Ms LIVERMORE (5:57 PM) —I rise to speak for the first time in this place with a great sense of responsibility to the people of Capricornia who put me here. I stand here also with a sense of purpose. Capricornia is a long way from Canberra. It is a long way for me to travel just to occupy a seat. I need to use my time here effectively for the people of Capricornia and make every day count. The views and hopes and ideals that I hold and that I hope to advance during my time here are those that I presented to the people of Capricornia during the recent campaign. Those values and beliefs are a product of both my working-class background and my experience of growing up, working and living in a regional area of Australia.

Looking back, I guess you could say that I had a very sound education in Labor values and ideals starting at an early age. It was an education based on theory as well as some pretty solid practical experience. In my family it was unavoidable. It was a family in which the Labor Party was as much a part of everyday life as vegemite sandwiches and backyard cricket. In his home town of Ipswich, my father Ian was surrounded by a family of coalminers and railway workers. Similarly, my mother's family had a history of working in the central Queensland gold mines, at places like Mount Morgan and Mount Chalmers. They knew that it was the Australian Labor Party that looks after working people and their families. It is not surprising, therefore, that one of my earliest memories in life is a rally led by that great Labor bloke Tom Burns that I attended with my parents to protest the shameful dismissal of the Whitlam government on the day after my sixth birthday.

The reforms of the Whitlam government had a big impact on my working-class family and many others like it. Suddenly, ordinary people could expect things like affordable health care, a university education for their children and, in the case of my parents, a society that would offer the same opportunities to my sisters and me as our male classmates.

This has always been the centre of the Labor Party ethos: the idea that there should be a fair go for everyone regardless of birthplace, birth date or birthright. We certainly put those principles to the test in my family. I am pleased to say that the Labor Party passed the test. I was 11 when my father died. My mother found herself with the job of providing emotionally and financially for her three young daughters, the youngest of whom was only six. I have never forgotten the short trip from working class to welfare class, a trip that many Australians have shared for what ever reason. It is a trip that no-one in my family asked for but nonetheless had to endure. The Labor Party passed the test. It is the test that it sets for itself. It espouses the principles of a fair go and equality of opportunity. Thanks to the assistance available to struggling families under the Hawke and Keating governments, my sisters and I never had to let go of the aspirations planted in our minds during Whitlam's time.

It was this experience that shaped my views on fairness. It was this lesson of how indiscriminately life can come along and kick you in the guts that brought me in touch with others in the same situation. It was during those difficult years that I made up my mind to work hard so that I would some day be in a position to fight for those same principles that helped my family so much. That decision led me to politics and inevitably to the Australian Labor Party. There was only one party that advocated on behalf of my family. There has only ever been one political organisation that dealt with the issues of fairness and equity. There is only one: the political arm of the labour movement in Australia, the Australian Labor Party.

I am a Labor member of parliament for the reasons I have just described. I am the member for Capricornia because Central Queensland is my home and it is the part of Australia that I care about and want to pour my heart, energy and aspirations into. It is an honour and an exciting challenge to represent the electorate of Capricornia in this place. The electorate of Capricornia extends from the beautiful Capricorn Coast and Shoalwater Bay on the Central Queensland coast to the awesome expanse of the outback and towns such as Winton, Muttaburra, Longreach, Barcaldine, Aramac, Jericho and Alpha. It also includes the mining towns of the Bowen Basin, such as Moranbah, Dysart, Tieri, Middlemount, Cappella, Clermont and Glenden and Collinsville, which is a town that has a particularly strong Labor heritage. The major city of my electorate is my home of Rockhampton.

Capricornia is indeed an enormous electorate with a spirit to match. It is an electorate full of character as well as its fair share of characters. The electorate of Capricornia has a proud history that belongs to both the traditional owners of our region and to those of us who have made it our home. It is not a history of purely academic interest but a living history, because the products of that history endure today as important symbols and institutions of our country. I am talking of things such as Qantas, which was conceived at a meeting in Winton and launched from a dusty airstrip in Longreach. Waltzing Matilda was written at Dagworth station and first performed at the North Gregory hotel in Winton.

