Sam Birrell
Nicholls · National Party · Australia
“They will put it maybe in New South Wales, Western Australia or Queensland, but they won't even consider Victoria. The taxes, the government interference and now this proposed work-from-home legislation just mean that Victoria is not an option.”
“The Mitchell Shire Council has identified the Kilmore-Wallan Bypass as one of the highest advocacy priorities, but the project has been languishing for years. The bypass is essential to improve safety, reduce congestion and return the historic town centre to local residents and businesses.”
“As I've often said in this place, it's a great privilege to represent the electorate of Nicholls in northern Victoria, one of the great food-producing parts of Australia. Recently, I had the great honour to go to a place called Legacy Packing in Cobram for the official relaunch of their state-of-the-art packing facility.”
“As at the last election, the AEC boundary changes meant that the town of Kilmore came into the electorate that I represent, the electorate of Nicholls, and Kilmore is one of the oldest inland towns in Australia. It's a beautiful place. It has bluestone buildings, a historic jail and a monument to Hume and Hovell.”
“A major agribusiness operator in northern Victoria who operates very successfully has told me: 'We're doing no more investment in Australia. The government's making it too hard.”
“We've also got high-tech investment in the dairy industry and the apple and pear industry and we have some new investments in the processing facility SPC, which is an iconic brand in Australia that processes peaches, pears, apples and also tomatoes.”
The complete record
Every one of 590 lines we hold for Sam Birrell, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 12 of 12.
“Where does the $275 come from? It comes from modelling by a company called RepuTex, and the government has relied on that modelling to deliver this promise. I just want to quote to you what Aidan Morrison, who is the director of the energy program at the Centre for Independent Studies, said about this. He said the $275 by 2025 number is the 'absolute laughing stock' of the policy debate in Australia—the absolute laughing stock! Not only that but what he says makes us think it might get worse. He says its twin, its sibling—and he is referring to the integrated system plan—has no better analysis behind it than the same people and the same report has been elevated to become the cornerstone of our most important planning document in relation to energy.”
“There is a cost-of-living crisis. It is crippling. Those of us who move around our electorates and talk to families know that it is crippling. The government has failed to manage it. There are a number of different topics we could discuss in relation to the cost of living. I'll pick three: energy, mortgages and rents, and food. I will also say that the cost-of-living crisis is crippling and that, if Labor stay in power, it will get worse, and I will explain why. First, energy. People were conned during the election campaign. They were told that electricity prices were going to be reduced by $275. Now, that was a huge promise during the election campaign. Who knows but there is probably a lot of people out there who believe the Prime Minister when he said it 97 times and, therefore, cast that ballot accordingly.”
“As well as the curriculum and as well as increasing funding to schools, which are supported aims, we want to see whether there is a focus on this insidious and challenging issue that all of us are seeing and all of us are hearing about from the parents and the staff of disruption and behavioural issues in classrooms. It's causing a lot of problems with learning and a lot of problems with teaching, and it is seeing teachers move out of the sector—sometimes out of the state education sector and sometimes out of education altogether, and that's not what anyone wants.”
“Now there are a lot of social issues—particularly since the COVID pandemic and the onset of social media. Disruption is becoming endemic in classrooms, and we need to focus on that and make sure we create environments to learn. I'm trying to understand where Minister Clare's funding agreements are up to with four of the states, because my understanding was that they were supposed to be done by 31 December 2024, and, in four of the states, we haven't seen the funding agreements. Not only do we want to see them but we also want to see whether there is any focus on this critical issue.”
“Senate recommendation 8 states: The committee recommends that the National School Reform Agreement Ministerial Reference Group consider including strategies for addressing disruptive classroom behaviour as one of the priorities for the next National School Reform Agreement. Now, I'll go to another recommendation. This was recommendation 3: The committee recommends that government and non-government education authorities are required to invest in the professional development of teachers, so that they are supported by the latest evidence-based teaching skills to manage classroom behaviour. So we need to give our teachers the tools that they need to deal with classroom behaviour, and it's getting harder. It's not like it was when my mum was a teacher in the eighties. Kids were coming from more stable backgrounds, in my experience.”
