get it. Or, if not, I will want to know why. We need to do a range of other things to identify the factors

[COUNCIL — Tuesday, 14 May 2013] 433 that militate against the successful renewal of Fremantle. I have said before that Fremantle is ripe for renewal— there is no mistake about that—but any redevelopment has to be in sync with the bigger picture. That is no reference to any other advertising program or information program. There is no point doing a whole lot of redevelopments in isolation, and there are a lot of things happening in Fremantle at the moment. I think the secret to all that is closer engagement with the state government and, to some extent, the federal government— certainly with the state government. I will talk with a range of ministers because there is a range of consultative mechanisms already in place between different government agencies and the local council and businesses and so on. I do not think they are necessarily achieving what they need to achieve. I want to ensure that they do. As I said earlier in my remarks, I do not think we have the option of having a disjointed redevelopment that does not achieve its potential and lets us down for the next generation or two. We have to get it right. That is why I will be talking directly to ministers who, like that person the mayor had to speak to, are at risk potentially of letting Fremantle down. I am not going to stand for that. Before I conclude, I would like to raise a couple of other matters in reference to some retiring members of this house. In order to facilitate that and some other business that needs to be conducted today, at this point I seek the leave of the house to continue my remarks at a later stage of this day’s sitting. [Leave granted for the member’s speech to be continued at a later stage of the sitting.] Sitting suspended from 6.00 to 7.30 pm HON PHILIP GARDINER (Agricultural) [7.30 pm]: I am privileged to stand to speak in reply to the Address-in-Reply. In doing so, I thank each of you for joining me in the chamber tonight. I do not expect you all to stay, but thank you for being here at the beginning. I would like to cover a few things over the four years in which I have been involved in this chamber. I will talk a little bit about the quality of the experience, I will talk about the political aspirations with which I came, and I will go through some of the things I talked about in my inaugural address. I will talk about the work we did on the estimates committee, and then refer to Max, who, unfortunately, is not here, because he says that he has gone beyond that now. But I would like to refer to some of the things that Max has done. I will talk a little bit about agriculture—in fact, that is probably going to be the main part of the substance of what I will say tonight—and then talk about the suitability of a career in politics and what it requires, some of the good things and maybe the unattractive things, some improvements to the system and conclusion. That is why I am not suggesting that you need to stay the whole way. Four years of being in this chamber is really what I feel is a service to the people in our electorates, which we all do. Having been removed from it, you suddenly realise that it is just like a large family, and every member is really a part of your family. The pressure that was released upon not being re-elected was actually quite huge. It is a privilege to serve the people in that regard, because one takes it on personally, considers it and tries to act in the best interests. In the course of the four years, I have endeavoured to cover issues without any sense of prejudice, without any sense of agenda or without any sense of power ambition. I think I can live with myself for achieving that basic start. But it is about trying to add more quality to our system if we can so that we try to get the best outcomes we possibly can, which is something towards which I have worked. In the political system, it should not be all about doing things so that we can get a job as part of the system. That is one of the things that has always concerned me. It is an adversarial system, as is our court system. It is really our business. We talk about competition to get the best results. It is all adversarial, yet, really, often the best conclusions come around when we work with our so- called adversary rather than always trying to fight. I have found that when I have done that and when I have been involved with others in doing that, the quality of the outcomes is always better, especially from me, because I always find what I think can be improved. In politics there is an issue of loyalty. I have always felt that I am loyal, but I am never blindly loyal, and that is the difference. It is when blind loyalty takes over that the whole system falls to a reduced level, because we do not get the fresh ideas, the fresh exchange and the contest of ideas so that we can pull out the best solution. It is something I have believed in all my life: blind loyalty is a failing, not a quality. Over the course of the four years—I did count them up, I am afraid—I have delivered 115 speeches across a wide range, be it estimates and revenue and expenditure, water catchments, environment and conservation issues, Loan Bills, genetically modified crops et cetera or criminal law amendments for out-of-control gatherings, rail freight and so on. But all that speaking in the house here really does is put it on record, and the record does not necessarily get enactment; in fact, it probably has a marginal contribution towards getting enactment. So, maybe in the four years I have wasted a lot of time feeling the desire to just address the issue to try to see whether we can make a contribution towards it—it was not to try to get any sense of kudos or anything like that—but I am not sure that it achieved a great deal, I am afraid. Over those four years, when we have achieved things, it has been with two of my staff—that is all I have—who are just outstanding and who have contributed in an enormous way to assist me to address the various issues that came through our door. As we know, whatever comes through our door is the agenda—that is the business—and

434 [COUNCIL — Tuesday, 14 May 2013] we address it. But without those two close colleagues and friends who have worked with me on these issues, we would never have achieved what I think was quite a significant achievement in the four years that I have been here. It has been from tier 3 rail to finding a contract in the library that people, either in government or in the private sector, could not find, until Brian Christie, my research officer, found it. This document was meant to have been made in 1966, but it was not in the folder with the 1966 documents; it was in the folder when it finally got to 1969, I think it was. But no-one else could find it. So, forensically, that is exciting, and I found that to be exciting, because that helped us to bring something to the table—not that it was appreciated; it certainly was not appreciated, because the minister to whom I talked about it said, “The government is not going to honour this contract”, when it was a contract that was signed, stamped and everything else, but I will come to that later. Phil Bellamy, my electorate officer, worked on a whole host of issues whereby I could delegate him to do a lot of the things that I did not make the time to do. He was able to address them in a way that gave him scope to do so and was consistent with the values which I had and which got results—not all the results we might have achieved. One of them was about the land clearing issue. He took on case study after case study—I think about 10 of them—to try to demonstrate to the Department of Environment and Conservation that we could deal with a land clearing conflict between DEC and the farmer, who should have the same agenda and the same outlook, and they do, but there was a massive conflict because of the way that had been dealt with historically. He got conclusions that had hitherto not been reached. Upon leaving, we have those conclusions, and I hope others will be able to take advantage of what has been achieved from that. The political aspirations I came with were zero. I came into politics in only 2007 when I was in a contest against Wilson Tuckey for the seat of O’Connor in the federal election. That was because I was angry about a number of the issues that Mr Howard had in the federal Parliament, and that included the climate change issue and the national broadband network—I have forgotten what they were now, but I was angry enough to put eight months into campaigning against Tuckey, with the help of some of my former National Party colleagues. But we failed, even though we got the biggest positive swing in an election that Labor won. As a conservative party we got, I think, the biggest or second-biggest swing. That was interesting. I then went back farming until Brendon Grylls said, “Look, we’re looking for someone to stand second on the parliamentary ticket for the upper house. Would you mind standing just in case we get the balance of power”, not thinking that that would ever happen. I therefore did a bit of work for the state election in 2008, but it was really carried by that great advertising campaign the Nationals had of 11 and 48—11 candidates for the lower house in regional areas and 48 in the city. In my view, that was the key component which took the Nationals up. It was then complemented and supported by the idea of the royalties for regions scheme. Royalties for regions was not a fresh idea. I have since learnt that someone wrote a letter to The West Australian, who worked in Max Trenorden’s office, said that the royalties for regions idea was about at the time Max Trenorden was around. It is therefore not a new idea, but the timing was right for it. If anyone wants to dispute that, they can talk to me later. Really, I had no particular aspiration; I never have in any job I have had. Whatever has happened has just happened. This was just a measure of the quality of the work. In my inaugural address I talked about a number of issues. One was about the importance of this chamber as a house of review. I must say that under the leadership of Hon Norman Moore I felt that this was a genuine house of review, as much as we could have it in an adversarial way. I took that feeling even more into the committee stage. I was grateful to be appointed to the Standing Committee on Estimates and Financial Operations, which I felt was a committee established, like all committees, to hold the executive accountable. I did not care whether it was Liberal, Labor, Greens or whatever it might be; I felt that was our task. I felt that it was not our task to defend ministers or to be rude or critical of them for the sake of the politics. That was not the point. The point was just to make sure that the best ideas got up and the best solutions could be carried out, as far as one could do that in a committee sense. I was also fortunate on that committee to have an outstanding chair in Hon Giz Watson and some good members. Hon Ken Travers and Hon Ljiljanna Ravlich were forensic in the way they sought answers to questions. Hon Liz Behjat came in and asked a crucial question about Ashton Foley’s résumé. When she asked that question, no-one responded, except for me. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up because it was so complete and thorough and I thought: is this for real? Nonetheless, one should never lose the point of that inquiry, which I will also come back to later. One of the other points of my inaugural speech was the social infrastructure issue. I was of a very strong view on that because of a personal experience I had when doorknocking in Geraldton. Geraldton has deep social issues; I noted that even when I was doorknocking there at this last election. A suburb called Spalding has a road off which there are a couple of other roads. I was told not to go down there because it was too dangerous. That is just the thing; I needed to go down there, so I went down there. In that road there were Aboriginals with no sense of direction. It was a very sad place for anyone to live, except that down at the far end there was a house with a good, tidy garden. I knocked on the door and introduced myself to the occupants. We talked a little and the husband said, “There are drugs down the road” and he pointed to where the drugs were. Then his wife said, “Look, how about housing?” Continuing, she said, “Our house value has dropped from about $350 000 to about

