Mr SCHULTZ (4:09 PM) —Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, and may I take this opportunity to congratulate you on your re-election to high office in this magnificent chamber of the House of Representatives in the nation's parliament. I stand in awe of this huge chamber as the newly elected member for the federal seat of Hume and reflect back on the decade I served as an elected member of the Legislative Assembly of the New South Wales parliament. I am conscious of my obligation to continue the people-first community based style of politics which voters within the Hume electorate overwhelmingly endorsed on Saturday, 3 October 1998.

It is important that, in this my first speech, mention is made of the rural seat of Hume, named after that great explorer, Hamilton Hume, who in 1818 accompanied by James Meehan discovered Lake Bathurst and the Goulburn Plains. Three years later, accompanied by his brother-in-law, he discovered the Yass Plains and established a sheep station in the Gunning district. Today, the rural division of Hume extends from Cowra in the north to Tumut in the south, from the city of Goulburn in the east to Temora in the west and also includes towns such as Adelong, Barmedman, Boorowa, Cootamundra, Cowra, Crookwell, Grenfell, Gundagai, Yass and Young. Thanks to the pioneering spirit of Hamilton Hume, it is one of the most diverse rural electorates in this great country of ours.

The Hume electorate contributes significantly to the economy through its agricultural, viticultural and horticultural industries, including wool, fat lambs, pigs, cattle, wheat, cherries, apples, stone fruits, timber and wine. The ability to efficiently produce this wide variety of rural commodities using the most productive farming practices in the world has, over the past decade, been overshadowed by falling commodity prices, high interest rates, high inflation and increased farm input costs which have made it difficult for rural producers to survive.

Some industries such as wool are additionally burdened with clumsy and inefficient bodies feeding off the various levies on growers who rely on government legislation for compulsory collection of these levies. A combination of these factors has resulted in an increase in the demand for rural counselling services. In the electorate of Hume, many wool growers affected by these adverse contingencies sold wool in the October sales where the cash return they received was less than 50 per cent of last year's return. Obviously these low returns are going to place extreme financial pressure on these property owners for the next 12 months and will be reflected in their communities.

Further pressure on producers has occurred as a result of an unusually rare temperature drop of minus five degrees Celsius on Wednesday, 28 October 1998, the worst frost in over 50 years. The drop in temperature had a devastating effect on orchards at Batlow and Tumut and on wheat crops at Cootamundra, Jugiong and Wallendbeen to the extent that this unseasonable severe frost damage will see up to 80 per cent of crops destroyed.

In short, rural producers, despite their best efforts to maintain their well-earned reputations as the most productive farmers in the world, are reeling from one setback to another, much of it outside their control. These setbacks are having a serious social and economic effect on rural communities who are so dependent on the millions of dollars injected into the many small businesses which in turn generate employment within rural towns, thereby contributing significantly to social and economic stability. No doubt the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, who has already indicated that the government is taking the issue of exceptional circumstances for frost affected crops very seriously, will give due consideration to assisting those rural producers facing severe financial difficulties.

The issue of the problems confronting people on the land is complementary to the general frustration of rural communities. They are angry at what they perceive to be the economic rationalism driving successive governments of all political persuasions and which has seen the demise of government infrastructure culminating in the very real loss of jobs and services in rural towns. After 13 years of Labor, mainstream Australia is aware of the Labor Party's record of pandering to minority groups and sectional interests and the impact this has on the nation's ability to continue to support Labor's socialist welfare state mentality.

The people of Australia are willing to bear some discomfort and pain, knowing hard decisions need to be made to overturn this massive financial burden created by past Labor policies. The constituency of the Hume electorate, like many other rural electorates, while prepared to accept that the government needs to promote certainty and security as part of its commitment to rebuild the rural sector's economic foundations, is concerned that in doing so government is relying too much on advice from bureaucrats—bureaucrats who do not know and care little about the impact their cost saving measures are creating within the social fabric of the targeted communities.

It is simply not good enough, as an example, for Telstra to seek to justify its staff reduction exercise in rural Australia by saying metropolitan and rural areas have equally shared the burden of their staff reductions. They argue that, in the period from December 1996 until August 1998, 13,431 staff reduc tions occurred. In fact, 10,906, or 81.3 per cent, occurred in metropolitan areas and 2,525, or 18.7 per cent, from rural areas.

Telstra has conveniently forgotten to inform us that in 1996, of the total 69,483 Telstra staff employed, only 15,800 Telstra staff serviced rural Australia or 80 per cent of Australia's landmass. Obviously, reductions in this work force have an impact on the quality of service to rural Australia. You cannot reduce the number of service personnel and expect them to cover the same geographical area and offer the same level of service. You certainly cannot expect Telstra customers in the Hume electorate to be adequately serviced from remote bases such as Canberra or Wollongong. The same applies to other government service infrastructure, such as Australia Post.

