My wife, Yolonde, and I are both very proud to be new members of the Mossman Botanic Garden, a unique project in the world of botany and conservation. Mossman Botanic Garden began an incredible journey seven years ago with an idea of a botanical garden run as a not-for-profit organisation situated in a world-class tourism…
I rise here today as the member for Leichhardt and the member for the wet tropics in the real tropical capital of Tropical North Queensland-Cairns, of course. I am here to talk about somewhere even further north. The island of Erub is one of the easternmost islands in the Torres Strait and has a population…
I am certainly pleased to speak against this motion today. I have long advocated for the reduction of penalty rates, and I refuse to be a hypocrite like the Leader of the Opposition. Leichhardt is the electorate most highly dependent on tourism. It is responsible for 20 per cent of employment, and it is a…
Australia has recently commemorated the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Darwin. However, there is another northern outpost that was also very heavily targeted yet barely rates a mention in Australian history books. I am talking about the bombing of Horn Island in the Torres Strait, which was the second hardest hit base in Australia…
Last Wednesday I proudly presented uniforms to the Cairns Regional Hockey Academy Singapore Development Tour squad for 2017. These girls have been preparing and training hard for eight weeks, so it was wonderful to recognise their efforts in front of their friends and families. Today they are flying to Singapore where they will play two…
On Tuesday next week, in the small community of Mareeba, west of Cairns, there will be a huge outpouring of community loss and grief at the funeral of Noeline Ikin, a very special woman who has fought for regional Australia to the very end. Noeline typified the values that regional communities hold dear: honesty, integrity,…
I stand here today as the co-chair of the Australian Tuberculosis Caucus, and I wish to acknowledge my other co-chair, the Hon. Matt Thistlethwaite. We are very capably, between the two of us, representing this issue here in this country. I also acknowledge my colleague and very good friend the Rt Hon. Nick Herbert, the…
I also rise to speak on the Parliamentary Entitlements Legislation Amendment Bill 2017 today. I was keen to do so primarily because my views on the scrapping of the gold pass have certainly been grossly misrepresented by various media outlets that have not even bothered to check the facts or pick up a phone and…
I was certainly taken aback today in reading in today's media of the salary package of Australia Post's CEO Ahmed Fahour. Earning $5.6 million in 2016, he was Australia's highest paid public servant. Five other executives in Australia Post received salaries ranging from $1.3 million to $1.8 million. This is not the first time there…
In recent weeks we have seen, again, the tragedy of domestic and family violence in the headlines. The murder of Gold Coast mother Teresa Bradford by her estranged husband, while he was out on bail on domestic violence charges, beggars belief. It has renewed calls for victims of domestic violence to be told if the…