I begin by acknowledging that we meet on the lands of the Dharug people and I pay my respects to elders, past, present and emerging and thank them for their custodianship.
Can I thank Lynda Voltz, Julia Finn, and my friend and colleague who’s online today, Member for Werriwa, Anne Stanley.
There’s one more person online I want to thank and celebrate their tremendous contribution.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. I don’t think there’s a door left in Parramatta that this person hasn’t rapped their knuckles on: Julie Owens.
Julie has been indefatigable. The Liberals always prized and sought Parramatta. They smugly chalked it up in their column so many times she helped wipe the smirk off their faces. Didn’t need to be all showy about it, Julie just rolled up the sleeves and proved them wrong.
Some ponder: does the party or the individual have a bigger influence on the eventual outcome secured in a seat? In Parramatta, the instant answer to that question is inevitably, inarguably: Julie Owens.
I still can’t believe your name won’t be on the ballot paper at the next election, Julie.
But what I know for a fact is that the people of this area, the branch members here and beyond, enormously respect what you have done, your contribution to the federal parliament, your personal decency. Thank you.
Jack Ferguson
It means a great deal to me personally to join with you to respect the efforts of a Labor legend of Western Sydney.
A husband and father of three sons and two daughters.
A veteran who served in World War II.
A farm hand, textile worker, brickie.
A unionist.
Eventually, a Deputy Premier in one of this state’s iconic governments.
History has many ways of marking what Jack Ferguson achieved in his life.
But I do love how, when you turn to the NSW State Parliament bio for Jack, who was one of the state’s longer serving Deputy Leaders, it records that Jack Ferguson, in this precise order, was: “President of the Guildford Branch and Deputy Leader.” As Labor old timers remind us, your local branch always comes first.
When you take time to learn about his journey, you learn something of the character of the man.
You look at what his others said about him and the way he reacted to pivotal points in his life, you get to know he was a man of humility, integrity, grit.
Of Jack’s political career, we remember him notably as Neville Wran’s deputy for ten years.
You’d assume that durable partnership sprang easily. But being a close friend of Neville Wran was not assured, nor readily attainable.
If you were a friend of Neville’s, according to long-time former observers of NSW politics, journalists Mike Steketee and Milton Cockburn, it was likely due to a combination of “a powerful political intellect” and “earthy charm”.
When people tell you Jack Ferguson was one of the few people Neville Wran really counted as a close friend, you get a sense of why.
Sometimes in politics, key moments define you, what you stand for, how you approach issues and points in time.
One of those moments was when Jack decided to run for Deputy Leader, when an utterly Western Sydney flavour shone through.
Senior Labor figures hopping in a car guided by a mission, drive out west.
They turn up at Jack’s place, in Guildford.
They take him out for a Chinese meal, in Carlingford.
And between sharing spiced dishes and boiled rice, those same figures put forward an idea: why don’t you run for Deputy?
The response of the man who would end up in that position for the next decade is an exclamation you’d not expect: “Christ, it can’t be me!”.
As you learn about Jack you learn of the characteristics that made him such a success: modesty, absence of any unseemly, misplaced ambition, not prone to hate, quick to forgive, his slap on the back marking his love for finding ways to work with people, pragmatism.
Driven practically
For that generation of Labor representatives, they grew up on stories of an earlier iconic government, the McKell Labor government.
Wran would influence the next generation similarly. The energy he applied, the issues he focused on, the manic attention and rigorous concentration on the regions. Very McKell, very much Wran.
Visiting regions whenever, however, he could, bouncing in planes flown by former WWII pilots who then served as members of his Shadow Ministry to cars trekking kilometre on kilometre to a regional country show.
Like McKell before him, Wran knew success lay in making sure regions were at the forefront of your thinking and plans. Of 99 NSW seats, Wran visited 97 of them.
Elected in 1976, Jack as his Deputy, with a mandate sharply focused on the things that meant something to ordinary people.
As former press secretary Brian Dale reflected: “The public issues he concentrated on were those which affected the voters’ pockets,”
You couldn’t be more bread and butter than focusing on the cost of bread, milk and meat; or getting more resources dedicated to home building, delivering no-fault third party insurance; restraining the greed of “rapacious developers”.
Public transport improvements dominated the agenda — looking to cut fares, air-condition trains and buses, add more buses and trains, plotting new rail construction, building commuter parking and bicycle paths.