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$270 000 over two or three years, mainly because the housing commission owns just about every other house in this little precinct.” In that little precinct there was total dysfunction. I therefore thought: why should it be that the housing commission should be causing the depreciation in value of someone’s private home by their own actions? I therefore met people at the housing commission and had a couple of goes talking to them, but they said, “No, this really is for the City of Geraldton.” I went to the City of Geraldton and spoke to people there. They were pretty keen to hear about it. They knew broadly about the status of it, so I wrote a letter to the City of Geraldton. The trouble is the reply came back from the CEO, though I spoke to him by telephone later, trying to find ways of not attacking it directly, and he suggested I get the people to write to make a case for why it is so bad. I have not been able to do that yet. It is just that the difficulty in all of that is we have to have that perseverance to keep on going to get a solution, no matter how easy it is for anyone to lift a telephone and talk. I can blame myself for not making that final telephone call, but it is just that social dysfunction in Geraldton is deep. I am told now it is even deeper in Mullewa—not that I have been there—as a result of the merger of two shires. I will also come to that later because I do not think it is wise for local government shires to merge in any sense, especially when it comes to dealing with social infrastructure. The other area I spoke about was genetically modified organisms. At that stage, I said I was happy for there to be GMOs as long as we had the measures to ensure that the resistance to glyphosate was not increased. I spoke to our minister and I spoke to people in the industry about the risks of increased resistance to glyphosate because of the increased application of glyphosate that would take place with farmers sowing GM canola. The whole idea of GMO is that glyphosate allows farmers to go into their canola crops and get the weeds out. They use glyphosate more dominantly, but that is the only knockdown chemical we have. We do not have any fallback position. It disturbed me more that the most highly respected person on herbicide resistance, a chap called Professor Stephen Powles, wrote a letter in support of GMO. That is fine, but he did not mention that there was a difficulty with continued use of a potential increase in resistance to glyphosate. I had meetings with him and so on, but I could not get any real support to strengthen the way for Monsanto to ensure that GMO was used so as not to increase glyphosate resistance. Monsanto had a schedule that farmers had to fill out and so on but it needed to be strengthened; you could have driven a cart through it! Do members think I could get any support for that? That was a point in my inaugural address on which I still failed. The final thing is global warming. I have a very strong view on global warming. The reason I am strong on it is that the science is clear to me that carbon dioxide is increasing, and it is clear to me that carbon dioxide leads to a warming of the atmosphere. It is not the only aspect though. That is where people make a mistake. It is only one aspect; it is probably a third of the influence. There are all sorts of other things that conflict from time to time to cause the changing climate or changing temperature. However, in my view, to take the risk and ignore it is foolish of mankind, and we are part of mankind. All we have to do commercially is make sure we can adapt and roll with the way the climate unfolds. That is going to be very difficult to predict, because it is a very complex area. But to ignore the risk and not do enough is foolishness on our part. That is why I feel so very strongly and why I say to people who say it is rubbish: please consider the risk you are taking. When I look at those four things in my inaugural speech, I think that I might have assisted with the house of review but on the rest I have failed, I am afraid. I mean that I have tried to make a contribution but in terms of moving things forward in a meaningful way, I may have failed. Let me come to one of the house of review things that the estimates committee did well. I will not spend long on this. I found that we could achieve much more in that committee, with Hon Giz Watson, Hon Ken Travers, Hon Ljiljanna Ravlich and Hon Liz Behjat, than in many other parts of government. That was because I found that public servants are, basically, easy to deal with. When they were given free rein, they acted, in my view, responsibly—in the interests of their department and in the interests of finding out things and, mostly, transparently, but not always. It is easy to identify when people are trying to hide things and it is easy then to know what to watch out for. I found that experience on the committee very, very useful. We made some changes to the district high school issue and we certainly made changes to the Peel Health Campus issue, but there is a big change that is yet to see the light of day. For those of us who are continuing here, we must consider what that report states about the profits that were being extracted from that hospital on its turnover. Of its $100 million turnover, $13-odd million was being taken out, plus a dividend. That is a very big amount to extract. That is all based on charges that the private sector can charge as set by the Department of Health. There must be a lot of excess costs in the government hospital system that should not be there. I know in health—I have just been through some of this—we have to be very careful: if we are cutting costs, are we cutting care? That is the trade- off all the time. A lot of work needs to be done in that area to ensure that our health system is operating in a cost- effective way, because if it is not, it will drag us all down in the long haul and we will not have it because it will have become too expensive. This morning’s paper states that a big percentage—I have forgotten the percentage; it might even be 16 per cent—of total federal government expenditure is spent on health. We have to be careful that we do not allow it to continue to get out of hand. I found being on that committee a very pleasurable experience and we made some differences through offering and suggesting ideas to the bureaucracy.

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Let me talk a bit about Hon Max Trenorden. He said he is not here because he has not been re-elected and he has finished. He is not resentful in any manner or form. I wanted to say something about Max and I have looked to try to find out what information I could get on what he has done. He has told me a few of the things he has done, but nothing I have really satisfactorily describes what he has achieved. He is a chap who was born in 1948. His partner between his two marriages had a tragic accident. He was an insurance agent and he was very involved with the Northam community, as a town council member and an Avon Community Development Foundation member. When he served as a member of the Legislative Assembly from 1996 to 2008, he was shadow minister for a number of different portfolios, but he was never a minister. He has been on many standing committees and I think he was a chair of an international standing committee. He mentioned just in passing that the Scandinavian countries that attended that meeting in South-East Asia thought he did a great job. He said he did not want to come here and talk about his own job. That would be hard for him to do and I can totally understand that. I have very much enjoyed sharing a room with him and seeing his perception of the issues that we tackled, which were quite broad issues. They were beyond where we were with royalties for regions and we tried to make a difference in the bigger picture. Let me come to the main part of what I would like to talk about, which is agriculture. I am sorry to say that I regret what has happened in agriculture, in part under my watch. I was not in control, but agriculture in Western Australia has deteriorated in its financial and emotional resilience. I happened to serve with Monty House when he was Minister for Primary Industry. I was a member of some of his committees and chair of the Wool Strategy Group in those days. I thought that his model of having industry member committees in the department arranged by product was very effective. It makes us understand how difficult it is to change some of those things. With wool we went to India; we understood the importance of developing a relationship with a set of buyers from one country. We eliminated the differential for wool prices between the eastern states and Western Australia. The eastern states used to always talk down our wool, but we went to India and sent wool lots across to India for processing. They proved that in every way our wool processed the same as that of the eastern states. As Hon Ken Baston would know, that led to the elimination of that differential from which Western Australia had suffered for years. The great vision we had then was to export a lot of wool to India. We had wool marketing groups around the state, particularly around the south-western part of the state. We got them all together. The arguments took place and positions were taken; they did not want to share information. In the end, we could not get anything working. I could blame myself partly for that because I did not put the time into it. We have to work these things through with the individual relationships, and maybe I did not have the time to give to that. But when it all fell apart on the Western Australian end, India was fine. It wanted our wool and shipments to go over there. I decided that I would demonstrate that we could do it by exporting our own wool across to India, which was very, very satisfactory. We have to build relationships with these people. It took us three years before we got a premium for our clip, but the premium we got for the clip represented the fact that our wool processed better, apparently, than any other wool they had. But we could not go and ask them for the results. They would process each clip individually and give us the results. Once we saw the results and they said how good it was, we could not say, “Listen; now give me another 50c a kilo.” After three years, I said, “We are having a difficult time here. Can we negotiate a price around this level?”, and we did. This state needs to build relationships of that kind. We should have already been building those relationships with Indonesia in particular, which is our big grain and live cattle market, and the Middle East, which is another market for grain as well as live sheep. For those who do not like live exports, that is fine, but they are differentiated markets. For any farmer, to have a differentiated market is the panacea for their product. It is so hard to get in agriculture. When we have it, we need to treasure it and nurture it so that we do not lose it. From Western Australia’s point of view, we need to establish government-to-government relationships so that when any issue comes out of whatever product in an importing country, we get a call at the government level so that we can then work with the private sector on what to do about it. The worst thing is to have shocks, as we have seen. We can reduce a lot of that shock by ensuring that we have visits to these countries three or four times a year. It does not have to be the minister; it can be someone delegated who can understand interpersonal relationships and someone who is not always finding things out, because if we are doing that, we are wasting our time. We have to have a relationship. That is what international trade is all about. I know it firsthand from working with India and when we were marketing wheat to Egypt, of which I was part, as well with the Australian Wheat Board. Relationships are critical, but we need to regard it as a Western Australian market, because that is what it is, and manage it. I have also found largely in this chamber and with the people I have been talking to over four years that agriculture is the least well understood of almost any industry. I assumed with the Nationals it would be well understood, but when I came in to work this morning there was only one muddy car in the parking lot and that was mine. That does not mean to say I am the only farmer, but it reflects the fact that a lot of people talk about how they farm or how they are connected to land and all this kind of stuff. Are they writing the cheques now? Are they doing the management accounts now? Those are the people we need to have. We have Hon Nigel