“On the coalition's pushed request on 28 November 2022, the Senate referred the issue of increasing disruption in Australian school classrooms to the Senate Education and Employment References Committee to inquire and report on the issue of increasing disruption in Australian schools' classrooms. There were a number of recommendations. I haven't got time to read them all out, but I'm just going to precis a few of them and then question whether the Albanese government in its funding agreements can focus on this very issue of behaviour and disruption in the classroom and get to the core of it.”
“But increasingly they were finding that they couldn't do what they were there to do, which was to teach, because there were a lot of behavioural issues coming into the classroom, and the system wasn't giving them the tools to deal with those behavioural issues. I saw kids outside trying to cool down because they'd blown their stack in the classroom, and I saw children being disruptive. There are cases where children have been violent, and assaults towards teachers are up. So we really need to understand what's going on here and try and work through it, because if kids aren't in a calm, safe environment, they can't learn, and if teachers aren't in a calm, safe environment, they can't teach.”
“The data and many of our experiences in the education system show us that behavioural issues and disruption in our classrooms are key reasons why education standards are slipping. I'll talk about some experiences that I've had, and then I'll talk about what the Senate committee found. Many years ago I was asked to be principal for a day at a state school in Shepparton, which means I got to shadow the principal and work with the staff. What I saw were a lot of teachers who were there because they were very committed to educating young people. They were very committed to doing it in the state system, because they wanted to give everyone a fair go, as did my mother, who was a teacher at Shepparton High School for well over 30 years.”
“It is good to hear people waxing lyrical about education. I think it's something that all of us agree is really important for the future of our nation. We've got to have an honest debate about how we get the outcomes we all want to achieve. I think there are some real challenges in education in this country at the moment. I don't think things are going in the right direction, and there's a lot of data to suggest that. In fact, OECD data shows that Australia's education standards have fallen since 2006, with Australia ranked 12th for reading, down from sixth; 10th for science, down from sixth; and 16th for maths, down from eighth. We need to have the analysis as to why we think this is happening.”
“BIRRELL (—) (): I move: That this House: (1) condemns the Government for failing to address the critical issue of classroom disruption in Australian schools which is severely impacting the learning outcomes of Australian students as well as forcing teachers to leave the profession in droves; and (2) notes: (a) that despite the escalating levels of classroom disruption and even violence in many classrooms, the Government has failed to respond to the Senate inquiry report by the Education and Employment Reference Committee into the issue of increasing disruption in Australian school classrooms; (b) the declining ranking of Australia in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) disciplinary climate index, making Australian classrooms amongst the world's most disorderly; (c) the impacts, demands and experience of disorderly classrooms on teacher safety, work satisfaction and workforce retention; (d) the impact of disorderly, poorly disciplined classroom environments and school practices on students' learning, compared with their peers in more disciplined classrooms; and (e) how leading OECD countries with the highest disciplinary climate index rankings can provide valuable lessons on reducing distraction and disorder in Australian classrooms.”
“I think Australia, Victoria and Nicholls need to get back on track, and I think a coalition government can achieve this. I really look forward to continuing to move around my community, whether it be on the football field, on the netball court, in the clubrooms afterwards, on the street, walking into the private businesses of Nicholls or going through the schools and just talking to people about the Australia they believe in, the Australia they want: do they want the entrepreneurial Australia, the have-a-go Australia, the Australia that's focused on the fair go and the free market, or do they want this rigid control that we seem to be having?”
“The Nationals, in a coalition government, will also build infrastructure, and I know that we will because we've done it before. In my community, we've seen the Echuca-Moama bridge built by the coalition in state and federal governments, and that's changed the lives of many people and many businesses in that community. It's also evidenced by the Shepparton rail upgrade, which is going to see nine return services from Shepparton to Melbourne—an initiative funded by the coalition. Again, it's something that makes people's lives better. And it can happen when you've got the budget in balance. And it can happen when you've got industries that are thriving and taxes that can be paid so that we can pay for these things that we all want—the infrastructure, the hospitals and the education.”
