Mr MELLISH (Aspley—ALP) (4.14 pm): It is a tremendous honour to address the House today as
the representative for the seat of Aspley. I acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this
parliament meets. I pay my respects to their elders past, present and future. I take this opportunity to
congratulate my fellow new MPs, some of whom I knew pre politics and many of whom I have briefly
come to know since the election. I also congratulate re-elected MPs and those who have been
appointed or elected to positions such as yours, Mr Speaker. I congratulate the Premier on her strong
and smart leadership of the state throughout the last term and indeed the election campaign. Without
her leadership I would surely not be standing here today and we would not be in a majority Labor
government.
It is very much a great privilege to be able to represent my community of Aspley. I intend to
advocate for them as hard as I can, making a difference in their lives through what I can do both in the
community and here in parliament. Many people say that running a campaign to be an MP and being
an MP are two vastly different things. In many ways I tend to disagree. There are so many aspects from
our campaign that I want to carry over into this position such as a commitment to hard work, getting
some great local projects across the line and an undertaking to continually listen to the community. I
will do rather than say. I will try not to get bogged down in being reactive or in procedure and process
but keep a focus on what is best for my community. I will make sure I am engaging with locals not just
during campaigns but all the time.
The Palaszczuk government has a great agenda of health, education, jobs and transport election
commitments to deliver on across the state and locally in Aspley. I intend to help make them happen in
any way I can. I am proud that we ran a local campaign based around real issues in Aspley, and we
managed to get some great transport, education and sporting commitments across the line. I am very
keen to ensure they happen.
Aspley consists of the suburbs of Geebung, Zillmere, Carseldine, McDowall, Chermside West,
Bridgeman Downs, Bald Hills, Aspley itself and a very small part of Albany Creek. Since I put my hand
up to run and since being elected I have been blown away by the number of people in the electorate I
have come across who, through their involvement in local organisations or on their own, are working
selflessly to make their community a better place to live. These people do not want any grand accolades;
they are not paid and, more often than not, they are fiercely bipartisan. I am immensely thankful to have
the opportunity to be able to work with these people throughout this term and get some great local wins
across the suburbs of the Aspley electorate.
Many of these suburbs are very different from one another, but most are linked through the
thoroughfares of Gympie Road and the north coast railway line. There are different communities in
Aspley, but they all have many things in common. They all want a good education for their children and
better opportunities for those who follow them. They all want good health outcomes so that they can trust the public health system when they need to use it. They want to be able to commute to work and
home again in as little time as possible to spend more time with their friends and loved ones. It is that
last point which is so important to people in Aspley and so important to me.
There is no doubt that there is a longstanding, historical, strong commitment of Labor
governments to major transport infrastructure in Queensland. With my private, departmental and
political background in the transport industry, I will fight hard to make sure my area always gets its fair
share. Public transport in particular has the possibility for massive step changes in the way people get
around and in where they choose to live. New road infrastructure is always important to keep up with
growth, but it is only though public transport investment that we can get ahead of demand. Light rail on
the Gold Coast, Springfield rail, Redcliffe rail and the entire Brisbane busway network are recent
examples of great state Labor investments in transport infrastructure. Cross River Rail and the
European Train Control System are the next cabs off the rank. They are both projects which will benefit
the Aspley electorate enormously. Enough about trains, and a bit about myself.
A lot of people ask me where the name ‘Mellish’ comes from. There is either the short answer or
the slightly longer answer. The short answer says that the name originates from somewhere south of
London, but the long answer goes some way to describing the background of my immediate family and
why I believe what I believe.
My paternal grandfather, Fred Mellish, came to Australia as a young foster-child from the UK,
very much starting from nothing. He battled his way through a variety of jobs and when World War II
came to the Pacific, he joined the Army in his mid-30s. Like many who joined at the time, this did not
go well for him. Upon being deployed to Singapore he was immediately captured and spent the next
three years in the notorious hellhole of Changi Prison and building the Burma Railway.