In office, Wran would undertake the bold stuff but practical considerations always guided him. A day after announcing his resignation, Wran said:
“Whereas some Labor governments in the past rushed in and tried to do everything at once, we tried to keep pace with community opinion. When the community didn’t have an opinion, we’d endeavour to create an environment whereby the community would accept it as if they’d thought of it themselves.”
Sometimes history is made by breaking new ground, but there is no shame in taking note of lessons learned.
In Wran’s case it was the energy applied to rally communities far and wide, banded together by an agenda responding to their needs.
Time to learn, act
Where we stand now is a perfect moment to emulate that.
Particularly for Western Sydney, getting back on its feet after shouldering the worst of a 106 day lockdown.
Efforts were made to condition us to believe it was difficult to respond to “unprecedented times”. That we should just be happy with what was achieved given the circumstances.
We were told by some leaders that NSW set the “gold standard” in pandemic management.
Some believed the former NSW Premier moved too late, egged on by a Prime Minister who lauded her for resisting a lockdown in the face of climbing cases and a lack of vaccines.
The same Prime Minister who then later resisted the former Premier’s earlier calls for stronger financial aid. Always ambitious for his “friends”, is Scott.
We thought it might be a short lockdown. We were wrong.
We thought we’d all be a city “in it together”. We were wrong again.
We needed vaccines in the west, backed by a strong public health campaign. Strike three, wrong again.
We got Federal and NSW Liberal announcements of “boots on the ground” and police on horseback.
Helicopters over our roofs, fingers prying through shopping bags to check we were doing the right thing.
When western Sydney federal Labor MPs joined to call on Scott Morrison to deploy the ADF to set up and run vax hubs in the hardest hit communities he ignored us.
When asked in Parliament why he wouldn’t do it, Scott Morrison turned his back on the question — turned his back on Western Sydney.
And we only called on him to do that because on so many occasions we had asked the NSW Liberals to set them up and they wouldn’t.
3,500 people in the suburbs around Mount Druitt had to test positive for COVID before we got a mass walk-in vax hub in mid-September.
When lockdown ended a few weeks later, nearly 7,000 largely unvaccinated people had contracted the virus.
Also appreciate the power of imagery that injected itself in the midst of our struggle, during the worst of the lockdown.
As western Sydney residents asked: “Can we just get vaccinated, get back to work and get our kids back to school?” In the middle of all that, this: the images of mask-free, mass gatherings on the other side of the city. Dancing, beachside yoga classes, free movement.
We’re locked down, treated like we’re responsible for the Bondi cluster.
Made to jump through testing and vaccination hoops just to leave our local government areas to make a living.
The Liberals were content to draw a line through the middle of Sydney, carve it up — and see how we on the other side fared.
It was a grossly uneven line at that. To the west of the lockdown LGAs the Liberals bizarrely managed to divide the Penrith LGA, locking down the largely Labor voting areas and leaving free the largely Liberal voting ones.
On top of that, while we called for weeks for vax hubs in our areas, the Liberals leapt right over locked down LGAs to plonk vax hubs or pop up mental health services into Penrith. The Liberals played favorites with public health. In the middle of a pandemic.
The people who’ll squirm the most, the ones most discomforted by what I’m saying here, they’ll accuse me of engaging in class warfare.
Let me tell you: the people we care about, they were the ones shunted straight into the middle of class warfare as it played out through lockdown. Know this:
● At the start of the lockdown, some of the wealthiest suburbs in the city had vaccination rates three times higher than the west (and with a better ability to work from home).
● By the end of our lockdown, 60 percent of the deaths were experienced in the west and southwest of Sydney. Many of these deaths were preventable.
That, that’s class warfare, right there. Utterly devastating and disappointing.
The stories of people dying at home with COVID. Losing young people with so much to live for. Tragic.
And when deaths occured, I couldn’t believe the clinical observation “they were people with underlying conditions”, as if to suggest COVID wasn’t to blame.
No: they’re exactly the people that a strong public health response should target to get vaccinated quickly, urgently protected against COVID.
I’m as furious hearing that as I am with people lecturing us to live with COVID. I look at the people uttering that free advice and think — sure, you’ve got the means to look after yourself.
What about the average Joe (or Joan), some working three jobs (including out there on the frontlines while many of us were working from home), trying to pay the rent, put food on the table for the kids, unable to pay for private health. What are you telling them, when you say: learn to live with COVID?