Of course there is the Australian Labor Party. The architects of the last redistribution perhaps would not have known the historical significance of the lines they drew. In fact, the boundary of the Capricornia electorate covers Clermont, Barcaldine and Rockhampton. All three centres played a significant role in Labor history. The Ballad of 1891, a long-held hymn of the working class, especially in Queensland, tells it all with lines such as:

From Clermont to Barcaldine the shearers' song rang out—the sheds'll be shore union or they won't be shore at all.

There is also:

To trial at Rockhampton the 14 men were brought. The judge had got his orders—the squatters owned the court. But for every man that was sentenced a 1000 won't forget—where you jail a man for striking it's a rich man's country yet.

No doubt some of my colleagues will want to argue this point and claim that the birthplace of our party is Sydney or Melbourne. However, the tree of knowledge in Barcaldine stands as a testament to the claim that the Australian Labor Party was born in Capricornia.

There can, however, be no dispute about the statement that Capricornia boasts many wonderful achievements. Wool grown on the backs of our sheep out west and shorn by local shearers such as John Laffin finds itself woven into the highest quality suits. Beef mustered out of the gullies and downs from Winton to Westwood, from Longreach to Lockington and from Aramac to Alton Downs graces the best dining tables in the world and gives my home of Rockhampton its much deserved title of the beef capital of Australia.

Coal dug from Capricornia's soil by hardworking coalminers makes our region one of Australia's richest exporters. The Central Queensland University is a progressive and successful institution that provides high quality educational and research facilities to our region and beyond as well as playing a leading role in our community. Great Keppel Island and the towns of the spectacular Capricorn Coast welcome increasing numbers of Australian and international tourists each year. Just up the road is Shoalwater Bay, a training area used by our Australian armed forces and one that regularly hosts exercises with our neighbours, such as the Singaporeans who have spent the last couple of months training there.

There is no doubt that our region of Central Queensland has great potential to build on our fine history. I wonder, though, whether this government knows what it is doing to crush the traditional spirit of the people of Capricornia. When I listen to people in the communities around the electorate, I share their feeling that this government has abandoned us in regional Australia. The coalition government apparently sees no role for itself in ensuring that the gains made by our country and the standard of living available to Australians are evenly distributed. The No. 1 issue for us in Capricornia has to be jobs: creating new jobs and providing security for those in work.

So what does the Howard government give us? It gives us an industrial relations regime that threatens the wages, conditions and security of workers and cutbacks to the public sector in our region. I spoke before about the history of Capricornia being a living history. There were parts of that history that we thought would never have to be relived: the times in our history when workers were gaoled and denied livelihoods for themselves and their families simply because they were members of a union. It appears that those times are alive and well in Capricornia. Just ask my mate Garry Barnes, the president of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union in Clermont, one of 16 unionists at the Blair Athol coalmine currently engaged in an unfair dismissal claim against Rio Tinto after losing their jobs shortly after refusing to sign individual contracts.

I have stood shoulder to shoulder with miners on picket lines around Capricornia while they struggle against the government's ideological allies, like Rio Tinto and Arco, to protect their jobs and that most basic right of workers, the right to form a union and bargain collectively. I have stood in the smoko rooms at the meatworks in Rocky and listened to the workers there talk about their fears of the future in a workplace where the award has been stripped back to nothing.

When the government talks of union members, it seems that it regards them as some kind of breed apart from the rest of society. The government's narrow ideological view of the world does not let it see that union members cannot be cleanly removed from a workplace with some kind of surgical precision without there being residual damage to a community. I am thinking in particular of the mining towns in Capricornia. The union members who are being attacked there are my friends, and I know them to be the local footy coaches, scout leaders and school P&C presidents. They have wives and children. They are the people who spend their pay packets on groceries and Christmas presents at the local businesses. You cannot attack these people without attacking the whole community.

It is not only the government's industrial relations policies that are hurting Capricornia. Over the past two years we have also seen the decline of government services in our region. We have seen the Taxation Office close in Rocky and Telstra workers retrenched. When the CES office closed in Longreach, there was nothing there with which to replace it. The people of Capricornia need these services just as much as those living in capital cities need them.