Unlike so many of his fellow Australians at Changi, he was very fortunate to survive the war and
return to Australia in 1945. Two more sons followed, including my father, before Fred’s death in a rail
accident in 1958, whereupon my grandmother, Hazel, was left to raise her three sons on her own. In
what is in hindsight a very sad coincidence, the local policeman at Redbank who had to deliver the
news to my grandmother was actually future Labor leader Bill Hayden. It was only through Fred and
Hazel’s perseverance through very different adversities that I am fortunate enough to be here today.
On the other side of my family, my mother’s upbringing was certainly no silver spoon affair either:
growing up with five other siblings, the daughter of a train driver in a modest three-bedroom house in
Ipswich. This thread of perseverance and hard work was instilled in my parents through theirs and in
me through my parents. My parents have always worked hard to help their community: my mother in
helping people get jobs and my father at TAFE helping people build their skills so they can get better
jobs.
I think the best thing I have inherited from my father apart from my height is probably his highly
tuned radar for bullcrap, if I can use that term, Mr Speaker. From my mother I would like to think I have
inherited a strong sense of social justice and helping those less fortunate than yourself as well as a
dose of diplomacy to balance out my father’s frankness, for lack of a better term. I thank my parents for
being a great example of post-war Australians who wanted their children to have it better than they
themselves had it growing up.
I still remember when my father graduated from university well into his adult life. He was the first
generation of our family to do so. Our parents made sure that we did not take anything for granted.
Growing up in Toowoomba my brothers and I were driven to secure academic scholarships to high
school, and our parents made sure we had the grades to attend our university, USQ, over the back
fence. I enjoyed USQ so much that I went back twice.
Despite much whingeing and occasional rebellions throughout our formative years, we were all
very grateful to have parents who saw the value in push
While I hold the view that politics is primarily about people, it is also about tangible policy issues
at the end of the day. I have always been interested in politics, not as a means to its own end but as a
way of implementing good policy which actually helps people. An essential part of implementing good
policy is being able to communicate. Many people in the media and politics have commented in recent
times about the ever-shortening political attention span of the public, political parties and media
coverage in general. This is being driven by a range of factors including, obviously, technology. Political
discourse has had to evolve from the printing press to radio to television and now to social media.
In 1985, well before his time, Neil Postman wrote about the corrosive effects of electronic media
on a democratic society. Postman said—
... television is the paradigm for our conception of public information. As the printing press did in an earlier time, television has
achieved the power to define the form in which news must come, and it has also defined how we shall respond to it.
In other words, the medium in which we consume political news defines what type of political
news is covered. On the surface this conclusion does not bode well for nuanced policy discussion in
the era of Facebook and Twitter; however, as parliamentarians we must all strive to still debate the big
issues and not just reduce every political argument to its shortest, most readily digestible form. I
genuinely believe there is still a place for serious public discussion of big issues at a state level because
there has to be, so working out ways to achieve that in the current media landscape will be one of my
goals in this place. For me that means two things: talking directly to people as often as I can and making
sure that what I talk about matters. On this issue Paul Keating had it right when he recently said—
... when those big ideas are not in evidence and the momentum isn’t there, the flux never materialises. Then the static takes over
and the static is now writ large by social media and the vacuous news cycle.
He continues—
I still believe that the power of the big idea or the power of a guiding light will always take precedence over the static of the
twitterssphere or anything like it. It’s more the pity that enough people in public life don’t believe that.
Having used that quote about big ideas in my maiden speech, and because I believe that politics
is actually about big ideas, I think it is important that I briefly talk about what I think will be one of the
biggest issues in public policy that governments will face over the next 10 to 20 years, and that is the
potentially devastating impact on the workforce of rapid advancements in technology if left unchecked.
Due to the increasing speed of telecommunications, increases in computing ability and the growth of
computer intelligence, we are currently in the midst of a substantial shift in the way society
communicates with itself and how work is organised. Technology is impacting not only the types of jobs
we have but on what the very nature of having a job means. I see one of the greatest risks to a fair
society from this technological revolution coming from the so-called ‘gig economy’, or basically
employment on demand.
This is a world where a job is created and ended with the click of a button on a smartphone.
