MS BURCH (Brindabella), by leave: First, I would like to acknowledge the Ngunnawal people as the traditional owners of this land, and I offer my respect to them. I would also like to congratulate you, Mr Speaker, on your appointment to the the position of Speaker of the Seventh Assembly. There are 340,000 people currently living in Canberra who rely on a grand total of 17 members to represent them in this Assembly. I have been chosen by our community as one of those 17. It is a great honour and one that I hope to live up to over the coming years.

As this is my first speech as a member of this place, I would like to begin by thanking a few people whose wisdom, support, encouragement and dedication were central to the success of my campaign: the senior campaign team of Daniel Hughes, David Pettersson, Troy Swan, Michael Jard, Marc Emerson and Jennie Mardel; my friends and neighbours; and, of course, the grassroots members of the Labor Party. You gave up your afternoons, evenings, weekends and public holidays. You did more than I could have asked in order to help me reach this place, and I am so very grateful. I thank you.

Thanks also must go to the ALP campaign director, Matthew Cossey, for all his assistance in running such a strong and positive campaign, and I wish him well in his new role. To my fellow Labor candidates, and to the recently retired MLAs, Karin MacDonald and Wayne Berry, I thank them for their dedication to the party and to the community. In particular, I would like to pay tribute to former MLA, Mick Gentleman, who has joined us here today, for his service to the people of Canberra and for his personal support, advice and encouragement during my campaign. Over the course of the last Assembly, Mick Gentleman served our community with dedication and vision. He led the way in reducing Canberra's carbon footprint and worked tirelessly for the people of Brindabella throughout his term. For that, Mick, we owe you our sincere thanks.

Now to my family: firstly, my mother, father, brothers and sisters. While my father and two older brothers are no longer with us, I do, indeed, feel they are here with me today. They, with my mother, instilled in me core beliefs of a fair go for all, that we are, indeed, all equal and that we all have a right to be heard. To my sisters and younger brother, thank you for being here. We have shared the good times and the bad, and sharing is all about family. And we are family.

While I made the final decision to run for the election, my family also lived and breathed the campaign. They shared my highs as well as my lows. So too my husband, Cam, and my sons, Kain, Tom and Lloyd, I owe you much. You have given me strength, support and encouragement. You made my hard days easier and my good days much better. And, finally, I want to thank the people of Brindabella.

Unlike our state colleagues, members of this place are charged with both state and local responsibilities. In re-electing a Labor government, the people of Canberra have shown trust in Labor's record and vision in a great many areas—from educational reform to local services, to transport policy, to investing in our health system. The people of Canberra have chosen a Labor government to represent their interests. As someone chosen by my fellow Brindabella residents and as the newest member in the ACT government, I am humbled and deeply grateful.

Mr Speaker, I was raised in a small home with my three brothers and two sisters. Growing up in that home taught me a great deal about fairness, hard work and the value of mutual understanding. At the age of 16, I left school and spent a bit of time working in a bank and for a trading company, and I realised that that type of work was not for me; I wanted to help people. I began training as a nurse, and it was one of the best decisions I have made.

Working as a nurse has afforded me a perspective on life that has held me in good stead throughout my working career and, indeed, my whole life. I have worked in urban and rural areas, in large hospitals, aged-care services and the community health sector. After deciding to try something new and to better manage the responsibilities of a young family, I moved out of health and took over as an owner-operator of a childcare centre in rural New South Wales.

With a lot of support from my family, I returned to study and gained bachelor and post-graduate qualifications. With new skills in hand, I took up a position managing a health and community support service. I was responsible for delivering health services to that particular region, with nursing, aged care and family support being amongst them.

Ever being eager to explore new opportunities and to see the rich diversity of our country, when the opportunity presented itself our family moved to Alice Springs, where I worked with Indigenous communities to increase access to GP services. I also travelled across the deserts of Northern Australia to supervise the construction of medical student accommodation in remote communities and witnessed the positive outcomes that can be achieved when government, non-government and community groups work together.

I have been involved in the development of health policy with various public service and non-government organisations. More recently, I was the CEO of the Australian Rural Health Education Network. It works across the university sector to improve health outcomes through health workforce training, research and innovative service models.

After what I considered to be a fairly diverse background, I feel lucky to have experienced life from several perspectives. I understand the burden carried by our front-line health professionals and how important it is for government to listen to them, work with them and support them in their work.

I recall the pressures of running a small business while raising a small family, and I appreciate the contribution that small business has made to this city's economy. I know all too well that returning to study after years in the workforce is daunting for many, and I believe the government should do all it can to provide access to education for all Australians.