This was a very demographic pandemic, where quick, decisive action was needed to protect the vulnerable. And the Federal and NSW government were found wanting, and ordinary people paid the price for that.
In a crisis of this magnitude, surely we could expect better?
Surely, in this day and age, in a pandemic, Liberal governments don’t classify care and support based on the voting patterns of the people crying out for help?
Turns out the phrase “we’re all in this together,” is not a creed to live by.
Just a slogan the Liberals relied upon to deflect difficult questions about their mismanagement through the crisis.
Like so much of what we see out of the Liberal Party — Federal and State — these days, it’s all about the marketing, the logo, the slogan.
It’s all “National Plans”, multi-stage roadmaps, Operation COVID-Shield, apps that hardly kept us COVID-Safe.
Picking a side
Living through that classist, ideological lockdown triggered something.
As I watched the Liberals divide this great city — the struggle we faced getting the support we needed to protect the health and livelihoods of the people we cared about — it reinforced to me all the reasons why I took out a Labor Party ticket as a teenager.
Those 106 days also took me back a few days. More than 14,000 days actually.
To 1982 when a Health Minister called Laurie Brereton was audacious enough to move hospital beds from the east of the city to the west.
It caused such a commotion. Dominated radio, TV, newspapers. I was a kid watching that battle. I remember it all to this day.
Trying to make sense of what was wrong with wanting to help people in my part of far flung Sydney — like in Blacktown — to get better quality health care.
It took Labor to demand better, to deliver for people in the outer suburbs.
To be there for one-income, blue collar families like mine, who simply couldn’t rely on private health insurance, costly specialists and depended deeply on a strong public health system, when it was needed.
The same people who had to wait a few more years before the arrival in their letterboxes of these plastic cards that bore the name “Medicare”, the product of a new Labor government in Canberra.
At last: universal health care, to give average Australians access to something that would help deliver a better quality of life.
Watching these fights — with Liberals wildly claiming better health care for people in the suburbs would be the end of our health system as we knew it — these were the fights that made it worth picking a side, joining the great Australian Labor Party.
Because growing up and living in the western suburbs you realise you can never take a backward step in demanding what is right for our people. And we never should.
1982. 2021. The nearly 40 years that separate these dates doesn’t matter.
And yet struggle is still the same. Exactly the same.
Our region still needs critical investment in public healthcare.
GPs tell me five percent of all those who caught COVID might experience debilitating long COVID, lingering for ages.
All that compounded atop other health issues that affect many in our communities: our demographics, like the Liberals, make it hard to be healthy. Heart disease, diabetes, obesity dampens the quality of life or shortens it. Being forced to work late shifts and the disruption that causes.
Life expectancy worsens as you travel away from the Sydney CBD and reach the west. Fact. We can make a difference here. Governments can make active decisions to do better for the people of Western Sydney.
But really, can we expect much from the Liberals when their connection and care for the western suburbs is as deep and lasting as an entry in Google Maps: dropping a red pin on a polling place, getting there to count the votes, moving on straight after.
Moving on to the sneering, contemptible assessments made by the likes of senior Liberals like Pru Goward who use national media to dismiss our people as the underclass, “damaged, lacking in trust and discipline, and highly self-interested” — sounds more like their own party room.
Labor’s responsibility to the western suburbs is to listen, to care, to fight for it, to deliver.
There are more federal seats in our region than there are in a lot of states. We can never take people here for granted. We’ve always got to repay the faith in practical, meaningful ways.
And now is the time to do it. Because it’s needed more than ever.
They’re in strife
The Liberals know they’re in big trouble, their candidates are taking a backward step from the Liberal brand.
For example, in the upcoming local government election here in NSW, Liberal Councillors in the largest council area in Western Sydney — Blacktown — are re-badging themselves as “independent”.
Liberals have run as Councillors here for as long as I can remember.
But not anymore. I thought it was just in Blacktown, but it’s happening here in Parramatta and over in Fairfield as well. Extraordinary.
Running on different tickets, designed to confuse the voters. Their way to maybe help voters overlook and forget how they were silent as their colleagues in Macquarie Street divided us from the east and turned the other cheek when we were crying out for help.
The other sign that tells me Scott Morrison knows he’s in strife: the Federal Liberals are trying to rig and steal the next election. Bringing in electoral laws to supposedly clamp down on voter fraud, something that hasn’t managed to attract major prosecutions. Like setting up a search warrant for the boogie man.
