Page 716 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 8 March 2016
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The challenge for me, which I will accept and will fulfil, is to ensure that Belconnen and Gungahlin remain some of the most inclusive and diverse areas of the territory. It is also to encourage investment so that they continue to become areas of economic growth that provide employment and investment opportunity for my constituents and their families.
I entered the Legislative Assembly following the retirement of Mary Porter. While I am excited and humbled that I have been given the opportunity to represent the people of Ginninderra, I understand that the resignation of Ms Porter is a significant loss to the territory. Mary has a well-deserved reputation as a highly principled politician who lived and served her constituents as a diligent, vocal and connected advocate for their concerns. I pay tribute to her passion and hard work fighting for her community. It was said in this place following her valedictory speech that she has given politicians a better name. Mary leaves a gap in Ginninderra in terms of community engagement. From today on as I go about my business in the chamber I will ensure that I am the one who closes this gap and upholds the same level of integrity that she did.
It seems appropriate that on International Women’s Day I acknowledge a second strong and impressive woman. My determination to fight for my community comes from my mother. She was widowed at 37 with four children aged five to 15 and was forced to sell our home in Hughes to pay death duties. Death duties was an unfair and arbitrary tax related to the transfer of assets to a spouse or beneficiary. It was easily met by the landed gentry but was much more difficult for a schoolteacher with a mortgage structured around an assumption of 30 years and two incomes.
Back then there were no safety nets, no death benefits, no mandatory superannuation to rely on. As an aside, Madam Speaker, after the death of my father I remember waiting as a young child for eons in a bank manager’s office until the frustrated bank manager stormed in and asked my mother why my very rude father was so late. In those days women did not borrow money and predictably no loan was offered. We have come a long way since then, but there is still much progress to be made.
Our family situation became difficult. Two older children were farmed out to friends and I went to boarding school at seven. My mother accepted a position as boarding house mistress at the Girls Grammar School where she was an art teacher. This removal from my family at a very young age, which I did not properly understand, began for me the formation of a strong commitment to social justice, although of course I did not have a name for it at that time.
My eventual realisation many years later that ill-conceived laws had caused my family to be torn apart caused me to question to this day the impact and intent of laws and regulation. The temporary scattering of the family was for me permanent. I completed my schooling at boarding school. Some might think such vicissitudes of life would be enough to make a mere mortal give up but thankfully my mother is neither mere nor, I would suggest, mortal. As evidence of her immortality, I offer the fact that although she could not be here today she is still teaching full-time high school in Leeton in the Riverina. In Leeton today it is 40 degrees. My mother is going to be 79 years old this year. She is a tough woman. My mother understands the value
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