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Hallett in this place who still does that. I do not know about Hon Brian Ellis; he might do that too. They are the kind of people we need to have to understand agriculture, to breathe it and feel it. I know a lot of people say that a person does not need to be that close to agriculture, but I am coming to the conclusion that maybe a person has to be, because I find it so weakly understood. That is why we have had great difficulty, not just in Western Australia, but in Australia, in coming to terms with developing a strategy for agriculture. Before I start with some of the premises we have about agriculture, we should all be aware—I used the word “catastrophe” during the course of January or February this year—that there is a catastrophe out there; not because we are losing production—production is the easy thing to increase—but because of the margin and the profitability of agriculture. Why do we think that young people are not coming into agriculture in the way they should be? It is because they cannot see a future in it. Even when I was being brought up in Moora, I realised that it was best for a person to go outside of agriculture to build their net worth, if they could, before they came back to it. Jenny and I had two boys. We did not encourage them to stay on the farm. They loved it but we did not encourage them to stay on there because we felt it was better for them to build their net worth outside first and then to come back if they wanted to. A lot of people think the same way. We need to have a vibrant agriculture that will attract those young people back so they can grow their industry, and that is happening extremely rarely at the current time. I go to some of the premises we have about agriculture. Firstly, we have this view that agriculture should be economic rationalist. Of all the industries we have, what is the most economic rationalist of them all? It is probably agriculture. We do not want to take subsidies; we are too macho for that. The feeling of some farmers is that they will almost go to their deaths without taking a subsidy. We have to wake up though. Sometime we have to wake up because nearly all the other countries in the world—or maybe all; I have not checked, to be quite honest—have got some form of serious subsidy. We have four per cent of our gross farm income being contributed by government—four per cent, remember that number. What do members think that the rate of subsidy in the United States is? It is about 27 per cent or 28 per cent. What do members think Europe’s is? It is 37 per cent or 38 per cent. Is that a level playing field? We say we do not want people being subsidised if they bring food into Australia, because we get cheap oranges from California and so on, but it makes no difference where the market is. If we export wheat to Egypt and the US is subsidised at 26 per cent, it is the same difference; we will not get our wheat in there. So how do those who are economic rationalists expect us to compete? We all heard through those who went to Corrigin the example of people from different walks of life in the community, the machinery dealer, the agronomist, the farmer, the IGA storekeeper—people in the country are “resilienced out”. Resilience is what we always attribute to farmers in Western Australia and probably in Australia. It is one of those great things. Our tradition is, “Yes, we can tough it out. We are strong on the land”, and all that kind of stuff. Do not forget there are women there as well, and women often do not have the same strength as men to handle the hardships that take place. They often see sense and say, “Darling, get out of this. This is not going to work.” We must not focus on our policy, which is the only policy we have had for the past three or four years, of having foreign investors coming in to take the family farmers out. That has been our only real policy. We need to look at what is damaging the family farm businesses. Do not forget that economies of scale are not endless in any form of farming; they are not there. They go so far and then stop and decline. Therefore, do not think that those people who finally come in will stay there forever. There is also the land care issue. Do members think these people will care for the land in the same way as a family farmer? They only will if the family farmer has no money to do it and mostly out there right now, they do not. Land care in a way binds the farmer to his land because he put so much effort into the land care, the weed control, the fencing, the water management or the rocks or whatever it might be, that to leave the farm is one of those very difficult things. It is like the severing of a relationship. That is one of the difficulties we have, but the family farmers are the ones who do the land care. I do not have any confidence in the corporate farmers doing it in the same way. I have just talked about economic rationalism. I think we have to seriously question it and wake up to ourselves about whether that is the right philosophy to run in agriculture when it is not the case almost anywhere else in the world and certainly not in other industries, including mining. Then there are the risks of agriculture. Why should agriculture get any special consideration anyway? It is just another industry. What differentiates agriculture? The differentiation point for me is the question of which other industries are directly affected by the weather and the climate. Are there any others? I do not think any other industry is directly affected by the weather. They are indirectly affected. I was involved with selling barbecues and heaters. If there was a warm summer that finished in May or June, the heating season, when the margins were quite big, was constrained. If the cold extended through spring into early summer, the barbecue season could not take off. They are indirect effects that we saw through the sales line. But the direct effect of the weather is only felt by agriculture. If we assume that is the case for the minute unless we can think of some other industry, that is the big risk for agriculture. We always say we hope it will rain or we hope the frost does not happen or something like that. Whenever we use the word “hope” do we know what it means? It means it is totally outside our control. What can we do to give us some control over the weather? That is why I am so keen on climate risk mitigation insurance, along with Hon Nigel Hallett and Hon Max Trenorden. I have been

438 [COUNCIL — Tuesday, 14 May 2013] working on this since 2001, when I think I had my first meeting with National Australia Bank, and then other banks. I have been following it through, and I do not believe that it is not the right strategic agricultural solution for Australia and, in particular, Western Australia. What about the other risks, including the Australian dollar? We cannot do much about that, but at least that is manmade—or man or woman made; it is humanly made. The market sets it and we have to manage our way around it. We can either sell forward or buy forward to try to manage our risk; but that is something we have to accept. That is a macroeconomic policy of which we are all aware, as is the Reserve Bank. It is not related only to interest rates, as we all know, but they may help a little. The same can be said about prices. Basically, the price for grain is an international price and we can trade it as well; therefore, we can manage our own price risk, more or less. However, if we do not manage our weather risk and we get a bad weather event, which means that our production is less than we thought it would be, but we have already sold it forward, we have a serious problem with our price management. That is because without some insurance on the weather, we cannot have sufficient insurance on the price of the product or the commodity; therefore, the weather is the first thing we should be addressing. That is the only way we can give some surety in managing the price risk to the grain producer in particular or to any other market that has an internationally traded commodity in which we have some depth to trade. Then, of course, we have government action, which we have seen with the live sheep and live cattle trade. It is not just the live animal trade—it is on all sheep and all cattle, whether they are going to the local market or the overseas market. That is causing the same serious revenue consequences. It is just like Wayne Swan’s budget: when the revenue side goes, there is a problem. On farms, the revenue side has collapsed, because the livestock prices have collapsed due to government action. Finally, there is the premise of communities. Communities in regional Western Australia are, with few exceptions, resting on the economics of agriculture. That means all the funds from the royalties for regions program that have gone into government plans for expenditure in regional communities are all fine and it is appreciated, but the trouble is royalties for regions is not fixing the foundation issue. The foundation issue has to be the resilience and profitability of agriculture, which then demands services in the towns, to which other occupations will come and grow the towns. It is not going to happen all the time because agriculture will have some limitations unless we get new varieties and so on to increase yields and all that kind of stuff. But, as the towns decline, we see what happens; the towns rest on agriculture. Climate risk-mitigation insurance could be called community risk mitigation insurance. It means the same thing to me. Let us come to some of the realities. We talk about markets. We have to have a market for whatever we produce. I realised 30 years ago that innovation in agriculture is so good that it keeps up with demand. In other words, the more we innovate, the more we produce and the more prices stay low, and that does not give us profitability. In a way, our technological innovation is so good that it always allows us to overproduce and, therefore, it is only a very rare and catastrophic climate event in another part of the world that forces the price to go up sufficiently. It is only if we have a good year here with climate that we can make something from it. The other thing about food prices is that people are not going to be very happy about food prices rising. That is the obvious way to increase revenue coming to farmers. How many governments will be happy about that? We can manage it a bit in Western Australia, because we have a high standard of living. What about Egypt and other countries that import our grain? We have a real difficulty that is intrinsic in there, and that is why we need to have a differentiated market, as we did have with the shipment of live sheep and cattle to Indonesia and the Middle East. That is very precious, because it breaks out of that difficulty, but it is hard to do. We also need a lot of luck in agriculture. We can talk about good farmers and bad farmers. I despair when I hear that kind of rubbish. The bad farmers were weeded out ages ago. The good farmers are often those who have had a bit of luck. I know a farmer who bought a property near Cranbrook. He already had a sizeable business in Wongan Hills. After paying a high price for the property at Cranbrook, he sowed canola over the whole property, which happened to coincide with a perfect year for growing canola and a very buoyant price of something like $600 a tonne; the next year the price came right back to $250 or $300 a tonne. That allowed him to pay off most of that property in one hit. Is that luck, good management or good farming? I have gone the opposite way. I have gone big and it has been a bad year. Is that good management or good farming? In our assessment of what is good farming, I think that luck plays a very important part. Eric Smart was lucky enough to find a property in Mingenew and was able to get through the first few years. He almost went broke, but then he had a good year. The northern wheatbelt had two droughts, in 2006 and 2007, and a lot of those guys would have walked off if there had been another less than average year, but they got the best year they have ever had. Is that playing the averages? I agree that farming is about playing the averages. However, people will go beyond the averages to try to pick up something to pay for a land purchase or capital expenditure, and sometimes it comes off. The other difficulty with agriculture, of course, is cost, which continues to rise. The cost of chemicals has not gone up that much, but certainly the cost of fertiliser has gone up and labour is in continuing shortage. Farm consultants have a role in all of this, because they are keen on efficiency, and that means: big paddocks with

[COUNCIL — Tuesday, 14 May 2013] 439 straight lines so farmers do not have to do all the turning; taking out the trees, if they can; and then buying the most efficient machinery. However, that is a capital expense, which again has to be covered. The bank is lending to farmers for that, but if the farmers have a frost event that wipes out part of their crop, they cannot repay the bank. Part of the reality of making farming a business, which is what people talk about, is that in Australia, where most farmers own their land and also farm their land, it is really about buying and selling land. That is how some of these people have managed to grow: they have bought cheaply and been able to sell profitably later on, if they do sell. Some people have done that. One of the biggest landowners in the state told me just the other day that he got out of farming because he was going broke. He said that he kept the land and that the land has appreciated—in this case, the land did appreciate, although it must be going back now—and then there are farmers who are going down and falling away. The business of land is one of the underlying reasons for some wealth when land prices go up. Let me turn to the strategy that I think can provide an economic foundation. I ask Hon Ken Baston to forgive me for doing this. I know of his role and how deeply he is involved in this. The first foundation plank is a crop risk- mitigation insurance scheme. The costs of that have always been regarded as being too high. They are partly too high because the margins in agriculture are very limited. If we can arrange it so that the uptake is there—the government may have to consider supporting a plan to have an uptake with a subsidy or rebate of the premium, and having the banks on side who insist that a number of their clients take out crop risk-mitigation insurance— there is a chance that the uptake will be big enough to get it working. I have not found any other country in the world that has got crop risk-mitigation insurance off the ground without a government subsidy of some kind. It does not have to be continuous; we just have to get used to the idea. America is developing technology in this area that is putting it so far ahead of Australia, it is dangerous hearing it. We cannot get that far behind America. It has Doppler radar throughout the country, which measures the rainfall—not these jolly weather stations. A fellow who talked to us about it said that they have insurance policies that, for $5 a hectare, would provide a certain payout if 1.6 inches of rain was received during the month of August for a corn crop. That is fine. Come August, there was no rain until 31 August, and they got 1.6 inches or two inches, and therefore they got no payout. The yield was seriously damaged as a result of that dry period. The most interesting thing he did then was to say that they are not talking about a rainfall event; they are talking about soil moisture. If they have a measure of soil moisture, they know what is happening to that crop—if it is drying out or what is happening if it is good and so on. They changed it. They synthesised, which they were able to do from the run-off, the soil type and the rainfall, what was happening to the soil moisture. We do not get any of this absolutely perfect but we do get it to the point at which it can be much more realistic than having weather stations around the place. The Doppler radars throughout the United States pick up exactly where the rainfall is on a field-by-field basis. We have to fill in the gaps of the Doppler radars so that we can measure the climate. We have a pretty good measure of the temperature for frosts. With that information, they can provide the payouts that match what has really occurred. The other thing to take into account is the plant growth stages. The Americans measure it by what happens during each plant growth stage—that is, the growth of maize—and we would do the same thing over here with the growth of wheat. That is where the benefits need to be assessed. These have not been done independently. I have done it but I cannot convince others totally of it. It needs to be done. The strategic growth that would take place in agriculture if a climate risk-mitigation insurance strategy was in place would turn everything around. It would mean that if someone was buying a property next door and they knew what their payments would be but the biggest risk, the weather risk, was covered, they would have a chance of making sure they could get the revenue to make the payments to the bank. If a farmer does have a bad season, he will get the payout from the insurance company. The same thing occurs when buying capital equipment. Strategic planning is so much more in place if a farmer has his biggest risk managed. That is one of the reasons it is so important. That will bring the youth back into farming because they do not want to be exposed to the naked risks that are currently there with climate. Land prices will rise once again because the biggest risk is covered. Agricultural land prices in America are very, very strong. Here they are very weak, apart from some properties taken out by large overseas purchasers. Those key strategic benefits would occur if a mitigation scheme was in place. When Hon Max Trenorden, Hon Nigel Hallett and I went overseas before December to visit these insurance companies, we wondered why it had not occurred before. It is only when we start talking to these people that different avenues and opportunities open up. Hon Col Holt referred earlier to opportunities opening up in agriculture. What we have not done properly is find out what some other parts of the world are doing in these areas which are strategically so fundamental. This visit to reinsurers is leading to something that I think has great prospects for Western Australia. The more insurers who come into it the better, but each company will be different. Multi-peril crop insurance—I have used that term frequently—is a particular product. The difference between that and what can be done with a climatic synthesised insurance policy is that there is no loss assessment in the latter but there is in the former, and that is about another 20 per cent of the cost. That is what we have to try to eliminate. We need to get the best technology to make it work.

