Mayo Electorate

Mr BIGNELL (Mawson) (15:17): The best member for Mayo will be a local member for Mayo—not some blow-in from Victoria. I find it really surprising, and I think the people of Finniss will react very badly to someone who wants to go along party lines instead of going along with the best person for the job.

I was at a function last night that the member for Finniss was invited to, and he was a no-show. He was a no-show at the Parawa Ag Bureau function in Normanville. He sent Georgina Downer along as his proxy so that people could meet her because no-one knows who she is. She has spent the past 20 years in Victoria. It is a bit impolite to send along someone as your proxy when you could quite easily have made it along to the function.

I went to my letterbox this morning and there was all this mail in there from the Liberal Party. That is how worried they are. They are spending so much money on trying to get Georgina Downer up because they know she is a hard proposition for the electorate that I live in to accept. She is from Victoria. She got out of South Australia as soon as she could. She said disparaging things about the state where she was born. She missed out on preselection in Victoria. Now she has come back because she thinks that, like Buckingham Palace and the royal dynasty, she can take Mayo over as some God-given birthright; that because great-grandaddy, grandaddy and daddy had the seat, she is entitled to have the seat. Well, no. The people—

An honourable member interjecting:

Mr BIGNELL: Now someone is interjecting whose dad was in the Senate. This is good form, isn't it? It is not Georgina Downer's God-given right to inherit a seat. That seat, and that representative, belongs to the people of Mayo: people like me who live down there who want a local person. We do not want someone who has just moved over here. I am not sure if she is on the electoral roll yet. Her name had not popped up when I had a look.

She is trying to get on the electoral roll, but she is not on there. I am not sure whether her children go to school in South Australia or if they are still in Victoria. I know she has taken leave from her job with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute but she has not quit that job. Does Georgina Downer intend to actually move to South Australia whether she wins or loses? Is she going to make that commitment, that she will actually move here?

What also disturbs me, amongst a lot of other things that Georgina Downer has done, are her comments on the ABC over the years. At the national Liberal Party Federal Council over the weekend, we saw that they voted to get rid of the ABC, to privatise it. That is a disgrace. It is regional people, people in the electorate of Mayo, who really need the ABC.

If you go and talk to some people on Kangaroo Island—and I do not know whether Georgina Downer has ever been to Kangaroo Island, but I get there regularly, and I was talking to people there last week—they cannot get ABC TV over there after about 7 o'clock at night because of what the ABC tells them are atmospheric conditions. They need more funding into the ABC, funding that has been ripped out by successive Coalition governments.

I worked at the ABC from 1996 to 2001, and the Coalition government was ripping through that place, ripping money out of it and taking things out of South Australia and centralising them in Sydney. The ABC was becoming the Sydney broadcasting corporation. Those cuts have intensified in the past few years under a different coalition government.

We need the ABC. We do not need it privatised, which the Liberal Party supported on the weekend, and we do not need it defunded to the extent that it no longer provides the efficient service it can. Anyone listening to the 7pm radio bulletin on Sunday night would have heard rugby scores out of Queensland and New South Wales and a story about someone who was attacked in their home in Coffs Harbour. I do not care about that; I want some national news, but I want local news as well.

The ABC has been defunded so badly that there is no money there to have journalists on here in Adelaide to read bulletins over the weekends, to read bulletins on weeknights. I want a better ABC than that for my relatives in country South Australia and for the people I represent in the seat of Mawson. That is what I want, a better ABC. Georgina Downer and the Liberal Party want to tear it apart, an institution that has looked after Australia, got the message out across Australia, for more than 85 years. That is a disgrace.

The Liberal Party will lose Mayo because they do not stand up for the people they want to represent. They have a candidate who is from out of this state and she is out of touch.

Time expired.