“I think we've got a government trying to control everything, with an ideological bent. And, unfortunately for our nation, that ideology is being mugged by scientific engineering and economic reality. I really hope we can form government, because Australia needs to get back on track. The Nationals in government will put agriculture back at the focus of this nation and give farmers the tools they need to grow food for our country and for the world. We will ensure that the Murray-Darling Basin communities can continue to irrigate crops and process food, all the while still caring for the river system. People who live in the basin communities understand how to care for the river system, as distinct from bureaucrats who try and run it from Canberra.”
“But where I've seen it happen for my electorate and for Australia is with the ethos of the coalition and the focus of the Nationals. And I think, right now, Australia is not going in the right direction. Our economy is suffering, our energy future is in serious doubt, and the tools that the entrepreneurs of Australia need to thrive, be profitable and, most importantly, employ people are being taken away from them—not to mention the social cohesion, and I thought that was something that was ingrained in Australia and that we'd never lose. I've seen that fray over the last 2½ years to my great regret, because it's the country I love. Countries do really well when they set up a framework for private enterprise to thrive, and I don't think we have that framework at the moment.”
“I've tried to have a real grassroots engagement with my constituents, and that itself has been a privilege. I set out on a mission to train with all 44 football and netball clubs in my electorate. I am only eight clubs off achieving that, and I hope to go to the election saying I trained with them all. The training has been fun, and fitness is good, but it's just engaging with young people—particularly young people who are involved in football and netball clubs—and listening to what sorts of industries they're involved with, what is working for them and what isn't working for them that has been a great lesson for me, and it's informed a lot of what I've done up here. Big successes can be had, and we can make people's lives better and their jobs more secure and their communities more prosperous, and I've seen that happen.”
“Who knows? This could be the last week before the election—or we might have a few more sitting weeks; that's up to the Prime Minister. But we are definitely heading to an election soon, and I would like to reflect, in the time I have, on what a privilege it's been to represent the people of Nicholls. I was elected at the 2022 election along with the member for Menzies, who, might I say, has made an outstanding contribution to this place. It's such an honour to represent an electorate like Nicholls for all of the good things it does for the nation. They're great businesses like SPC, all the dairy manufacturing businesses, food processing, the manufacturing, the farming—all of the things that happen in Nicholls are what's good about Australia.”
“This parliament needs to send a very strong message that this is not tolerated. This bill's a start, but it needs to go further. We've got some amendments that take this further that I hope the government will consider. We should not only be passing legislation; we've all got to be really strong in our statements about this scourge. I urge the Prime Minister and anyone in a position of leadership to look at the way that the opposition leader acted in the days when this was getting a foothold, and to use that moral clarity to guide them in their attack on antisemitism.”
“What we do in this place and the messages we send matter. I hope people get prosecuted. I hope people get caught. I hope they get prosecuted by these laws. I hope that this makes the prosecution of them easier. I hope that this makes the capture of them easier. I hope that this means the punishment can be harsher, but, even if it doesn't, the fact that we're passing this legislation is a message from this place to say that antisemitism will not be tolerated in Australia. Antisemitism is an outrage. It's a hatred that should have died in ashes of 1945 in World War II, when many of our brave Australian servicepeople and, indeed, many from the United States and the United Kingdom fought against that evil regime to put a stop to antisemitism once and for all. We're seeing it rear its head again here.”
“We celebrated that plaque the very day that there was a synagogue firebombing in Melbourne. If you didn't understand the necessity for these laws and the fact that they need to go further to protect places of worship, then that was your answer of what there needed to be. That synagogue bombing was an outrage, and it's really rocked—everyone is experiencing that. But there are those of us who are from Victoria and understand those parts of Melbourne, like Caulfield and Brighton, where Jewish people, who make such a contribution to our region, have congregated and live in Melbourne. What a contribution they've made, through business and arts, to our community. For one of their places of worship to be firebombed by some coward or cowards is an outrage. It goes against everything we believe and everything all of us want Australia to be.”