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The second part of the strategy and what is about to be in place is a transitional Western Australian Rural Adjustment Finance Corporation facility for two or three years. That is what the federal government has effectively offered the state government. I asked a question about that earlier today. Farming is a game of windows. The window opens and then it closes and once it closes, we live with the mistake or live with not doing what we might have been able to do when the window was open, for 12 months. Seeding and sowing a crop occurs from mid-April but certainly through May and the latest it can be done, depending on the area, is probably mid-June. That window is still open right now but for any of those who have been constrained—I do not know whether they are not putting on sufficient fertiliser or not using chemicals—will be affected unless they get the sufficient finance to make it work. What a tragedy it would be if this year was the most wonderful seasonal year with no frost but some people who might have been able to get some of that money in time to put their crop in could not because it was our fault. The third part I wish to talk about is markets. I have spoken about government-to-government relationships. I do not think I need to go into that anymore because I have covered it. Infrastructure is the fourth part. All members know how determined I have been about the tier 3 rail and how it made so much sense to me. The Ord River is a project that is successfully working with an investor who has plans to put the infrastructure in place. We must have the infrastructure. That is why we have been able to compete with the Ukraine, Brazil and other parts of the world because they do not have the storage and handling facilities or the roads to carry the trucks or the railway lines to carry the grain to port in time. Infrastructure is just as crucial to agriculture as it is to anyone else. While on the tier 3 rail, there is something that I should mention that I referred to earlier; that is, the Merredin transfer fee. The government has an obligation under contract to pay CBH about $3.50 per tonne. That was part of an agreement in 1966 in which the state government said, “We’re running out of money to build a dual railway from Merredin to Fremantle. We can build it to Northam but no further.” There is only a standard gauge railway line between Avon and Merredin, so the government told CBH that it would cover the cost of transferring the grain from narrow-gauge wagons to standard-gauge wagons. That was the genesis of the $3.50 Merredin transfer fee, because all those lines in the eastern wheatbelt lead up to Merredin, and then it all comes down the standard-gauge railway. That was a 50- year agreement—it finishes in 2016—but it also has a rollover provision for another 50 years if either party wishes. The other thing is that when the rail was sold to Genesee Wyoming Wesfarmers in 2000, there was no reference to the Merredin transfer fee in the documentation. All the parties have gone through all the documents and there is no reference to the Merredin transfer fee in them. In the intervening years somehow it has switched across to the growers paying the $3.50 to CBH. The way it worked meant that CBH did not know where the money was coming from, because it was paid into a transport fund. CBH assumed that it was the government paying it in, but it was not. The marketers actually deducted the $3.50 from the freight, or it did in those days, and that is what the marketers put into the fund, so all CBH was getting was a cheque. What we have is the government actually owing money to the growers in the tier 3 zone for the wheat that has been carried for the five years or so for which the transfer fee was in place. It is there for another 50 years, which means that the government has an obligation of probably about $35 million, if I have done the numbers right on a discounted basis, to pay to CBH. That is alive. It is a stamped, signed contract that government has. No minister—I am not referring to you, Hon Ken Baston—should, as has occurred, say that this is not a contract. Every contract that a government goes into is a contract unless it can be renegotiated as something different. I will not go into other parts of the agricultural strategy apart from just two points. The first is about cooperatives. I know that Hon Jim Chown is very anti-cooperatives in the sense that he wants CBH to sell and to corporatise and so on. We have to wake up and understand a little bit about what cooperatives are. Cooperatives work when the members and the beneficiaries are the same. We did have an Australian Wheat Board that was a cooperative before it became a corporation in 1998 or 1999. The revenue of the Australian Wheat Board was all going back to the growers of the grain, apart from the costs. It was the same thing with CBH. What is more, cooperatives do not pay tax. So cooperatives provide either a low-cost service, as in the case of CBH, or high revenue, as in the case of the Australian Wheat Board. If CBH were corporatised, the shareholders would very quickly become different from those who are using the service. The shareholders would then have to be paid a dividend, and the costs, plus tax, would escalate enormously. We have to wake up about where cooperatives work and why they can be successful. We also need to be wary. The one danger with cooperatives is that they can become too serving of their customer base—their members—which can lead to inefficiencies. However, I think this could be easily fixed if there was something in the law that said that cooperatives need to have some independent consultants come through and review certain things such as efficiencies once every two years or something like that. The benefits of cooperatives are enormous. In my view, the storage, handling and now freight carried out by CBH is of great benefit to grain growers. We do not have any dairy cooperatives here now, because I think Challenge Dairy Co-operative Ltd failed. There needs to be a second opinion, if members like, to help cooperatives ensure that they do not get trapped into overservicing their customers. Finally, I think we have been falling badly behind in climate change preparedness. We have to reopen that with the federal government. It is quite possible, especially if we have climate risk mitigation insurance out in the

[COUNCIL — Tuesday, 14 May 2013] 441 eastern wheatbelt, northern wheatbelt or wherever, but if climate changes to a point, it must be reflected in higher premiums such that those people change their land use or stop growing what they are growing out there. I will go away from agriculture to something that is more at home for many of us. I want to talk about the suitability of a career in politics. It is interesting. I actually feel that it is very dangerous to have career politicians. The reason it is dangerous is that they have to compromise themselves in the meantime. Those people who have been here for some time may disagree with that. I always look back at Gorbachev and wonder how he did it. He must have bitten his nails for a long time before he got to a position where he could make a change, and did so. That is the argument for how career politicians can work; they have to play the game, not dispute the leaders and not contest the ideas if that is the way the system has been framed to work. I do think it is useful to get a broader perspective from people outside the political parties. The question is how to do that. A former colleague of mine, David Clarke, who was the managing director of Hill Samuel Australia and then Macquarie Bank, was a very good man in so many respects. He was going to stand in the seat of Wentworth at one stage. I forget who was retiring from that seat. I remember him remarking to me that his name had been in the paper as being a possible candidate but that he had not had one current parliamentarian ring him up and say, “David, it is a great idea; come on in.” I think there is a danger in that. The question is whether I would recommend to my business colleagues that they should come into Parliament because they can make a difference and so on. I would be very hesitant, because what they are used to is so different from what one has here, unless one is committed to agreeing with the system and has a plan to stay for 12 years. That may be the perspective one would have to have, but it is something I would be wary of recommending to business colleagues. I am sorry that I am saying that here, but in my view parliamentarians need to be able to listen and to critically analyse, which I think we could do much better than we may have done, and should be able to change their minds without fear. We are never going to get it right all the time. I think we do need to change our minds without fear. There is a book called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. Some members might have read it. It is a book about philosophy. I read it many years ago. The most interesting thing it talked about was the relevance of rhetoric to a philosophy or value. In a way, rhetoric is one of the most important ingredients in being in a chamber like this. I do not think it should be based on rhetoric, but that is the way preselection works. Attracting people with real life experience who have gone through a lot of it will not be an easy job unless we introduce some changes into the system. I will talk about a couple of improvements that might benefit the system. I suggested to Brendon Grylls—unfortunately, I did not make this suggestion until the last 12 months of my time in this place—that our party have a value statement about what we stand for. Parliament is often criticised because of the way we behave in the institution. That is partly because there is no corporatised system of working out what values we should have as a party and how we should behave and treat others. I know that there is goodwill; indeed, I have felt it, even today, from many of you. Corporations work out how to treat people in a professional way, how to treat others in a professional way and how to keep businesses coming back. If they make a mistake, they look at how to compensate for that mistake. All political parties need to go through a process like that. When I was with Macquarie Bank, such a process cost half a million dollars. We do not want to spend that much, but it certainly benefited us at Macquarie Bank. I think it would be worthwhile for all parties to consider that model. Preselection is another issue about which I have previously spoken. Preselections rely on resumes, which we all know are the least reliable for determining a person’s performance in a job. They then rest on a five-minute speech, which is equally unreliable. Of course there is politicking to get the votes. That is different again, but when it comes to making an assessment of the good, the bad and the ugly of an individual candidate, we need to go to the third phase. The third phase, which would take more time but may help to get a better selection, involves bringing in a professional headhunter or human relations person to ask questions of referees to draw out the good, the bad and the ugly. A lot of it is in how the question is asked and how the follow-up questions are framed. We would need a professional to do that, but that would expose those who are voting to how it is. That would remove a lot of the politics and would get more merit into the system. In conclusion—I thank members so much for staying and being with me—we are all ordinary people, as I have said before. It is a wonderful thing that the whole system works. The ceremony, I think, is an important part of elevating our ordinariness. I am happy to be leaving. I feel for my constituents, but I am happy to be leaving in the sense that I am very keen to go back to looking after those about whom I care and whom I love. Over the last four years the farm has declined to some extent despite the best efforts of the people who are there. I have enjoyed being here on many occasions. I have enjoyed a great deal the friendships around me. I appreciate that very much. Hon Norman Moore, I value very much the work you have done to preserve this chamber as a house of review. I am sure that you, Hon Peter Collier, have the same sense for that. I have appreciated working with you when our paths have crossed. I have enjoyed the interaction I have had with members of both the Labor Party and the Greens, especially on our committee. That is partly because when we are trying to keep the executive accountable—which, I guess, is government—we often have the same perspective. I have enjoyed that. That does not mean to say that I have not

