Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am proud to come to this House and come to Canberra to represent the electors of Grey. One of the things I need to do as I represent the electors of Grey is put forward their interests. Since I have come to Canberra—and I have only been coming here for a few weeks—I have felt as though my electors are under assault. We have had 115 days of this government, and the government’s attacks on rural and regional Australia are setting a pattern. We have had the termination of the Investing in Our Schools Program. We are in the middle of a $2 billion raid on the Communications Fund put aside for rural Australia. In my electorate, it seems as if we have just lost an Indigenous youth festival called Croc Fest. We have had cuts in Exceptional Circumstances funding. We have had the removal of $10 million of support for agricultural research—support put in place to help alleviate the loss of levies grower organisations have at the moment through the drought. So here we have a government proudly claiming to be delivering on its election agenda, but there is a whole stack of nasties out there as well, a whole heap of nasties that we did not know about before the election; in particular, the Interstate Road Transport Charge Amendment Bill 2008.

And there is more in the pipeline. We are already talking about what is going to happen to the Australian technical colleges and Regional Partnerships. Let us face it, the government even had a go at trying to cut the carers payment in the last week, but the public outcry was so great they could not proceed. But rural and regional Australia is an easy hit. They have a go at us and they can get away with that.

The previous Prime Minister often said, ‘We will not abandon rural Australia in its hour of need.’ It seems to me that this government cannot get out fast enough. Labor does not understand or care about rural and regional Australia. We are now seeing the product of wall-to-wall Labor. The last time these proposals were put up by the NTC, the Australian Transport Commission rejected them. That was when the coalition still had a seat at the table. We are not seeing that sense of cooperation now—first meeting and the changes go straight through. My office has had numerous contacts on this issue. Figures bandied around suggest that it will add 13c to a $100 grocery bill. Maybe that is the case when your freight is five per cent of the final cost. I might point out that fuel in the northern part of my electorate is over $2 per litre. That would suggest to me—

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