“I talked about what's happened to MPs' offices, what happened at the Opera House, the spray painting of cars and the targeting of people because of what they were wearing. All of this is anathema to what modern Australian values should be. But the worst thing happened late last year. Ironically for me, I was at the Israeli Embassy. I was there that day with the Israeli and German ambassadors. They're neighbours in Canberra; the German and Israeli embassies are next door to each other. The two ambassadors came together to commemorate a person from my electorate—an Indigenous Yorta Yorta man called William Cooper—who, in the 1930s, took a petition to the German consulate in Melbourne on behalf of the Jewish people and was turned away. There was a plaque to commemorate him.”
“Those steps lower the threshold for criminality, particularly for those who urge violence against individuals or groups. Instead of proving that the person intended that the violence occur, the police now only need to prove that the person was reckless as to whether the violence would occur, and that is a welcome change. These laws remove the good faith defence for those urging violence. As the previous speaker, the member for Lynes, said, you can't urge violence in good faith, not in this situation. It's a welcome change. There's also some expansion of the offences that relate to the urging of violence in relation to a range of personal characteristics on the basis of which a person or a group is targeted.”
“To push for this sort of thing and to keep the pressure on—which is what oppositions do—was the right move. Government take credit for coming out and saying, 'We're going to do something,' but often they do something because of the pressure the opposition puts on them. This bill is an example of that. This bill has come about because of the pressure applied by the opposition. I want to give a shout out to the member for Berowra, who's also shown equal moral clarity based on his own experiences. The bill itself—the changes are welcome. I think they're too late, but we have to do this. We should have done it a long time ago, but we are doing it now. That's a good thing. There are some simple straightforward steps that the government are proposing to take.”
“As I've said in this place, in the country you only had two channels, but I was allowed to watch the late movies sometimes when my parents didn't know that I was up watching the late movie. There was a TV movie on called Escape from Sobibor , and it showed, in graphic terms, what the Nazis were doing to the Jewish population in Europe in the late 1930s and 1940s and why the West had the moral clarity to wage war against that evil regime and to stop antisemitism in its tracks. I mention that because what we saw in the 1940s is what this sort of thinking and this sort of evil, when it gets going, can lead to. As I said, the response from the opposition leader has had a moral clarity, and his writing to the Prime Minister to convene the National Cabinet on this was the right move.”
“There are people in the Australian Labor Party who have shown some leadership, but, overall, I would say that the response has been too equivocal and the Jewish community has felt that the response hasn't been strong enough. It hasn't had that moral clarity that we need to face this evil. I just want to talk a little bit about antisemitism as one of the world's oldest hatreds. In my experience, you go back in your own mind and try to think about what you know, what you understand and what forms your view. I've talked a bit about my experiences in Israel, but, even before that, I remember my experience in the late eighties when I would've been in my early- to mid-teens.”
“The member for Macnamara and I disagree on policy, but we are friends, as I am with the member for Hunter, and I felt that personally. Obviously there's been a great deal of debate about the response since. I thought that the Leader of the Opposition's response had a real moral clarity to it. He spoke in parliament about what was chanted at the opera house, and that was really uncomfortable for all of us. He didn't use the exact words, but he alluded to them. I saw a lot of people around the House being critical of the opposition leader bringing them up, but you have to say this stuff to face the evil of it. He did that and he's been steadfast since. I think that he's shown real leadership on this issue even when it's got pretty difficult, and I commend him for that.”