442 [COUNCIL — Tuesday, 14 May 2013] liked the government; it is just that we all need to be held accountable. I refer to what was said by a forebear of mine, James Gardiner, who was a member of Parliament in the Legislative Assembly in 1901. In his inaugural address he said — My ambition, in common, I feel assured, with other members of this House, is just to serve the State first; and I bring to this task the highest possible ideal. I have seen instances of environments lowering an ideal considerably. I hope they will not in my case. I want to serve the State as well as I possibly can. After the State comes my constituency. If I let loyalty to party, or personal ambition, or anything else of a personal nature, interfere with my desire to serve the State to the best of my ability, then I hope that when I face my electors, whether it be in a month’s time or at the end of my term, they will give me every evidence that I am not a fit and proper person to represent them in Parliament. I independently agree with that and aspired to that, but I failed to be re-elected; hence I guess I qualify as not being a fit and proper person. I admire those words enormously. They are a wonderful example. Finally, I thank those with whom I have been especially close. To begin with, Mr President, thank you very much for presiding over a chamber with fairness and delivering everything that was deserved in the course of my involvement here. I thank the people who have worked closely with me professionally—Brian Christie and Phil Bellamy in Moora—and before that, Danny Degoda and Dahlia Richardson, but especially the former two. I found them an enormous strength. They could not do enough to assist me. They were forensic, they were brave and they dealt with issues when I could not deal with them. No bad consequences have arisen from the work they have done. I am very grateful to them. I also thank some key people. Nigel Hallett is not here tonight. Nigel is one of the last farmers left in Parliament. I wish him the best in continuing the work that he and I have done with Hon Ken Baston. Hon Matt Benson- Lidholm—Matt—I have enjoyed a lot of our conversations, as I have those with you, Hon Ken Travers. To my former National Party colleagues, the “R4R” got you and me in. Keep maintaining it, but remember that it is now government policy. Max, who is not here tonight, was a tremendous friend all the way through. I learnt a lot from his perceptions of how government and public service works, the improvements that can be made and the broad set of policies we worked on together. Finally, I thank my family. We all know we can never do without them. To have Jenny here tonight after getting back from England an hour ago is wonderful as it is having our two sons, Charles and James, who gave me every support in the last few difficult days. They were wonderful. I also thank Colin, president of the Nationals branch in Moora. He is such a fine man. I guess it was the early nurturing of a wonderful mother and the unconditional love that she always offered that built an intrinsic, almost unconscious strength in me throughout the time I have lived. I am very grateful for that. Thank you, Mr President. [Applause.] The PRESIDENT: Best wishes, Hon Phil Gardiner. HON SIMON O’BRIEN (South Metropolitan) [8.49 pm]: I thank the house for leave to interrupt my introductory remarks. I want to conclude, as I indicated before the dinner break, quite quickly with something along the theme of what Hon Phil Gardiner himself concluded with. The summary, though, of the substance of the matters that I have been addressing concerns the future of Fremantle. I hope members now have a little more understanding of where this important part of the Western Australian community and of Western Australia’s heritage and history now sits, are aware of the importance and the significance of the crossroads that that community now inhabits and will join me in encouragement to make sure that we maximise the potential of that great town into the twenty-first century. I would like to thank and acknowledge the effort of the Fremantle Chamber of Commerce, headed by its president, Ms Ra Stewart, and its chief executive officer, Mr Tim Milsom, and the mayor of Fremantle, Dr Brad Pettitt, and his colleagues. I look forward to working with them to continue to pursue the goals that I outlined earlier. Already, over the dinner break, I had the benefit of contact from one or two ministers wanting to know how they can be more closely engaged, and that is greatly encouraging. I thank them for that, and I look forward to reporting to the house about progress in this matter in due course. Of course, I would not want to have to come to the house again to report anything else, and I am sure the government will be supportive of that. I wish to conclude by acknowledging departing members, some of whom go back a long way. Hon Giz Watson came in with me—I never know whether we should call ourselves the class of ’96 when we were elected, but that is what people from another place called themselves. We are probably more correctly described as the class of ’97. It has been quite an interesting 16 years. Giz, could I just say thanks for sharing the journey with us. It is something that we share—an experience–and no-one is going to take that away from us. I wish you all the best in the future, together with your colleague Hon Alison Xamon, who has been with us for a term. It was quite a remarkable feat by her to be elected for the East Metropolitan Region. She has applied herself very diligently, and I wish her well in the future.

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I have not worked closely with a number of members from the Australian Labor Party who are retiring, simply by virtue of the fact that I have been pretty busy doing ministerial duties over the life of most of this term and our paths have not crossed in the way that they perhaps would cross with one with whom I share a committee involvement and so on. But to each and every one of the members who have served with the ALP, whether you came in on 22 May four years ago or, in the case of Hon Linda Savage, for example, to fill a casual vacancy, I wish you the best in the future. I want to single out just a couple of members for mention—firstly, Hon Phil Gardiner. Phil, we met when you were a member elect, I think, and I was the new Minister for Transport. I was going up to Geraldton to turn a sod, because I am a hands-on sort of person. I asked you to come along, and you did, and it was great to meet you. We have worked together on a range of things ever since. I appreciated the sentiments that you expressed. As I said in my response to some of Hon Col Holt’s remarks earlier this afternoon, I share the sentiments and the genuine feelings that were behind, in particular, your closing remarks about the support of family, the impacts of those relationships and how we rely on them. I understand all of that, as we all do. We value the fact that you do have those close relationships and have had those supports. Those of us who are lucky to enjoy similar supports know how important they are. I wish you, your family and your associates all the best in the future. Hon Matt Benson-Lidholm is also retiring next week. I have had a bit to do with Hon Matt Benson-Lidholm over the years on a number of committees, and we have applied ourselves at great length and, indeed, on a couple of occasions, at great distance in pursuit of committee activities. I just want to say that I have valued our association very much indeed; I hope it continues. That association has been forged not only by what goes on here in this chamber, but also by what happens in committee offices and interview rooms in all sorts of places in pursuit of committee inquiries. That is something that, again, we will both share forever. I thank you and your wife for sharing some of those occasions with us, and I wish you all the best in the future. Similarly, Hon Max Trenorden is also leaving us. He is not here now, but I wish him all the best. He has a significant period of service to the Parliament over very many years—in both houses, of course. I also, with regret, note the retirement of Hon Jon Ford. I would like to hear a valedictory speech from Hon Jon Ford, and I hope we get to hear one in the days of this term that remain. I was here when he made his maiden speech, and he impressed me then with his sincerity. He made it quite clear that he had a strong personal commitment to what he described as social justice. Over the ensuing years—some 12 of them—we got to find out exactly what that meant and how genuine it was. I think that Hon Jon Ford served well in a number of capacities in this place with commonsense born of an interesting and complex background and life experience, and thereby he enriched the experience for those of us who were here to share it with him. Just as I enjoyed his most recent speech, I think—it might have been his last speech—about some things concerning James Price Point, I would like to hear some concluding remarks from him. I hope I get the opportunity to do so, but that remains to be seen. Finally, I would like to make reference to my very good friend Hon Norman Moore, who came to this place only in 1977. Hon Norman Moore: A career politician. Hon SIMON O’BRIEN: I will not give members his curriculum vitae, because members can look it up if they want to, if they do not already know it. But what members will see is that some Liberal members, including me and some Liberal members who have been in this place and who have long departed, have taken more than a few leaves out of the book of this very distinguished parliamentary member. I can remember once—probably at the start of my second term—continuing an altercation outside the chamber, probably not very far outside, with a certain member. Our then Leader of the Opposition said, “I think you’d better go outside and cool off for a bit.” I did, and that was good advice as well. When I saw him a bit later, I had cooled off, and of course had come to my senses and realised that it could have resolved itself in a much less satisfactory way! I said to him when I caught up with him, “Thanks very much for keeping us on the straight and narrow there,” and he said, and I quote, “That’s what us old blokes are for.” A term or two later I gave some similar advice—this actually happened—to another new colleague in similar circumstances who also thanked me for guidance on whatever the matter was, and I could not help myself and automatically said, “Oh, that’s what us old blokes are for.” So, there is the proof. There is plenty more that can be taken from the experience of this member. We need parliamentarians who have corporate memory to make sure that the traditions and practices of the Parliament endure; to make sure that the good things are remembered and adopted; and that mistakes, to the extent we can, are avoided. Certainly, that has been one of the benefits of this long-serving and most distinguished member. He has been in his day a range of things. He has been a cabinet secretary back when the cabinet secretary was a member of Parliament. That was in the time of the Court government. Most members of this place have not been here long enough to remember the Court government. I am not talking about that Court government! I am talking about the previous Court government of Sir Charles Court. That was when he first sat in the cabinet room, and he sat in the cabinet room as a minister throughout the