Examples of platforms for this work run the full gamut of services from Airbnb to Etsy to Deliveroo and
tech giants such as Amazon. At its best, this model provides convenience, cheaper products and
friendlier service, but at its worst it is effectively circumventing generations of hard-won employment
rights such as penalty rates, workplace health and safety, superannuation and protection against unfair
dismissal. If left to its own devices, massive shifts in how work is allocated and apportioned will result
in further wealth concentration and lessening of opportunity—a ‘cheery wave from stranded
youngsters’, as it has been described.
As Atlassian founder Mike Cannon-Brookes recently said to a federal Senate inquiry—
Software is eating every industry in the world. Tech disruption is a very real thing. It’s happening all around us. It’s happening
faster than you think. And that’s hard for governments.
That is the reality. If governments wait for someone else to take the running on this issue, it will be too
late.
The International Monetary Fund—hardly a pack of rabid socialists—recently noted that the rise
of the gig economy has the potential to challenge the very structure of social safety nets which have
underpinned Western economies since World War II. There is no doubt it will be a real challenge for all
parliaments as to how we harness this technological revolution to make the lives of everyday Australians
better, not worse.
Broadly speaking, while we should always seek to create reforms that benefit the great majority
of people through greater competition of services and a higher quality and range of goods, we must
also consider how to manage the very real impact of these changes on the workers of the gig economy.
My fear is that a failure to acknowledge and anticipate these technological changes will further entrench
inequality, leading to a more divided society, and a highly unequal society leads to a fractured society
for everyone. To steal a quote from an excellent recent publication by federal member of parliament
Jim Chalmers and former CEO of NBN Co Mike Quigley—
Large numbers of people being left behind for an extended period is not conducive to social stability.
How do we respond to this change? We could do worse than looking into the history of our nation.
When the French scholar and later Minister of Labour and Social Welfare Albert Metin visited Australia
at the dawn of the 20th century he discovered a true oddity to his European eyes. Australia had
established labour legislation founded on conciliation, arbitration, workers’ protections and a minimum
wage but without the baggage of radical ideology. He dubbed our land a ‘workers’ paradise’ formed
through ‘socialism with no doctrine’.
We are all fortunate to be reminded that in Australia our world-leading social and economic
reforms were built on the back of strong argument, persuasion and consensus. I do not need to go
through the early history of workplace relations in Australia that led to labour leaders organising into a
political movement and taking the fight for reform into the parliamentary realm, but it is in this vein of
practical, common-sense responses to the changing nature of work that I believe we must face the
current wave of technological changes sweeping across our society, because the alternative to this
discussion being led by parliaments is that a void will be filled by major multinationals and consumers
themselves in a race to the bottom.
Just as Australian parliaments of the 1800s and early 1900s adapted and changed as the
understanding of work and industrial relations changed, so too do we need to adapt and change as the
nature of work changes yet again. The primary beneficiaries of these waves of technological change
must be Queensland workers and Queensland business owners, not tech billionaires from California. It
is not just workers who have much to lose. Queensland’s small, medium and large businesses have
the potential to be washed away by large overseas operators who may or may not be playing by the
same rules.
In Australia we have much to be proud of in our workplace conditions. We do not have the sheer
numbers of working poor that America has, for example, where the lack of a decent minimum wage
means that whole swathes of workers still need handouts to get by, but we cannot rest on our laurels.
Unions clearly have a stake in this, and it is very pleasing to see many of them driving public discussion
around on-demand employment in everything from trade services to warehousing to delivery services.
To quote a recent report from the Australian Council of Trade Unions—
We are seeing a generation of workers growing up without access to sick leave, annual leave, minimum rates of pay, OHS
protections and workers’ compensation.
I do not proclaim to offer all the answers today, but these are important questions that this
parliament can help answer. We cannot just ignore people being left behind by ever-increasing
technology and pull the ladder up after ourselves. We cannot sit back and hope that the tech billionaires
and start-ups from San Francisco driving these changes will have our community’s best interests at
heart. We as elected officials owe it to our constituents to make sure technological changes work for
our communities, not against them.
There are obviously many other policy challenges facing Queensland, and I am incredibly proud
to be part of a Labor government that will tackle many of them this term. The failure of the federal
government to deal with climate change means, increasingly, states are having to play a greater role
going forward. Queensland can obviously play a big role in this, as it has done before.
