Dr NELSON(7.35 p.m.) —My adjournment address is prompted by the first speech delivered by the member for Oxley (Ms Hanson) last week in this chamber. There is a lot to admire about the honourable member: a single mother raising four children, running a family business in a tough economic climate and a fearless courage to speak out. These are characteristics normally found in my heroes and, in fact, the hallmarks of traditional liberalism. That, however, is where my admiration ends.

The member for Oxley has called for an immediate end to foreign aid, preferring instead to see the money spent on ourselves or, more specifically, on unemployment. Her understandable resentment of the more questionable aspects of Aboriginal funding leads her to deny a disadvantage in being an Australian Aborigine. A number of callers to my office think she is right. One went so far as to suggest in rather crude terms that, in contrast to the member for Oxley, I am seriously lacking in testosterone.

I challenge those who subscribe to the view that we spend too much on Aborigines to go to Palm Island, Fitzroy Crossing, Aurukun or Docker River and then tell me you wish you had been born there. I would not consider myself privileged were I to be born into circumstances in which I would have only a one in three chance of living to the age of 65.

I took my son doorknocking—he is nine—in March for Red Cross. I told him that he would learn something important that day, and he did. A man in a three-storey mansion with two luxury cars in the drive gave us 50c and said, `No change.' An elderly woman, nursing her dying husband in what seemed to be a lifelong family home, offered $50 with the comment, `There is always someone whose needs are greater.'

Sometimes it is tempting to think that we ought to give up on foreign aid. Billions of dollars have been spent in the last 30 years. Economically, politically and ecologically things frequently seem worse, with famine, war and refugees. But remember though that the media highlights the bad news. My images of time spent in Kenya and Tanzania for World Vision are of people not unlike the member for Oxley or anyone else in this parliament—people struggling to survive, but usually happy in giving of themselves to others.

If we become a people who no longer care about the world, it is then that we cease to be true human beings. One-eighth of mankind, its aspirations and talents reside in Africa, so too lies the measure of this country as a nation of caring people. As members of the human race, we should not ever abandon those in need. Would we give up on drug rehabilitation, telling kids not to smoke or support for families? Of course we would not.

I have found in life that the strength of human beings and of nations can be measured in terms of the care, concern and compassion that they show to those who are most in need. Opinion pollsters seldom take their clipboards to the slums, the shacks, the shanty towns or the distant communities of Aboriginal Australia. But if they did, on behalf of the member for Oxley, or indeed for any one of us here, we would find that their aspirations are a little different from the people whom she and I represent.

There is no doubt that money can be better spent. However, Fred Hollows, Weary Dunlop, John Simpson Kirkpatrick and other selfless icons of this country did not become so for the promotion of self-interested resentment. There is constant tension within all of us as individuals and as a society between on the one hand wanting for ourselves and for our own self-interest and on the other hand needing to know that we are doing what we believe to be right.

My son will need much more testosterone than that of the member for Oxley to follow in the shoes of the Australian icons whom I mentioned. In the end, leadership is not about populism, and it is not about appealing to the primeval instinct in human beings to want for themselves; it is about trying to evoke in people a genuine enthusiasm to support things that are in the best long-term interests of others, the community and society. In that sense, I disagree vehemently with the things that were said by the member for Oxley.