444 [COUNCIL — Tuesday, 14 May 2013] entire period of the second Court government, and of course he served in the Barnett government as well. He has been the Leader of the Government, he has been the Leader of the Opposition and he has been the Leader of the Government again. I have previously told the house the story about the old furniture we had with the drawer on the inside lid of which had been scratched the initials of the various leaders of the house. There was Hon Joe Berinson, Hon George Cash and a whole lot of very distinguished members who served in that office. When we came back here again onto this side in 2008, I believe his only addition then was when he went to where he had already scratched his name eight years before and put “x 2” next to it. His is an almost unique contribution, I would suggest, and one that has been valued by all members on both sides of the house. Gone now is any suggestion of cantankerousness or of overly authoritative leadership. All of that is out of the window because we all appreciate the strength that he has brought to the position. I said in my remarks earlier today in this speech that I appreciate the scars that we get automatically when we go through life. When members have been doing this for 36 years, they have accrued some scars along the way as well. I have been around over the years and witnessed events that have caused scars to Hon Norman Moore. I have seen the way he has dealt with and responded to them, and I have admired his character, his integrity and his guts in the way he has gone about doing it. I will not go into any of these occasions. He might remind us of some when he makes his own speech in due course, but I have seen the tough and principled person he is, and I can personally vouch—if anyone requires it—for the character and the contribution of this individual. I have also had the benefit of that experience at a personal level with a valued friend. He seemed a very scary creature when I was a first-term member, sitting there, under the second Court government and he was over there as the Leader of the House—very scary indeed. But over 16 years we do get to know colleagues very, very well and I feel richer for the experience. To you, Norman, and to Lee, I wish you every happiness in whatever will be the next phase of your life. I note that we are looking for a candidate for the seat of O’Connor, for example. Who knows? We have a special sitting of the house tomorrow to appoint a new senator. Who knows what spontaneity might arise. We shall see in the fullness of time. However, I am deeply appreciative that I was able to share part of my career with this distinguished member and to be able to make these comments this evening. HON BRIAN ELLIS (Agricultural) [9.06 pm]: I join with the other members of this house in thanking His Excellency the Governor for his address at the opening of the thirty-ninth Parliament. Although this was His Excellency’s first opening of Parliament with the current government, it was also the last opening of Parliament for Hon Norman Moore. After dedicating 36 years of his life to the business of this house and service to the Western Australian community, I believe it is fitting that I begin this address by acknowledging his place in the history of the Western Australian Parliament. Although I acknowledge Hon Norman Moore’s achievements as Leader of the House and as a minister in both the Court and Barnett governments, I will not go into all the other positions he has held. Hon Simon O’Brien has very adequately gone through Hon Norman Moore’s career; and a long list of achievements it is. However, I wish most of all to record my appreciation of his friendship. Hon Norman Moore has been a great mentor to me in my time in the Legislative Council and I have valued his advice. He has always given wise counsel. Away from Parliament he has also given me a few valuable lessons in wine appreciation. It may be that I could have done without some of that advice, Norman! Hon Simon O’Brien: Very expensive lessons too! Hon BRIAN ELLIS: Very expensive lessons, yes. Norman, I do wish you and Lee all the best in the future in whichever direction your life takes. I am sure that I am not the only Agricultural Region member who appreciates the outcome of a good harvest of grapes. I also want to toast the future of Hon Max Trenorden, Hon Philip Gardiner, and yourself, Mr Deputy President, Hon Matt Benson-Lidholm, who also sit here for the last time. I also believe Hon Ed Dermer has a quiet appreciation for a good red, although I suspect that has more to do with a reflection on his political leanings than the actual wine, and we will all miss his gentlemanly contributions to this place. With his beard and motorbike, I suspect Hon Jon Ford is leaning more towards or has a secret fancy for bourbon and coke. Hon Kate Doust: Actually he is a Moët man! Hon BRIAN ELLIS: Is he? Hon Kate Doust: Yes. Hon BRIAN ELLIS: We find out everything eventually, don’t we? I have appreciated, as Hon Simon O’Brien has said, many of the speeches that Hon Jon Ford has given to this place. Being a fellow Deputy Chair, and a former minister, I hope that he rides off happily into the sunset. Whilst Hon Giz Watson probably prefers an organic red beverage, I would like to pay tribute to her vigorous contributions to debates and her attention to detail, even though I may not have agreed with her very often. I also acknowledge the contributions of the departing members Hon Alison Xamon, Hon Helen Bullock and Hon Linda Savage and wish them all the best for their futures. I hope that these few words so far will encourage the

[COUNCIL — Tuesday, 14 May 2013] 445 new members who will take their place in this house next week. Whilst this is rightly a place of debate and sometimes it is adversarial, it is also a place of mutual recognition as we do our best to provide good government and to keep government to account. I look forward to joining with the house in making these new members welcome. Something else that is welcome is the assistance being provided to farmers who are doing it tough. I intend to speak along those lines tonight as it is topical, particularly for my region, the Agricultural Region. Hon Philip Gardiner has expressed some views on where he thinks agriculture should go. I do not necessarily agree with all of them, but I have sympathy for some of his thoughts and I respect the dedication and commitment that he has shown towards his constituents in the Agricultural Region. As a third-generation farmer with a son on our family farm at Bindi Bindi and a daughter farming in the marginal area of Bruce Rock, I know firsthand what it is like to live at the whim of the weather. That is probably one of the reasons that the Premier asked me to help organise a tour of the wheatbelt not long after we came into government for this term. Let me share with members some of my insights into what farmers are facing in the marginal districts. I happen to know a young bloke who had to sell part of his farm in the eastern wheatbelt to try to keep the rest of the property viable. This was a heartbreaking decision for a young fellow who inherited property that had seen better seasons. Sons in this situation feel a responsibility to keep the property in the family in honour of their fathers and for the future of their own children. Nevertheless, farming is a business these days and I encouraged him to make that business decision. If this season does not go well, he might have to make another heartbreaking decision and sell the remainder of the property. In the meantime, like other farmers in that area doing it tough, he and his family have to draw up a business plan to take to the bank and ask for finance for this year’s crop. Then they will spend their days waiting for the rain, and if they are lucky enough to get the crop out of the ground they will then wait for the follow-up rains. If the crop grows and gets past the risk of frost and is ready for harvest, they will still be worrying about the weather in case of storms that may flatten the crop and knock it down so it cannot be harvested, just as they are thinking of going to pay back the bank for the money that they have already borrowed. There is nothing they can do about that except have the courage to keep on farming, and if it rains, it rains. In the meantime, they have to put food on the table and petrol in the farm vehicles, buy schoolbooks and clothes for the kids, and pay the electricity bills and household expenses as people in the city also have to do. For farmers such as this young fellow whom I am speaking about, I believe there needs to be three packages of assistance—an intermediate package to help keep food on the table so that they can stay on through this season or leave the farm if things have become that desperate; an interim package to plant the crop for this season; and a long-term package to look at the future viability of their property. We now have these three packages. I am hopeful that the three will fit together to make a brighter future. The government has promised to address the long-festering boil of red tape. I will just give a quick example of that red tape. I will give my example, I suppose, and it is a common example for most farmers. We have a truck that does fewer than 5 000 kilometres a year. It is an old truck but it is well maintained and in good condition, yet we have to have it audited every year. The audit is done by my son because he fills in the paperwork, but he pays an auditor $500 or $600. The auditor never sees the truck. It is just a case of my son doing a heap of paperwork, which he sends off. I still do not know where the auditor sends that paperwork. My son has to have a medical examination every three years. I do not know of any other industries in Perth—delivery vans or perhaps even private car use—that have to have their vehicles checked. It is fair enough in the trucking industry, because when trucks do hundreds of thousands of kilometres a year, there is a good case for the inspection to make sure that they are roadworthy, but even those trucks are not checked. They just have to fill in the same paperwork and send it away to have it audited. Unless there is a real follow-up and a thorough investigation and audit of the truck, what is the audit for? It is just another expense that is added onto these farms that are small businesses, with vehicles not doing many miles at all. That is just a simple example. Another example that Hon Jim Chown knows more about than I do is a simple thing; a grain silo builder in Kellerberrin cannot deliver grain silos outside Kellerberrin because of the red tape involved in him trying to do that. I will not go into all the details, but there is a lot of that red tape around making life hard for people without any real positive outcome for the work that they do. Most farmers are looking forward to the reduction of that red tape. The state government has provided the emergency relief that forms this first package that I was talking about. The $5 million provided for the financial support grants will give an estimated 200 farm businesses the option of accepting up to $25 000 each to help with their expenses. They do not have to pay it back. They do not have to take it—it is their choice—but they do not have to pay it back if they qualify. To be eligible the recipients must have traded as a broadacre farm business for the past five years. The property must have been owned by the recipient for the past five years or have been held with a written agreement to sharefarm or lease the property. At least one member of the farm business must have derived at least 50 per cent of their income from that farm business and at least one member of the farm business must have devoted 75 per cent of their labour to it. The recipient must have farm business equity between 55 per cent and 65 per cent and have received finance for the 2013 cropping program. The net off-farm assets of all members of the farm business, including shareholders,