Sensible land clearing policy under previous state Labor governments was substantially
responsible for Australia meeting its emissions reduction targets by 2020 under the Kyoto Protocol. I
will have much more to say about this at the appropriate time but, both as a biologist and someone who
has worked in resource management in regional and rural Queensland, I take a keen interest in this.
In a similar vein to the points I was making regarding the regulation of technology, it is very
pleasing to see the Premier take a strong lead on cyberbullying, an issue that cannot be ignored. On
this and on so many other issues, as technology changes and adapts, government policy often needs
to change and adapt.
I take this opportunity to thank a range of people without whose help I surely would not be the
member for Aspley today. My wife, Vivienne, I cannot thank enough. Vivienne has always supported
me in everything I do, especially over the last year. She is probably the nicest, most talented and hardest
working person I know, but I am biased! She has very much made me a better person since I met her.
I thanked my parents earlier; my mother is here today. I also thank my brothers, Daniel and Joel, as
well as my extended family who helped on the campaign.
Labor Party branch members in Geebung and Aspley were an incredible help, making sure we
ran a tight ship and got our message out there to as many people as possible. My campaign team were
a hastily assembled pack of legends, particularly Rosemary, Louen, Stella, Daniel, Dearne, Jon, Anika
and Finn. My field organiser, Jack, and of course, Dean, were out there almost every day of the
campaign with me rain, hail or shine. I also thank Georgia from my office. Evan Moorhead and Jon
Persley from the party office ran a fantastic state campaign. Julie-Ann Campbell and Sarah Mawhinney
have big shoes to fill, but I know both of them are well and truly up to the task. I thank Jon and also
Josh Millroy, who as my organiser was always there to hear out my complaining and, importantly, filter
out my bolder ideas.
It is also worth thanking those who helped my campaign with external advice, both good and bad,
along the way, including Matt, Lachlan, Mark, Elliot, Izzy and Aaron. I particularly thank those politicians
kind enough to allow me to work with them at some point in the past, namely, Paul Lucas who gave me
my first job in politics and is still a great source of advice and friendship and still has a burning passion
for public policy, as well as Anna Bligh, Senator Chris Ketter, yourself, Mr Speaker, and Senator
Anthony Chisholm. Anthony in particular encouraged me to run and helped me in other innumerable
ways. When running a campaign, it is handy to have one of the best campaign minds in the country
willing to offer advice and provide support when needed. There is no point reinventing the wheel in
politics, and everything is done under the sun, so I am thankful for their advice along the journey.
I thank the Premier and the Deputy Premier for their support for what we were doing in Aspley
during the campaign, and I thank my neighbouring Labor MPs for not minding too much when we
pinched or borrowed their volunteers. I particularly thank the member for Sandgate who, despite having
to run his own race, was instrumental in helping our campaign throughout. I also thank the member for
Lilley, Wayne Swan, and Councillor Jared Cassidy for their support. I sincerely thank the union
movement, particularly Chris Gazenbeek and the SDA, Gary O’Halloran and the Plumbers Union, Peter
Biagini and the Transport Workers Union, and Ben Swan and Steve Baker at the Australian Workers’
Union, who all were very supportive of our campaign from day one.
I acknowledge former MP Tracy Davis for her nine years as the member for Aspley. I particularly
thank the former member for Aspley, Bonny Barry, who is doing it a bit tough at the moment but is
certainly not taking it lying down. I am sure many other members here would share in my best wishes
being sent to Bonny.
Lastly, and most importantly, I thank everyone in the electorate of Aspley who took time out to
talk to me during the campaign, whether it be on pre-poll, while doorknocking or just answering the
phone while I was interrupting their dinner. Those many conversations that people were very gracious
to have with me all helped in giving me a clearer picture of what needs to be done locally and what I
should be pushing for going forward. I will stand up for the people in my electorate. I will work hard and
continue to lobby to improve the lives of all members of my community. I am incredibly humbled to
represent them here in the Legislative Assembly of Queensland—and I am up for it.