It is the regional areas that suffer the most from the government's agenda of downsizing and privatising because the market that is supposed to fill the gaps is not interested in us. We cost too much and eat up profits. We rely on the government taking some responsi bility for keeping our communities functioning and providing services to those who need them.

The government is clearly not listening to people in regional areas. If it were listening, it would not have announced two weeks ago that we can expect more job losses at our local Centrelink office. The sick and disabled, the unemployed and the elderly people of Capricornia know exactly what that means for them—a decrease in services. The business people of Capricornia know exactly what it means for them too—fewer pay packets in our towns to keep our local economy ticking over.

In Capricornia we have seen the same thing over and over—promises of increased competition and efficiency that amount to nothing but the slashing of jobs and the decline of services. Whether it is the sale of Telstra or the deregulation of Australia Post, the message from my electorate is clear.

I have wasted no time in bringing these issues into this chamber because they are the issues that I campaigned on and they are the issues that the people of Capricornia expect me to pursue on their behalf. Wherever I go in the electorate—whether it be the Rocky railway workshops, the Lakes Creek meatworks, the Longreach RSL, the Middlemount Bowls Club or Pat Ogden's Globe Hotel—the people of Capricornia have had a gutful of economic policies that are advocated by people who have never even heard of Alpha or Jericho or St Laurence. The people of Capricornia are not interested in fitting into anyone's economic model; they want to be proud of their local communities and not feel penalised because they do not live in the city.

Most of the things that I will say in this place will be spoken on behalf of the people of Capricornia. Right now, though, I would like to say a few words that are mine alone, and they are words that come from the bottom of my heart. I want to pay tribute to the people who gave so much of themselves to get me here. I will never forget or take for granted the support and assistance that I received from local ALP branch members in Capricornia—people like Robert Schwarten and Barry Large and their families; people like Bronco Smith, Marilyn Tynan, Sam Morris, Jim Pearce, Pat Ogden, Stephen Schwarten, Jeff Jones and Mary Therese Brady.

It was especially touching for me to have the support of the family of the late George Gray, the member for Capricornia from 1961 to 1967. Thank you to Bray, Linda, Trish, Jeanne, Don and Rick. One branch member, Joan Brady, deserves a special thank you for being there right from the start. Thank you, Joan, for having faith in a 27-year-old woman long before anyone else got quite used to the idea.

My local branch members have a dedication to their party and a commitment to their communities that I hope I can live up to. From its inception, the Labor Party has been the political voice of the union movement; I will certainly continue that role as the member for Capricornia. During the campaign my brothers and sisters in the union movement showed that they truly understand the meaning of solidarity. The support from unions—like the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union; the Australian Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Workers Union; the Australian Meat Industry Employees Union; the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union; the Queensland Nurses Union; the National Tertiary Education Union; the Communications, Electrical and Plumbing Union; my old employer, the Community and Public Sector Union; and others—was absolutely rock solid and an important part of Labor's victory in Capricornia. I would also like to pay tribute to the members of Emily's List for their support and motivation throughout my time as a political candidate.

It does feel sometimes that the Labor Party has become my family—it has become such a big part of my life—but it can never compare to the wonderful family that has given me so much love and support over the last 29 years of my life. Thank you to my mother, Desley, and my sister Heidi, who is here today, and my little sister Sascha. My grandparents—Richard and Beryl White in Mackay, and Roy and Clara Livermore in Ipswich—also played a big part in giving me the values and motivation to make this journey.

Compared with these people, my partner, Craig Brown, is a relative newcomer. But the last 3½ years that he has shared with me have been the most tumultuous and fulfilling of my life: you're my best mate—I couldn't have done it without you, and I wouldn't have wanted to.

I finish today with a pledge to work my heart out for the people of my electorate. As the member for Capricornia, I will work with the communities in the electorate to build on our traditional strengths and always be on the lookout for new opportunities for our region. I cannot promise miracles, but I promise hard work, determination and complete honesty of conviction in trying to deliver to the people of Capricornia a secure future.