446 [COUNCIL — Tuesday, 14 May 2013] partners et cetera must be less than $412 500. The scheme is capped at $5 million and individual grants will be allocated according to the number of applications received. The grants are available until 31 July and details can be accessed through the Department of Agriculture and Food’s website. I understand that within the first few weeks of the grant being made available 43 applications were made and that now 70 applications have been received, with money, I think, expected to flow next week. For those who have done their best but have made the tough decision to walk away, the state government will provide exit grants of up to $20 000 to an estimated 50 farmers. This is to go towards living and transitional expenses for farmers who have owned their farms for a least five years and who have net assets of no more than $450 000 after the sale. The exit grants will also assist those farmers who may be leaving their farms for other reasons, including having reached retirement age. Once again, they do not have to pay that back. It is simply their choice whether they take the grant or not. For those who need to talk through the tough times and also need the interaction and support of local communities, the state government has provided $1.8 million over 12 months for rural counselling and for local governments to bring people together. Fifteen Wheatbelt shires including Kulin, Bruce Rock, Westonia and Esperance will be eligible for grants of up to $20 000 from the $300 000 pool to stage community events. We do not want to underestimate how powerful that can be. It may seem trivial, but Hon Nigel Hallett and I went to what was called a blokes barbecue a couple of years ago and it was a good night. We went along to speak to these farmers along with a doctor and a local farmer who in his day was a high profile VFL footballer. He spoke about some medical conditions he had. The doctor went through a lot of other issues that these farmers would have been facing. I have to say I was quite shocked on the night to find out how many of those farmers were on some sort of medication. At the end of the night farmers came and spoke to us afterwards and thanked us for being there. I had expected, being a politician, a night of horror, of being attacked by farmers and pulled apart for not listening to them, but they were most constructive and very grateful we had gone out there. By the end of the night it was a relief to them in some way to find that they were not alone and that a lot of their friends and fellow farmers were going through some of the same difficulties they were. That is why I say: do not underestimate the assistance that is being given to those communities so that they can hold community events and get the community together. Hon Philip Gardiner touched on the fact that some of the burden of this stress falls back on the wives, and I have to say that that is the case. The men are out there doing the work; they have the worry of trying to meet their commitments to loans, but in many cases the wife is at home, looking after the children and taking on board the husband’s worry and the whole family’s worry, and often also doing the books. I am sure that in most cases the wife is the stronger partner, supporting the husband out in the paddocks. Once again, I think this is a very important part of the state’s package. I would now like to turn to the three packages that have been announced. The relief package offered by the state government has provided a foundation for the intermediate package offered by the federal government. Without the state package, some farmers would simply not survive long enough to take advantage of the intermediate federal funding. The federal government’s farm finance package will provide $30 million each year over two years for low-cost loans to Western Australian farmers. Members who have been following this issue in the media will know that low-cost loans were one of the remedies called for at the farm crisis meeting in Merredin. Indeed, 91 per cent of the 200 growers surveyed at that meeting believed that access to long-term, low-interest loans would allow them to return stability to their businesses. Personally, I do not agree with adding more debt, but I hope I am proved wrong. The same survey showed that 25 per cent of businesses were paying between eight and nine per cent interest on farm debt, with many paying between nine and 12 per cent. I believe that the details of the criteria are still to be set, as the minister alluded to during question time, but it is my understanding that the scheme will be administered by the state government and will offer farmers low- interest loans for productivity enhancement projects or debt restructuring for a 20-year loan period. Concessional interest rates will apply for the first five years, with the rate returning to commercial levels for the remainder. These farmers must demonstrate that they are viable in the long term, but struggling financially under current conditions such as seasonal pressures and pressure from the high Australian dollar, although there seems to be some light on the horizon with the Australian dollar coming down just recently. This funding is designed to provide a breathing space. In return, the loan recipients will have to demonstrate financial need, participate in farm business planning programs and demonstrate their capacity to meet a debt repayment schedule. These loans will take effect as soon as possible after the states and territories sign up to the farm finance scheme, at which time eligibility criteria will be finalised. Whilst I welcome the funding proposal, it is a shame that the state government was not consulted or informed about the federal package prior to its announcement, but I understand that the state is negotiating with the commonwealth government to ensure that the best possible agreement is reached for WA farm businesses. The federal package also provides 16 more rural financial counsellors, bringing the Australia-wide total to 126 from 21 July. A commitment to establish a nationally consistent approach to farm debt mediation will help farmers and their bankers access a simpler and more consistent system that delivers real results for both parties.

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Currently, only Victoria and New South Wales have appropriate legislation, so a working group will be established to develop model legislation and will include industry and banks, and the states and territories. The federal package will also increase the non-primary production income threshold for farm management deposits from $65 000 to $100 000. The FMDs are an important risk management tool for primary producers to manage fluctuations in their income. However, with many farmers now working off farm to gain much needed income, greater flexibility is needed in how farmers can manage and use their deposits. From 1 July 2014, the non- primary production income threshold will be increased by $35 000 so that more farmers can access the scheme and diversify their income to help better manage income variation. From that date, red tape will be removed to allow farmers to roll existing FMD accounts into one account. This applies to accounts held for the required minimum period of 12 months. We have an immediate survival package in place and a low interest rate loan program on offer. What is needed now is a long-term future for farm survival. This involves an intergovernmental agreement on the national drought program reform. A five-point program was agreed to by the federal, state and territory governments, and Hon Ken Baston, in his role as Minister for Agriculture and Food, is a signatory to this agreement. It will be implemented prior to or on 1 July 2014 and will replace the former exceptional circumstances agreements. It will expire on 1 July 2019, but may be terminated earlier, or extended, as agreed in writing by all parties. Full details of the programs in the package will be announced as commonwealth, state and territory budgets are finalised. However, in brief, the agreement includes a farm household support payment based on individual need. As this involves the accountability of taxpayer funding, this will carry reciprocal obligations and involve case management. It also includes continued access to farm management deposits and taxation measures; a coordinated collaborative approach to the provision of social support services; tools and technologies to inform farmer decision making; and a national approach to farm business training. The state government will be responsible for encouraging the delivery and uptake of the national approach to farm business training and developing a state implementation plan in consultation with the commonwealth and monitoring and assessing its delivery. Performance indicators and benchmarks will be included. Another product that has been spoken about for some time, which Hon Philip Gardiner mentioned tonight, is risk mitigation insurance. A survey of 200 farmers taken at the rural crisis meeting in Merredin showed that 84 per cent of those surveyed would take up affordable mitigation insurance. However, a previous crop insurance program through the CBH Group had a poor uptake. The cost was just too high for enough farmers to take it on. However, the Farm Weekly reported last week that Latevo International Pty Ltd had indicated that crop insurance would be available to Western Australian growers from $15 a hectare this season. The cost would vary for individual farmers and how much they wanted to cover. The company reportedly wants to attract 100 farm businesses. Assessments will be independently audited by RSM Bird Cameron. More recently, The West Australian reported that Latevo was already accepting applications and was set to offer revenue-based insurance policies by July. According to that report, the financial clout behind Latevo included the biggest reinsurers in the world of agriculture and would be revealed in the next few weeks. The article went on to state that the company’s model relied on a case-by-case assessment of a farm’s records over a five-year period, and that the financial records were independently audited and benchmarked as part of the application process, which involved a $3 000 up-front fee. The article in The West further stated that Victorian farmer Andrew Trotter, who is behind the launch of the scheme, has said that it gets straight to the base of the problem in farm business and that it deals with the missing revenue in the exact production years when the problem occurs. He also reportedly said that Latevo had brought forward its launch by 12 months and was still working through the industry compliance process. I also look forward with great interest to the outcome of the state government’s discussions with companies such as Swiss Re and its United States–based partner, the Climate Corporation. I understand that they have a different approach and their product could be worth more consideration. A commercially viable risk insurance product would give farmers more certainty of income. In conclusion, today’s farmers have not only battled poor seasons over the years, but have also had to survive against the high Australian dollar, live export problems with both cattle and sheep, and other market issues such as the price of wool. For example, the western market indicator for wool has fallen every trading week since March and dropped 14 per cent in under two months. Although the price is still historically strong, it is causing problems in the current conditions, when farmers have lost so much of their purchasing power. It is a sign of the times that it is hard to spot a sheep when driving through the wheatbelt these days. Farmers have always had the attitude that it is a case of adapt or die, and most of them sold their sheep long ago. At least they had the choice; some cattle growers and sheep graziers are talking about shooting their animals because the overseas export market is such a disaster. So much for the legendary romance of farming! In reality, it is a business of survival. Farmers are small businessmen and they must make decisions as businessmen. Farming is a great way of life, but it has to be a profitable way of life to survive these days of high cost pressures. I came to that understanding when I took over my farm when my father suddenly died. I realised that I needed advice so that I could make the correct decisions to succeed in farming. I employed a farm adviser, and even though I have been a farmer for

448 [COUNCIL — Tuesday, 14 May 2013] over 40 years, I still seek his business advice and so does my son. There is no shame in seeking advice, particularly when times are tough, and I would recommend that farmers who are struggling at the moment to make a decision about what to do seek advice; it will help. A farm adviser cannot make it rain. Whilst the state package has not pleased everyone, and I would have liked to have seen more money available, where do we draw the line? I am relieved that a safety net is now in place with some options for those who want to try to survive for another season, consolidate and improve their farm business in the future or move on to another lifestyle. I recognise that this is more help than many struggling family businesses receive in the city. Whilst I appreciate firsthand the quiet desperation of those doing it tough on the land, these three packages are a start. We do not want to appear ungrateful. HON HELEN MORTON (East Metropolitan — Minister for Mental Health) [9.40 pm]: I would like to begin by thanking His Excellency the Governor, Malcolm McCusker, for his address in opening this term of Parliament and also for his tremendous work, along with Mrs McCusker, right across WA in all the areas that I am heavily involved in. I continue to come into contact with the Governor and his wife at many functions, whether they are to do with mental health and drug and alcohol services or disability, and I am sure the same will occur with child protection and family support services as well. In particular, I thank him in his role in encouraging adults and children, in particular, to give back to the community. That is probably even more important this week, which is National Volunteer Week. I would also like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the long parliamentary career and leadership of Hon Norman Moore. As a member for the Mining and Pastoral Region, that was the very first time I got to meet Hon Norman Moore. At one stage I felt that I might have liked to have been a member for the Mining and Pastoral Region. I was living on a pastoral property at that time and I spoke to him in one of his offices about the possibility of it but not long after that I moved back to the metropolitan area. His roles as Leader of the House and Leader of the Opposition are the only leadership roles that I have known him to have in the house since I have been a member of Parliament. It was not hard for me to understand why he was often referred to as the father of the house. He was also the Minister for Mines and Petroleum and Fisheries and had many other portfolios before those. I do not know all of them but I know that education and tourism were a couple of the favourites that I have heard Hon Norman Moore talk about. I acknowledge Hon Norman Moore as being a tremendously influential person, a tremendously influential Liberal, a fantastic politician, an amazing parliamentarian and an incredibly strong and valued member of the Liberal Party in Western Australia. Thirty-six years has seen many changes in technology. I think one of the biggest changes that Hon Norman Moore has seen is the increased number of women in the house, which we have often talked about. The one message that he will constantly leave with me is to just be very clear that what goes around comes around. Because he has been here long enough to see a number of cycles of changes of Parliament and most of us have not, that is a clear message. He has always provided very solid advice about aspects of the house, including custom and practice and standing orders that must be preserved. For those of us who might like to think that we have a better idea about how to run things, that advice is always well received and appreciated. Hon Norman Moore: Ha-ha. Hon HELEN MORTON: It is so! I wish Hon Norman Moore and his wife, Lee, all the best for a very long, very enjoyable and, I am absolutely certain, productive retirement. I also acknowledge the contributions made by all the retiring members and wish them all very well. Debate adjourned, pursuant to standing orders. GUILDFORD HOTEL Statement HON LINDA SAVAGE (East Metropolitan) [9.45 pm]: I think it would be remiss of me if I did not use this opportunity tonight to raise for the last time an issue that has been raised with me a number of times, or continually, really, since I first came into the Parliament three years ago, and that is with regard to the Guildford Hotel. As members know, the state and federal heritage-listed Guildford Hotel was severely damaged by fire on the night of 31 August 2008. Immediately there were calls by the public and promises by the owners to restore that hotel. In fact, Mr Domenic Martino, one of the owners, was quoted the day after the fire as saying, “We are going to put everything we have into getting this back together”, and, later, “It is a treasure of Guildford, we have to rebuild it.” He also said, “We can’t afford to lose this building, it’s part of WA’s history, an iconic building here in Guildford. Our first aim is to make sure it’s structurally sound so that we put it back together again.” However, despite the hopes of the residents, and the promises, it is now more than four and a half years later and the facade of the hotel is unchanged. There is no roof or covering. The scaffolding that was erected to stop bricks