The party that is supposed to be anti red-tape is tangling up the voting process in so much red-tape just to lock out First Nation or low income voters — the very people who want to send a big message about how badly they were treated through lockdown.
The Liberals are trying to steal the next election. We won’t let them get away with it.
They worked quicker on bringing in these laws than they did on their stalled anti-corruption commission. Again, another form of their class warfare.
Besides dropping the Liberal and running as fake independents, or trying to steal elections, the Liberals here are trying a charm offensive. Visiting Western Sydney as often as they can, camera crews in tow.
I don’t care how many pubs the new Premier visits in our area, my message to him is simple:
If you think you’ll get Western Sydney cred for tapping a keg or appointing the Member for Penrith as your Deputy, you are just spotlighting how out of touch you are. Relying on tricks as opposed to delivering seriously for the west.
The task of building something better in our region is going to be big, demanding. No gimmicks. Concrete commitment. Serious investment.
Reducing surgery wait times at our hospitals, improving public transport quality, building better social housing and supporting working class people to move into new homes, rejuvenating local suburbs, decongesting roads without relying on tolls to do that, jobs closer to home as opposed to the other side of the city. Revitalising manufacturing.
Affordable, accessible childcare, modern, well resourced schools targeting support to outer suburbs and kids with high need, reinvigorated TAFEs as opposed to closing campuses, universities with a presence close to our suburbs.
Can we also, finally, see ordinary workers get a decent pay rise and secure work? You may think now is not the time to push for that, but we are seeing the reports of big profits being recorded over the last few months. Or companies profiting from Jobkeeper who shouldn’t have.
After the GFC we were told wages wouldn’t move while unemployment was high. Now the pandemic hit but unemployment has fallen and we still have a Liberal government that can’t bring itself to support wages increases for low income workers.
And while falling unemployment should always be cheered on, scratch the surface: the numbers are driven by the reality that people are giving up looking for work. Others are registering as sole traders, delivering meals or driving people around in an Ola or Uber service.
We should be able to do better. We can do better.
Western Sydney residents want to work hard to deliver a better life for themselves and their families. That is a Labor cause we can sign up and fight for 24/7, 365 days a year.
All that I outlined before is a big agenda that Labor — federal and state — can work together as one on to deliver for Western Sydney.
Because at the moment the Federal and State Liberal governments are working lockstep to frustrate this. Look at infrastructure for example.
The Federal government likes to spend millions of taxpayer dollars on advertising to tell us they’re spending billions of taxpayer dollars on infrastructure.
If you’re delivering infrastructure that makes a difference, let that speak for itself. That’s the job of Government.
Yet they have consistently underspent on infrastructure, to the tune of $1bn. With choked roads, crowded public transport how is that even possible?
Here’s the answer: the Federal Liberals will not invest in any infrastructure that the NSW Liberals won’t back.
We’ve seen how the NSW Liberals make their investment decisions: forget “evidence-based decision making”. The needs that matter are the ones of Liberal mates with great connections — someone who can score $140m for a hospital in Wagga Wagga sooner than you can snap: “Get me Dominic Perrottet”.
The lockstep works like this: when I’ve spoken up for people in new estates screaming for investment in new roads or in built up areas where infrastructure has failed to keep pace with that growth, the NSW Liberals say fixing that isn’t a priority, their Federal counterparts shrug, say they can’t fund that project, move on to a commuter carpark they can announce in a marginal Liberal seat.
The abuse of taxpayer dollars, the Liberals disgraceful shovelling of those dollars for crude political end, their commitment to the ideological above the practical.
This grimy thread runs all the way from Macquarie Street right down to the Lodge.
The only difference is an actual, legitimate anti-corruption body can cut the cord and clean things up at the Sydney end.
Meanwhile in Canberra, it’s been over 1,000 days since Scott Morrison promised a Federal ICAC. Not even close to happening. We know why.
Wasted fights, wasted years
Governments in past times could point to advances.
They made big calls, took the nation forward, did things that other countries now envy.