It now begs the question as to why ministers of the Crown, and indeed governments of the day, have not made it mandatory for a social and economic impact study to be carried out before any decision is taken to reduce the numbers of employees or to move any service infrastructure from rural towns already struggling to stop the haemorrhaging of our young people to the eastern seaboard. We must do all we can to attract families into rural Australia and not drive families away from the way of life many Australians hunger for. Australians domiciled in our cities should support rural communities' rights to equal quality of service in health, education, communications and transport, which are available to metropolitan dwellers, regardless of the cost of delivery. It has always been governments, not the people, who have been fearful of those costs and who have identified other priorities for their spending.

Whilst I am passionate about my concerns for country people, it would be irresponsible of me not to acknowledge the magnificent contribution Prime Minister John Howard's government has made to this wonderful nation of ours in the 2½ years since it was elected in 1996. In contrast to Labor, which has never been serious about stopping fraud and non-compliance in social security, the Howard government, through its very capable minister for social security, has saved taxpayers $48 million a week by shutting down the loopholes Labor left in the system and reducing benefits to 570,000 people who were receiving in excess of their legitimate entitlements. A further tightening of the social security system has continued to restrict people's ability to rort the system and has seen the establishment of a special rural task force to address social security issues affecting country people.

The Howard government has also recognised the need to encourage Australians like me to remain in private health insurance. Legislation which will assist in attracting back into private health care those people driven out of the private health system by the escalating cost has been introduced into this parliament, as promised during the election campaign. Since the introduction of Medicare, the number of Australians contributing to private health insurance has fallen from 65.8 per cent to just over 30 per cent at the end of September this year.

The Labor Party, in the 13 years it was in government, was instrumental in forcing 800 people a day out of the private health insurance system when it withdrew all political and financial assistance from the industry. For every one per cent reduction in private health insurance an additional $83 million was added to the cost of delivering publicly funded hospital services at state level. The Labor Party's ideological, socialistic and incompetent mismanagement of the health service during its 13 years in office effectively forced the cost of hospital insurance up by 20 per cent and came precariously close to destroying the private health insurance industry as we know it.

Thankfully the Howard government, through the bill currently before this House, is providing a 30 per cent private health insurance rebate to those people willing to pay to look after their families when they require health care. The government is offering some hope to our health system. Its initiatives will certainly take pressure off the state public health systems, which are critically in need of relief. It is my belief that the rural health system, in particular, will benefit from this responsible approach.

The most courageous issue ever undertaken by any prime minister in the nation in my lifetime was the decision by Prime Minister John Howard to radically change our tax system. It is the first time a Prime Minister of this country has put his political career on the line for something he believed was in the best interests of the people of Australia. The tax system as we know it has not kept up with the rush into technology. It has been continually patched and filled with increasing rates of sales tax. This has seen the standard sales tax rate of 2.5 per cent first introduced in the 1930s blow out to an average of 22 per cent standard rate in 1998.

Sales tax and personal income tax is seen by most Australians as outdated, too complex and unfair to those who unselfishly work hard to assist those who pay no tax at all. Australians demonstrated their support for a change to the taxation system by returning the coalition government on 3 October. Hopefully, the Australian public, who expect the democratic process they voted for at the ballot box to be honoured, will not be arrogantly ignored and abused when the government sends its tax package to the Senate.

As a founding member of Parliamentarians Against Drug Abuse, I am concerned about the availability of illicit and dangerous drugs in our community. There is no more important social issue confronting our community than the use of illegal drugs. This government is committed to using every strategy that it can to stop drugs ruining the lives of Australians. Under the National Illicit Drug Strategy, this government has committed over $200 million to a balanced approach to the drug problem. The government is spending more than any other federal government in anti-drug measures.

In November 1997, the government provided an additional $20 million over three years to the Australian Federal Police for mobile strike teams, witness protection and the National Heroin Signature Program. In March, it provided an additional $23 million over four years for additional mobile strike teams, the AFP's overseas liaison officer network and cooperation programs in the Asia-Pacific region. In the election campaign the govern ment made a commitment to provide an additional $23 million over four years for another four mobile strike teams, which have proved to be remarkably effective in intercepting drug importations.

This government has also provided additional resources to Customs. More than $34 million has been allocated to Customs under the Tough on Drugs strategy over four years for improvements to coastal surveillance and detection capacity in the Torres Strait, improving the ability of Customs to identify suspect cargo consignments and to examine containerised cargo. In the election campaign, the government made a commitment to provide an additional $31.65 million over four years for X-ray equipment, ship and aircraft search teams and an extra marine crew for the Torres Strait.

The additional funding provided to the Australian Federal Police and Customs is helping those bodies to catch drug criminals. Recent successes, including Australia's largest ever heroin seizure resulting from a joint effort between the AFP, the New South Wales police and the Australian Customs Service working within the AFP's International Liaison Network with Hong Kong police, are helping to combat drug importation into Australia.

