Tony Pasin (Barker, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

What a beat-up! These people come into this place and I think their thesis is effectively that 90 per cent of the funding has gone to coalition and coalition-target seats. Well, the reality is I can tell you 100 per cent of the funding went to coalition and coalition-target seats, because we're targeting every single seat in this place. That's the reality. You know what they say about statistics: lies, damn lies and statistics. This is a cruel trick by those opposite to pretend they're on message. They come in and want to whinge and whine and carp, always pointing out these so-called inequities.

If I take the member for Macquarie's argument to its logically extent, she basically says, 'Don't worry about the merits of the application, just apply funding evenly across electorates.' What that would ultimately result in is a situation where applications with very high merit that had gone through a rigorous application process would be disadvantaged and poor applications that hadn't received the necessary work required to get applications over the line would be advantaged. You've got to think about what that means. That means we'd end up with this kind of mismatch across the country where people would ultimately say, 'There's no point really working hard to develop a good application because at the end of the day we'll be punished for an application so we might as well make rubbish applications.' We don't want to see that. We want to see merit based assessment. In fact, if we applied that rule—I will call it the member for Macquarie's rule—then those opposite would no doubt come in here and say, 'This is ridiculous, because there should be a merit assessment in relation to this.'

The reality is: this is a program about building better regions. There might be a hint in the title—'building better regions'. For me, that means stronger, more resilient regions. In my electorate, which spans 64,000 square kilometres—larger than Croatia!—I have some very, very, very small communities. If you went to the community of Karoonda, in the east Murray, with its own local government, less than 1,100 people live in that local government area. The member for Corangamite wants to have that community compete on an even footing with Geelong. You can't be serious, with respect! Geelong is not a regional community. From where I'm standing, it looks like, basically, a capital city. Quite frankly, from the people of Karoonda's perspective, it's a metropolis.

The reality is: if we don't do something serious about the trajectory of population distribution in this country, projections have us ending up, by 2050—and there has been a lot of talk about where we'll end up in 2050—with two megacities in this country. I don't want to live in an Australia which is effectively Melbourne and Sydney, with all due respect to those people who represent those fine capitals in this place. The heart of Australia beats in our regions. I want a basketball player with talent at Murray Bridge to enjoy similar facilities. He or she will never enjoy exactly the same facilities as people living in our capital cities, but I'd like them to enjoy comparable facilities. Quite frankly, our next generation of Australian Olympians disproportionately comes from regional Australia. I want older Australians living in small communities to enjoy similar facilities to those in the cities.

To those opposite who come in here and say, 'This is just another rort, because 90 per cent of the funding went to coalition and coalition target seats': this is just playing with statistics. You're losing credibility daily. You didn't come in here after the emergency round, the bushfire round, and say, 'Oh well, we did particularly well in bushfire affected communities.' Of course bushfire communities did well in that round; it was deliberately targeted at drought and other emergencies.

The reality is: the people of Australia vote with their feet. They know that the coalition—proud Liberals, proud Nationals—represent regional Australia and do it well. That's why we keep getting returned, disproportionately, in regional Australia.

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