But clearly, many of us are particularly proud of the Labor achievements. Besides universal healthcare:
● we modernised the economy and set in on a recession free path (until last year);
● we championed superannuation to lift incomes after retirement and created one of the largest savings pools on the planet;
● we championed school retention rates, backed TAFE, opened new universities to give working class kids a chance to get ahead;
● we began building a truly national broadband network;
● we took climate change seriously, reduced emissions and even the Libs now shamelessly count our reductions in their own stats (without giving us credit); and,
● created the National Disability Insurance scheme to deliver better care and support.
Contrast it to the angry, combative approach of the Liberals and Nationals since coming to office under Tony Abbott. Turning good policy into a punching bag, all they have to show: self-inflicted upper cuts, stuffing strewn around their ankles.
An agenda about tearing things down, not lifting the nation up. Then crawling their way to a solution someone else thought of first.
And now, after a decade of division, the Liberals have capitulated on nearly every fight they fabricated.
Fought rabidly on climate change, now sheepishly chewing on their own words as our allies watch in disbelief (and imagine how stunned they were by the Liberal leaking of the text messages of fellow world leaders)
Where are the Liberal debt trucks that roamed our streets, what happened to rampaging about debt and deficits? Are they trying to find a bigger truck for the billboard they need to lug telling us they’re responsible for a trillion-dollar debt?
Haranguing us about “Labor waste” on school halls welcomed by needy communities, while the Liberals stood by and watched big, profitable companies abuse the JobKeeper program to the extent that that wasted money overshadowed what government would invest in education in one year.
Labelled our plan to build a national broadband network wasteful, then said that they would do it differently, for less — then ending up copying our plans but by which point they spent an eye-wateringly larger amount.
The Liberals love talking about manufacturing now, but remember how they hounded the car makers out of the country? Dared them to leave.
On coming to office they cut our investment in manufacturing, then committed to a manufacturing plan that coincidentally looks similar to what we did in government.
Useless fights, splitting the nation, holding us back.
Having said that, Labor must be prepared to fight hard, to fight back stronger. We cannot be timid in taking that fight up to the Liberals.
Without blinking, our job is to remind everyone how the Liberals failed the nation at the worst possible time.
The bulk of our policies should be released during the campaign proper, showing how we will fight hard for the people and ideas we believe in — remembering the method of those who came before us.
Bringing people together from across regions to unite around an agenda that means something to ordinary people. Improving lives with practical policies.
Some will say my prescription is too negative, we need to pump out positive policies to contrast the government.
Why, right now? So they can steal the ones they like, dilute to useless other ideas we put forward or beat us over the head with ones they don’t like? No, thank you.
We’ve lost three elections on the trot now and after every loss the same people who lectured us about being positive, tell us that “Oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose them”.
Our job is not to play nice or give an inch as we build the plank to walk off this awful, inept, chaotic Morrison government.
Jack’s Legacy
When the nation needed the Liberals to get their act together, when our region needed the Liberals to get their act together, they failed us.
Their constant political diet of division and point scoring left them without the nous or know-how to unite us and see average Australians safely through crisis.
They left us with marketing gimmicks and slogans when we needed vaccines, national quarantine, quick action, strong public health campaigns.
The sounds the Liberals need ringing in their ears is our knocking on the door of the Ministerial Wing; Labor turning up to take out that trash, end the corruption and waste, stop the drama, govern properly, in the best interests of all Australians, done with care and respect.
The Liberals were not just unable to breach the divide that exists in our society, their failures deepened them. It’s Labor’s job to repair the breach.
People like Jack Ferguson left us a legacy that we should build upon today: repair the divide, bring people back together, with a commitment to make a difference in the lives of the people of Western Sydney.
The First Nations people, to the ones that have made Western Sydney their home for generations, to the ones who joined us from all corners of the globe to make a better life and contribute to our region.
And in fighting this fight, we look to bring back Labor voters across the country, joining them up with an agenda that delivers for ordinary voters — from Western Sydney to Wilcannia to West Australia.
We need you and other party members to talk to friends, family, neighbours, work mates. Social media is something, it ain’t everything.
Connections will matter, personal touches count. Energising Labor voters, bringing on board other voters too, this is something we must work on together. Your conversations will matter, can make a difference.
This election is up for grabs — but we will have to fight hard to prise government out of the fists of a Liberal party that will do and say whatever they can to win, even rig elections. Tougher, stronger, hungrier. Relentless. Determined to make a difference for the people that matter and who count on us to deliver.
Ed Husic delivered the Jack Ferguson Memorial Lecture on 6 November, 2021.
