Darren Chester (Gippsland, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Roads and Regional Transport) Share this | Hansard source

Minister, you may laugh; and the members may laugh. Funnily enough, it was good enough for Sydney to have the cattlemen on horseback parading in the Olympics opening ceremony. The men were in their Driza-Bones, and you all cheered madly. But it is not good enough to let them do their job for regional Australia. The sheer impracticality of Labor and the Greens is on show again: ‘We don’t mind a bit of theatre when it is in Sydney, but we really don’t want those nasty cows eating any grass.’ Heaven forbid that they reduce the fuel load in the forest and actually help to reduce the severity of future fires. We would not want that to happen, would we? No. They were happy to cheer the mountain cattlemen at the Sydney Olympics but they do not actually want them doing their job out in regional Australia.

Make no mistake: Labor will pay a heavy electoral price for its dalliance and unquestioning service to the Greens. In Victoria we remember the member for Narracan, Ian Maxfield. This was the man who chaired the committee which did the hatchet job on the mountain cattlemen for Steve Bracks; he has gone, defeated by a Liberal candidate. Remember Brendan Jenkins, the member for Morwell—the man who sat back and failed to stand up to Melbourne Labor and the Greens on anything? He has gone too, defeated by the Nationals.

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