“A debate about what Israel is doing is legitimate. Targeting Australian Jewish people because of it is not, and that's what's been happening. It's happened at the opera house, at MPs offices and at my office in a small way. I mention this because I've had experience of 'Free Palestine' stickers being put and texter drawn all over my office. But I was disgusted with what happened to my friend, a person on the other side of the chamber that I met since I came to this place, the member for Macnamara. I play sport with him of a morning up here, and it's been my great honour to get to know him. For him and his staff to go through what they did at his office is against the foundations of democracy, and it's against a member.”
“It's one thing in a war zone to attack one another's soldiers, and often, in war, there are civilian casualties that happen because of the nature of conflict, but these were people deliberately going and murdering civilians. That they'd suffered should've sparked a great deal of sympathy for the Israeli people, instead, in some quarters in Australia, it unleashed burgeoning antisemitism. We saw that with the way that people gathered at the opera house and with the chants they were making. We've seen it since. A lot of that happened before Israel's military response, and people said: 'This isn't antisemitism. We're just against what Israel is doing in their attempts to defend themselves.' A lot of these protests happened before those military operations started—let's not deny that. But, since then, Israel launched some military actions.”
“Many of them are in the south and many of them are very close to that border. Netafim is the company that makes the drip irrigation equipment, but there are other companies that make the valves, the filters—everything that gets water to agricultural crops, as the member for Braddon and the member for Forrest as farmers well know. It's all technology that's created in these communities, so they're bringing life to the world by making agricultural produce easier to grow. I said at the time that they were obsessed with life. What they were met with was people who were obsessed with death, people who have impossible to understand hatreds—irrational, insane hatreds—to think that they could cross the border and do those things to people.”
“I was very proud to work for that company, because that company developed water-saving technology that brought agricultural prosperity to many parts of the world—yes, in Australia, where we use it to grow tomatoes and almonds, but also in Third World countries and developing countries. That is Israeli technology that they developed out of necessity. The people who set up the kibbutz that started Netafim in Hatzerim, down in the south of Israel, were working with the government to do what the inventor of drip irrigation, Simcha Blass, said: 'Make the desert bloom.' They could make the desert bloom as long as they could use the very small amount of water they had efficiently, so they developed this technology, which is now used around the world. It brings life to people. At the time, I spoke about my visits to those Israeli communities.”
“Everyone was shocked the day after that Sunday when we all awoke and saw the news that paragliders, four-wheel-drive utes and all sorts of vehicles with murderous terrorists had gone into these peaceful kibbutzes and communities in southern Israel and committed the most horrific crimes. And the more the week went on, and as footage was released—it was impossible to watch, but you had to watch it to understand exactly what had happened. It affected many people in this place very personally for their own reasons. In my case, before coming to parliament I had worked as an agricultural scientist for an Israeli water technology company called Netafim.”
“I rise to speak on the very important Criminal Code Amendment (Hate Crimes) Bill 2024. I'd like to talk a bit about how we got into this situation, what has happened in Australia, what the response has been, antisemitism in general—because as horrific, distasteful and as outrageous as it is, we need to talk about it—this bill and how the coalition think that it could be made stronger. How did we get here? Well, it's interesting. Antisemitism is one of the oldest hatreds in the world—something we thought probably wasn't under the surface in Australia but that, to our horror, we discovered was there after the horrific acts of October 7. Everyone was shocked that Israel was attacked by Hamas in the way it was.”
“They're doing more for climate change than a lot of people living in the concrete jungles of Australia. They're off the grid. They're growing vegetables. They're growing sustainable meat. They said to me: 'Sam, member for Nicholls, I'm trying to do everything right for the environment. Why do I have to have wind turbines the height of the Rialto'—go and have a look at the CBD of Melbourne—'and many of them two kilometres away from where I'm trying to sustainably produce sheep and vegetables?' Please get interested in regional Australia. It's worth it.”