It is the Australian values of fairness, justice and appreciation for diversity that are the spirit of our Labor Party. It is the Labor Party that charts a course between supporting the needs of small business and ensuring that workers have a fair go. We know that protecting workers' rights and encouraging business growth can, and indeed must, go hand in hand. Unions and business owners in the end have a united goal to provide opportunities for all.

It is the Labor government who the people of the ACT have chosen to trust, and it is our responsibility to make sure that trust is rewarded. We need to continue investing in our health system, while ensuring our local schools are looked after, by meeting the day-to-day needs of our citizens and helping small businesses drive our local economy. It is going to be hard, but it can be done.

Mr Speaker, I believe there are three areas in particular where the government has an essential role in planning towards the future of our wellbeing. The first area is education. Access to and successful participation in quality education is and will remain the great deciding factor in the direction of many of our lives. In a nation as prosperous as ours, it should not be possible for students to reach high school lacking the most basic reading and writing skills; yet it seems that some students are doing just that. We are not talking about a particularly large group, but for any student covering up an inability to read by putting on a tough face and disrupting their class, the long-term effects can hardly be more significant. Unless remedied, I fear that those students will be at increasing disadvantage for the rest of their academic, personal and professional lives.

We need to find those students and we must help them catch up with their classmates. We need to help those students catch up today, and we need to reduce the number of kids who appear with similar problems tomorrow. We must ensure that as children move through school, they all take the essential literacy and numeracy skills with them. In practice, this will mean investing in outreach and intensive learning programs for our students. It will mean speaking to teachers, parents and students and it will mean continually looking to do things better.

We have committed to a raft of measures that will ensure that every child can access the support they need to gain the literacy and numeracy skills through our ACT education system. As a Labor candidate, I was proud to support such positive vision, and now as a Labor MLA I look forward to assisting in its implementation.

A second area is health. Mr Speaker, the ACT allows for one health system rather than a series of individual area health services. As such, we are well placed to be a leader in developing and delivering an innovative health system. We can do this by developing our own health workforce and service delivery models in both the community sector and tertiary facilities. The ACT has renowned university and vocational institutions to train our future workforce. These are local institutions which can facilitate articulation across the education sectors. This will allow for more of our local community to enter training and to contribute to our health system. I see a system of education and health working together to train our own health workforce, leading to more Canberrans caring for those in need—Canberrans caring for Canberrans.

I see a system where new models of care and models of service delivery lead to improved health services through nurse-led clinics and where the whole multidisciplinary primary health care team can respond to the needs of our community, providing strong, proactive and preventive health measures. This primary health care team can offer services through innovative scope of practice—a change to meet our community needs over the years to come.

Finally, Mr Speaker, I would like to talk about the immense talent and extreme dedication that can be found within our community and the need for government to harness that talent. One of the great privileges of running as a candidate in the 2008 election was being able to witness the great work being done across Brindabella by a good many local organisations, big and small. Organisations such as Communities@Work, the Tuggeranong and Woden Valley community councils, the Lions Club and the Concerned Residents of West Kambah are just a few of the many local organisations that I had the opportunity to meet this year.

The strength of the Brindabella community is due in no small part to the passion and dedication of our community organisations. Local residents devote their time to make sure that their kids play sport on the weekend. Local residents serve on school committees. They collect money for local charities. They run local scouts, brownies and cadets. Local organisations, through hard work and dedicated volunteers, represent some of the greatest assets that can be found in our community. As a member of the ACT government, I believe we should make the most of these most wonderful community assets.

I believe that by harnessing this immense resource—the knowledge and dedication found in our community organisations—we can meet any challenge that comes our way. When looking for ways to encourage an active and healthy lifestyle, where better to go than to ask the local football club or walking group? These organisations, run for and by local residents, should be considered an asset to drive and promote healthier lifestyles.

Opportunities do not end with health. With goodwill and open communication, we can see community dividends in the areas of education, welfare, planning and local services—in any area we choose to examine. The opportunities are as vast as the background and qualifications of people in this city. The efforts of government can only be enhanced by a relationship with these organisations already delivering so much to our community through the dedication of our members.

Mr Speaker, we as a city will face many challenges over the coming years. We need to provide for next year while investing in the next decade. We need to maintain our fiscal discipline while weathering the effects of the global financial crisis. We need to liaise with community organisations and we need to make tough decisions when needed. We must do these things and more, and it is going to be hard. I do not believe that anyone here today signed up expecting it to be easy. I, for one, am eagerly looking forward to working with my Assembly colleagues over the coming years.

I pledge here today that I will simply and wholeheartedly do all I can to make the ACT and Brindabella the best they can be. Mr Speaker, colleagues and friends, that's it, and thank you for listening.