[COUNCIL — Tuesday, 14 May 2013] 449 from falling on passers-by is still there. The banners asking for the preservation of the hotel and the rebuilding are still there. The years of rain have eroded the plaster and brickwork; there is water in the basement; and vandals have ripped out floorboards and walls. How do I know that and how do the residents know that? That is because last year, an intrepid but unknown photographer went inside the Guildford Hotel and took photos that were then published in the Echo newspaper. Those photos showed the wreckage of the floorboards and the pressed tin that had been torn down, and a range of other damage, which is not unexpected after a building has been subject to the elements for over four years. Anyone who has left anything outside in the weather for years would expect that sort of damage. So where are we now? We know that the owners have received an insurance payout, because on 19 October 2010, the then Minister for Heritage stated in the Assembly that the owners had settled the insurance claim in late 2009. In August 2011, the hotel owners submitted a formal application to the City of Swan for redevelopment of the hotel and the adjacent land. On 30 November 2011, the City of Swan accepted the application and granted parking concessions worth around $2.98 million, based on a value of $20 000 per parking bay. That was allowing for the fact that the owners should have provided 149 more parking spots. The main people who are affected by this concession are Guildford residents, who already find their residential streets and driveways filled with visitors’ cars on the weekends. Most Guildford residents who have talked to me about this recognise the problems that these concessions will cause but are willing to accept them provided that the Guildford Hotel is restored. As members, particularly those in the East Metropolitan Region, will know, there has been an appeal that went to mediation, and an agreement was reached in June 2012. So where are we today? As I come to the end of my term, we have not seen any further action on this matter. Although the owners have advertised for expressions of interest, which closed on 29 March this year, for new retail shops, some constituents are reporting to me that they believe the owners now think that the restoration will go ahead only if it is economically viable, and the residents are beginning to believe that that will never occur and that the hotel will not be restored. Although we are approaching the five-year anniversary of the fire, there is still the ruined facade, no coverage and a vandalised and very badly damaged interior. We are coming into yet another winter. Obviously what is needed, and was foreshadowed in the last parliamentary term, is reform of the Heritage of Western Australia Act. In my opinion that act needs amendment to ensure that adequate insurance of heritage- listed buildings is compulsory, so that that cannot be used as a reason to not restore the building. It should also be amended to compel speedy and effective protection of heritage buildings pending restoration and compel restoration of damaged heritage buildings. We need a heritage act that allows the Heritage Council to, either at the direction of the Minister for Heritage or of its own initiative, enter, inspect, assess and act to preserve and protect a damaged building pending restoration, with the costs of such action being repayable by building owners. That right to act should be available to the minister and/or the Heritage Council as soon as a heritage- listed building, such as the Guildford Hotel, is damaged. Guildford residents have listened for over four years to promises and some excuses. They have put up banners, written to newspapers and lobbied members of Parliament. As recently as in the past two weeks, they have been in my office. They have been to rallies, rung radio stations and appeared on TV programs. I hope that their persistence and hopes are rewarded this year with the beginning of the restoration of the Guildford Hotel. EAR SCIENCE INSTITUTE AUSTRALIA Statement HON LIZ BEHJAT (North Metropolitan) [9.51 pm]: I rise this evening to speak about a function I attended on Friday evening at the Perth Convention and Exhibition Centre. It was a charity fundraising dinner for the Ear Science Institute Australia. I represented the Premier at that function. I wanted to share with members tonight some of the fantastic work that the ESIA does and the success it had on Friday. The Ear Science Institute Australia is an independent, not-for-profit organisation dedicated to improving ear and hearing outcomes through education and translational research. Drawing from a dedicated focus, expert staff and established national and international networks, ESIA is uniquely placed to address the issues faced by one in six Australians who suffer from hearing loss. That is quite a remarkable figure when we think about it. The ESIA, originally named the Lions Ear and Hearing Institute, was established in September 2001. Today it continues to have a close relationship with the Lions Foundation and Lions Club members. The institute is governed by a board of trustees consisting of some amazing people who are well-known in this town for their philanthropy in a number of areas—John Schaffer and George Jones in particular, and also Professor Marcus Atlas, who is the head professor at the institute. The event was attended by up to 400 people in the presence of the Governor and Mrs McCusker, and my federal parliamentary colleague Hon Julie Bishop. Jeff Newman was the host for the evening. I sat with his wife, Pat. I said to Pat, “Has Jeff actually retired? I seem to see him at a lot of places.” She said, “No. Jeff is just not on television anymore.” He certainly has not retired; he is doing lots of things like these charity auctions. The

450 [COUNCIL — Tuesday, 14 May 2013] auctioneer for the night was the champion of charity auctions, my very good friend Ron Farris, who helped raise an extraordinary amount of money, which I will tell members about shortly. A number of speakers spoke about their experiences. One of the most amazing people was Jane Goodfellow, a 39-year-old woman who was born with single-sided deafness. Three and a half years ago, very suddenly, in the course of one day, Jane went completely deaf. She said it was the scariest thing that had ever happened to her. She woke up one morning feeling a bit strange and by the end of the day could actually hear nothing at all and was obviously very scared. She then became a patient of Professor Marcus Atlas. She said to him that her two biggest fears in life were being eaten by a shark and going completely deaf. His advice to her was, “Well, don’t go swimming because your hearing is not coming back.” She then received a cochlear implant from ESIA, and her hearing has now returned. She works at the West Coast Institute of Training, a place I have spoken about a few times in this place, as a tertiary educator for primary school teachers. She has now found that although her hearing is not as good as it was previously, she has a certain level of hearing and is now planning to have her second cochlear implant. But it was amazing to hear the story from someone who has benefited from the work that is done at ESIA. One of the other speakers for the evening, with whom I am sure members here are very familiar, was our Chief Scientist, Lyn Beazley, who spoke in layman’s terms about how cochlear implants work and about research projects that are underway, including using the cochlear implant technology to perhaps be able to cure some forms of blindness, which is absolutely amazing. The comment made by Jeff Newman after Lyn Beazley’s speech was, “I wish she’d been my science teacher; and, if she had been, my life might have taken a very different direction.” She is the most amazing, animated speaker. We are very lucky indeed to have someone as talented as Lyn Beazley as our Chief Scientist in Western Australia. The main reason for the evening was to support ESIA in some of those community services that it runs. I will quickly run through some of the services it provides. The Hearing Discovery Centre is an interactive ear and hearing health and education portal created by ESIA. It has been designed to promote all aspects of ear and hearing health and to provide education about ear health, anatomy, hearing disorders and latest treatment options. During Hearing Awareness Week, which is held each year, ESIA also runs a number of free seminars to educate people on how they need to look after their hearing and the telltale signs of a person perhaps losing their hearing. One of its newest programs, which is a great one that I know my son has participated in at his school, is Cheers for Ears. The mascot, Charlie, goes around to schools. It is an innovative school health initiative designed to educate and encourage healthy behaviours of children at the classroom level. It focuses on the use of personal music players, education on noisy environments and aspects of ear and hearing health. It involves a video showing how we hear, discussions on what can cause hearing loss and the effects of hearing loss. Those of us around the chamber who have children know that they tend to listen to their music quite loudly sometimes, and it can affect their hearing. The Happy Hearing program is an interactive training session held for staff in aged-care facilities, home and community care workers, paramedical staff, volunteers, nurses and families and friends of anyone caring for someone with a hearing loss. Of course, there is the Lions hearing bus, and I am sure that all of us here are familiar with the free hearing screenings that the Lions provide to the community. They are some of the programs that ESIA supports during the year. To do that, ESIA needs to raise quite a bit of money. I am very happy to say that on Friday evening, in the short space of probably an hour when Ron Farris was running the auction and seeking donations, he received direct pledges from people. That night, our Governor and Mrs Tonya McCusker pledged $50 000 of their own money. As we know, our Governor is one of the most generous philanthropists in this state. Shaun Hand, the general manager of Cochlear Ltd, the company that produces the cochlear implants, also donated $100 000 on behalf of that company, as well as donating two cochlear implants that are to be given to some disadvantaged people who cannot afford the implants themselves. People were raising their hands all around to give money to this most worthwhile cause. Through the pledges, raffles and auction items, in one evening an amount of $510 000 was raised. I would just like to take this opportunity to congratulate all those people who support the Ear Science Institute Australia in the work it does, and to encourage it to continue this work. There is a saying that is, I think, attributed to Helen Keller, which is that if we lose our sight we lose touch with things, but if we lose our hearing we lose touch with people. I think that is quite telling and we know how much all of us in this place cherish our hearing. Again, I would like to congratulate ESIA on the wonderful work it does and encourage it to continue, and to encourage members in this place to perhaps get involved in anything that ESIA may do in future. House adjourned at 10.00 pm ______

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QUESTIONS ON NOTICE

Questions and answers are as supplied to Hansard.

KALBARRI BEACHES — RUBBISH 1. Hon Robin Chapple to the Minister for Mental Health representing the Minister for Environment: I refer to concerns raised by a constituent regarding rubbish left on coastline and beaches around Kalbarri, and I ask the Minister to please advise me who is responsible for removal of rubbish, including fishermen’s abandoned items, various pieces of flotsam and jetsam and general rubbish left strewn on the ground at beaches in this area of Western Australia? Hon Helen Morton replied: I understand that the removal of rubbish from beaches in and around the Kalbarri townsite is the responsibility of and is undertaken by the Shire of Northampton. Department of Environment and Conservation staff at Kalbarri remove rubbish from beaches that are accessible and immediately adjacent to the Kalbarri National Park and have supported community rubbish removal projects in the Kalbarri area.

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