“It doesn't matter anymore.' They crossed to me and said, 'What do you think, Sam?' I said: 'I'm standing in an apple orchard. How are we going to refrigerate these apples without baseload power? They don't stop needing refrigeration when the wind's not blowing or the sun's not shining.' This discussion about firming is really important. It's not only that. It's what the renewables are doing to people in regional Australia. I've got a beautiful, small—and it's small, so you don't care, because there aren't that many people there—region called Colbinabbin. There are 650 hectares of solar panels on prime agricultural land in the middle of one of the great wine-growing areas of Australia. I spoke to a young couple from Timmering, who are off the grid.”
“If you take the tools away from them—like irrigation water—they can't do that anymore, and no amount of money that someone throws at them for some silo art or God knows what else is going to satisfy those people, because they don't just do it for money; they do it because they love it and because they want to provide food and fibre to people who live in other parts of Australia and other parts of the world. I spoke earlier today about energy policy, the Integrated System Plan, and I described it as having more holes in it than the colander in my kitchen. Its energy policy is a mess. There is no serious analysis of how we're going to firm 82 per cent renewables, and that's important because, as I mentioned before—I was on Sky News doing an interview. The member for Warringah was before me and said: 'Baseload power is an antiquated idea.”
“I can say with great certainty that my region has given up on the Albanese Labor government because of what they've done in relation to their new Murray-Darling Basin plan. In fact, they don't even call it the Murray-Darling Basin plan anymore. They call it the Plibersek plan, after the minister for water. It's reneged on the agreements that had happened with the states. It's reneged on agreements that were going to put a socioeconomic impact test in place before ripping out 450 gigalitres of extra water. All of this is important because it drives the industries that employ the people in regional Australia. You can get up and talk about fee-free TAFE and you can say, 'We built this and we funded this and we did that.' That's all nice. What regional people want is to be able to do the jobs that they love doing: farming and food processing.”
“But I noticed before I came into parliament that previous Labor governments and Labor oppositions at least had people who showed some interest in regional Australia, and I say that in deference to the late Simon Crean and also to Joel Fitzgibbon in previous governments and oppositions. But this Albanese Labor government is just not interested in regional Australia. I'll also give a shout-out to the current Leader of the House. When he was the shadow water minister, he was relatively—and I say 'relatively', because we didn't entirely get what we wanted. But he had some understanding when negotiating the Murray-Darling Basin Plan with our then water minister David Littleproud and the member for New England. So what happened when the new government came in? The agreement that had happened for the Murray-Darling Basin got completely smashed.”
“The subject of this MPI is that regional Australia has given up on Labor because Labor has given up on them. Labor has never really been that popular in the regions, and, historically, I think we can understand why. The regions are a place that, traditionally, entrepreneurial people have moved to, and entrepreneurial people are more attracted to the coalition's side because we support business, we support small business and, of course, in the Country Party, now the National Party, which I'm very proud to be a member of, we support the businesses that operate in regional Australia.”
“We in the regions are, therefore and understandably, very frightened of a minority Labor government controlled by the Greens and teals, who tend towards the luxury of what they want to believe and not the scientific, engineering and economic realities that we face as a nation.”
“It's hugely expensive and disruptive to harness and distribute this energy, and it is, by its nature, intermittent. It's necessary for us to analyse very real problems with the life cycle emissions of renewable infrastructure projects, with emissions not reducing but shifting offshore due to reckless policies, and with how industries that require 24/7 or baseload power will receive that power at a price that enables them to remain competitive and operating in Australia. There are no convincing answers in relation to these problems, only an integrated system plan that has more holes in it than the colander in my kitchen.”
“During the summer break, the member for Warringah was being interviewed on Sky News just prior to my interview. Her words, along with slogans from the energy minister, highlight the shallowness of the energy debate in Australia and the air of unreality that some members exist in. She said: The old-fashioned concept of base load power is proving to be more and more a thing of the past. She said it's 'an antiquated idea'. I was standing in an apple orchard for my cross and I asked how those apples would be refrigerated 24/7 without baseload power. Thousands of workers in my electorate depend on it. This, along with inane comments by the energy minister such as, 'The sun and the wind don't send bills,' attempt to dumb down a complex issue.”