The Federal Member for Fremantle, Melissa Parke MP, is pleased to announce that 10 schools from her electorate will receive almost $500,000 under the latest round of the Gillard Government's National Solar Schools Program (NSSP).

Ms Parke (11:01pm) — As a member of this federal Labor government, it is with quiet satisfaction that I join my colleagues at the end of a difficult but momentous year of reform in order to support the passage of the minerals resource rent tax legislation. This is a Labor initiative. It is about making this country fairer and stronger. It is about sharing the wealth that should be better shared. It is about ensuring that the development of finite mineral resources is translated into wide and long-term benefits for all Australians, and that those benefits are translated into a stronger, more diversified Australian economy.

Ms Parke (Fremantle) (16:45): I want to take this opportunity to speak about the understandable concern among Australian manufacturers and workers, and in the wider community, about the poor and declining local content component of major mining and petroleum projects.

This is a matter of importance in Western Australia, where it goes to the heart of the disconnect between the booming resources sector and other parts of the economy. And it is a matter of importance in my electorate of Fremantle, where manufacturing businesses in areas like the Australian Marine Complex are not sharing in the work that should logically flow from the scale of investment we are seeing.

Ms Parke (1:24 pm) – Mr Speaker, I join my colleagues in congratulating you on your return to that important position in what will be an interesting and I hope productive time in this place. I return to parliament with the renewed privilege of representing the people of the Fremantle electorate. It is an enormous honour and also a heavy responsibility that comes with representative politics, for each of us elected to this place is charged with the task of making a difference for our own communities and for Australia as a whole. I said in my first speech that politics is about service, and that this service is both to the communities that we represent and to the set of ideals and values that draw us to this vocation. I have certainly reflected on that over the last three years and, as a federal member, I have done my best to come to grips with the difficulties involved in trying to give that service effectively and across as many areas as one would like. Not surprisingly the doing is inevitably harder and more complicated than the saying, and one of the most straightforward difficulties is choosing how to give priority to the literally hundreds of issues that arise in this work.