I certainly welcome the opportunity to speak on the Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2017-2018 and the associated bills. In my view, it has been a very responsible budget and it builds on initiatives that the coalition government has built in the past and which it has certainly been very good at. Just from the perspective…
On Saturday night I attended a fantastic event hosted by the Rotary Club of Mossman to celebrate the centenary of the Rotary Foundation. At the event, held on the beautiful High Falls Farm, which is about 14 kilometres out of Mossman, six local people were awarded for their outstanding contributions to the Douglas community as…
This Friday night I am really looking forward to attending the celebrations of Sea Swift's 30th anniversary. Sea Swift transports the bulk of the freight goods from Cairns to Cape York and the furthest reaches of the Torres Strait Islands, and recently expanded into the Northern Territory. It offers mothershipping, project and charter services and…
For the last four years, the DANII Foundation has been knocking on politicians' doors to raise awareness of a technology that prevents type 1 diabetics dying in their sleep as a result of deadly low blood sugar, hypoglycaemia. In my electorate, Cairns mum Vicki McDonald has been a very strong advocate for making this lifesaving…
I move: That this House: (1) notes that: (a) 24 March is World Tuberculosis Day, and marks the anniversary of German Nobel Laureate Dr Robert Koch's 1882 discovery of the bacterium that causes tuberculosis; (b) tuberculosis is contagious and airborne, ranking as the world's leading cause of death from a single infectious agent; (c) in…
I present the report of the Australian Parliamentary Delegation to the 25th annual meeting of the Asia-Pacific Parliamentary Forum held in Natadola, Fiji, from 15 to 19 January 2017. I was accompanied on the delegation by the member for Paterson, who is across the chamber here, and senators Moore and Williams. The APPF is an…
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…