South of Port Macquarie, Sydney based strike teams have seized in excess of 400 kilograms of heroin with a street value of over $300 million; 18 people were arrested in relation to the importation of this heroin. This month 23,000 ecstasy tablets were seized in Adelaide in another coordinated operation between the AFP and the Australian Customs Service. Obviously, if the resources are available, mobile strike teams, which are intelligence driven, have the capacity to attack all aspects of a drug syndicated operation, including financing, transportation, distribution networks and money laundering. I commend the Howard government for what is a positive contribution to this government's tough drugs strategy.

Time restrictions do not allow me to address a number of other issues important to me personally, and certainly of interest to the people of the Hume electorate. So I believe that I should talk about who I am, why I am here and what this parliament can expect from me during my time in this House of the Australian people.

I am the son of a wool store labourer from a low income working-class background. My grandfather on my mother's side was a personal friend of John Curtin. An uncle recently told me that my grandfather would turn in his grave, knowing I was a Liberal member of parliament—and he is absolutely right.

Having established my family's Labor Party bona fides, I can assure members on the opposite side of the House that I was converted to conservative politics at a very young age because extremely well paid union officials, similar to those members opposite, had me out on strike more times than I worked. As a young slaughterman in the meat processing industry, I learnt rapidly that the only people lining their pockets at the expense of the working class were not the employers but the union officials on executive levels of pay driving company cars.

In 1988, as a candidate for the Liberal Party—following encouragement from my wife, Gloria, and the then member for Hume, Wal Fife—I successfully contested the New South Wales state seat of Burrinjuck, which had been held by the ALP for 47 years. That 1988 election was similar to my election into this parliament on 3 October this year in that it was a three-cornered contest between the ALP, the National Party and the Liberal Party. I must say that in both of those elections my natural political opponents, the ALP, were honourable protagonists, unlike my other political opponents. Whilst I am opposed to the ALP's socialistic ideologies, I am always aware of where they are coming from.

As a member of the Liberal Party, which is the largest rural based political party in Australia, I can assure the House that my politics differ to some degree in that I am not in the business of compromising my constituency expectations by concentrating my energies on self-interest politics. I am closely aligned to grassroots politics and, whilst that may at times create some discomfort to a number of my parliamentary colleagues, it is in line with what the bulk of Australians expect from their local elected representatives. There are many politicians within this place who do not understand this grassroots commitment because, unfortunately, they have become too engrossed in their own comfort zones—and the mainstream community at large, in recognising that weakness, is increasingly demanding accountability from politicians.

It is also true to say that the public is becoming increasingly concerned about the politically correct divisive nonsense driven by a desire to placate the noisy minority groups as a means to political expediency. A former colleague of mine, the Hon. Marlene Goldsmith MLC, summed up public concern on this issue in her book Political Incorrectness—Defying the Thought Police when she wrote as part of the introduction to that novel:

The politician, with even a modest number of watts in the light bulb, soon learns that the secret of success in this business is to avoid doing most of the things that need doing, because many of the real challenging and controversial issues, the ones that need more careful analysis and debate are off limits. The boundaries of acceptable discourse are policed by several watchdogs: on the left, the guardians of political correctness and fashionable orthodoxy, on the right the fascist fringe, and all over the place every special interest group whose disproportionate power needs querying . . .

How right she was! So what does all this mean in the context of what this parliament can expect from me? I am simply saying that I do not subscribe to political correctness. I intend to defend the mainstream family values which have been pushed aside for political expediency; and I will never compromise my principles, honesty and integrity, no matter the cost. I seek no favours and I ask only that my rural constituency be given a `fair go'. Should there be any occasions during my time in this place when my constituents are penalised because of any action undertaken by me on their behalf, then I will vigorously respond on their behalf accordingly.

Mr Deputy Speaker, I now take this opportunity to acknowledge and thank all of those individuals who assisted me during the recent election campaign. Whilst it is difficult to name each and every individual, I must express my sincere appreciation to my cam paign manager, John Crawford, and his wife, Ondi, who offered valuable advice and worked so hard to ensure that I stayed on track with our campaign strategy. To Lynn, my secretary, who not only ran my campaign office single-handedly but also worked extremely long hours over the five-week period ensuring that the momentum of our campaign was maintained: thank you.

To all of the loyal Liberal Party branch members and supporters who donated money and organised and manned campaign rooms and polling booths: thank you. I am grateful to the people of the Hume electorate who judged and accepted me for what I am: thank you for your massive support at the ballot box.

To my lovely wife, Gloria: thank you for your love, your quiet inner strength, your comfort and support, and for just being beside me; `the team', as we are known within the region, has been a close successful combination in everything we have done together all our married life. To my two sons, Grant and Dean: your strong support, understanding and assistance to both your mother and me in the time consuming political process of campaigns over the past 11 years when quality family time has been limited is so much appreciated. To Debbie and Bernadette, who are an important part of your lives and a welcome distraction from the demanding life of politics: thank you for being part of our close-knit family.

Finally, Mr Deputy Speaker, I acknowledge and thank the House for its patience and indulgence in allowing me the privilege to participate in this the Governor-General's address-in-reply.

Debate (on motion by Mr Kelvin Thomson) adjourned.