Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Development) Share this | Hansard source

Day after day in this place, and week after week, we've been treated to the spectacle of the National Party trying to have you believe that they, sitting on the government benches, are the only one true voice of our regions, that only the National Party represents the regions. Time and time again, we hear them use that as an excuse for holding the country hostage across a vast range of progressive policy areas, whether it's from climate change, whether it's investing in renewable energy, whether it's investing in regions across the country. That is what we hear from them.

The truth of the matter is that no one political party has a monopoly on representing our regions. Our regions in this place are represented by members of the Liberal Party. They are represented by Independents, the Katter party and members of the Australian Labor Party. All of us, together, care deeply about what happens in regional Australia. Our regions are complex. They are diverse. They are as complex and diverse as the economies that support them.

The National Party would have you believe that the regions of this nation look and sound and think exactly like they do, and nothing could be further from the truth. The stranglehold that the National Party has over regional policy in this government is holding our regions back—and I know there are members on the other side, in the Liberal Party, who represent our regions who know it too. There is no greater demonstration of that than what we saw happen with the climate debate this week.

We're told from media reports—we don't know, because somehow there's a secret deal about this so-called net zero promise that some of the National Party have signed up to and some haven't—that there's some regional Future Fund. If the history, of the way in which the National Party treats regional funding, is anything to go by I can guarantee that it won't be the regions across this grand spectrum of Australia that benefit. It won't be the regions in the Australian Labor Party held electorates or the Independent held electorates or even the Liberal Party held electorates; it will be a small group of electorates that, frankly, do deserve funding but are not on their own.

We saw recently, with the recent round of the Building Better Regions Fund, just how the National Party treats taxpayer funding. Ninety per cent of that fund went to seats held by the Liberal National Party or to seats we know, such as Hunter, such as Flynn, they are intending to target or desperately want to hang on to at the next election. The result of that has been that there are regions and then there are National Party supported regions. And that is not helping anybody except the National Party when it comes to trying to stay in office. We saw that again when we saw the minister for resources—the only person whose job seemed to benefit out of the so-called climate change deal the National Party has done.

This is not a way to run our country and it's not a way to support our regions. The truth of the matter is: there is no regional policy in this country. There hasn't been since Labor was last in office. There are a series of buckets of funding that the National Party systematically rorts to its own benefit. That is the equivalent of the National Party's regional development fund. Goodness help us when we see what they're likely to do with the next fund.

When we talk about the Building Better Regions Fund in particular, a fund the Australian National Audit Office is currently investigating, we know that since 2018 over a billion dollars of this fund has been channelled through—90 per cent of that total fund has gone to coalition held and targeted seats. If you look at the Deputy Leader of the Nationals' seat of Maranoa, during that period of time that seat has received $52 million worth of funding out of this grants scheme. The former Deputy Prime Minister's seat of Riverina has received $27 million during that period out of the Building Better Regions Fund, $22.4 million went to the current Deputy Prime Minister's seat of New England and $19.6 million went to the former Attorney-General's seat of Pearce. At the same time, $2 million went to the seat of Bendigo, $1.1 million went to the seat of Cunningham, $1.5 million went to the seat of Newcastle and a grand total of $241,000 went to the seat of McEwen. How is that at all justifiable as a regional development policy? It simply is not. It is not a fair policy. It is not a transparent policy. It is a rorted policy.

The National Party has its grubby fingers all over this program. We know that because 112 of the 330 projects approved under round 3 of the Building Better Regions Fund were chosen by a secret ministerial panel, against the advice of the department. Unsurprisingly, this is the exact same round announced in the run-up to the 2019 federal election campaign that saw coalition seats or coalition target seats receive 94 per cent of all projects and 94 per cent of all funding.

In round 5, another pre-election round, we know even more thanks to the member for Mallee, who in a brief moment of honesty told us that coalition MPs were given access to secret project spreadsheets that were colour-coded pink and green, and that they had a further opportunity that nobody else seemed to—including, I think, members of the Liberal Party—to actually go and lobby for those projects that were important to their regions, even if they did not quite fit the program's criteria. You won't be surprised to hear that the member for Mallee's seat has received over $38 million worth of funding under this Building Better Regions Fund.

What the government won't tell us, though, is which projects were cut and denied funding because they didn't suit the National Party's and the Morrison government's agendas. How many projects that fully met the criteria have missed out to those in Nationals seats that didn't quite fit the criteria? They won't tell you because this isn't about the regions; it's about them staying in power. It's about using taxpayer funding for election-winning purposes. That's what it is about. As I said before, when it comes to climate change, you can see the failings of the National Party writ large on the national stage.

I am a proud representative of regional Australia. I care about climate change and so does my community. Farmers in my region know that climate change is real; they see it every single day. Communities in south-west New South Wales and East Gippsland know that climate change is real; while the Prime Minister was in Hawaii, they lived it. Communities in the far north who rely on the Great Barrier Reef know that climate change is real; they count the cost of bleaching events. Communities all along the Murray-Darling know climate change is real; they see it in the droughts and in reduced river flows. Communities across Australia see it in floods, droughts, fires and storms. But not only do they see the cost; they know the benefits that climate action can bring.

We know that the Business Council's own modelling has found that, on average, Australians will be around $5,000 better off per person under a net-zero scenario, with regional Australians around three times better off compared to capital city residents. But we don't hear that from those in the National Party who represent that small number of seats that they claim is the mirror of regional Australia across the country. We don't hear from them about what's happening to workers in their regions across this country. We don't hear them worrying about the casualisation of people working in the mining sector—we don't hear them talk about that. We don't hear about the disparity in wages. They don't care about the workers in the regions—they don't care about them at all! They only care about their own self-interest. And nothing about that is writ larger than the Minister for Resources and Water being elevated to cabinet, someone who does not support net zero and who doesn't support the regions but certainly supported his own job in that process.

We know that the National Farmers Federation and Meat & Livestock Australia, all of those, and thousands of regional Australians feel betrayed by this National Party, which has completely and simply lost the plot when it comes to climate change. This is a party of dinosaurs; they no longer represent the regions. If we want to see what the regions look like, then look on our side. Look at the fabulous women that we have on our side representing the diversity of the regions: the members for Bendigo, Corangamite, Eden-Monaro, Gilmore, Richmond, Paterson, Macquarie, Newcastle, Dobell, Franklin and Cunningham. These are strong regional women who are standing up for their communities every single day. If we want to see the difference between our side and their side when it comes to the regions, just watch this debate and see the dinosaurs that they've put up on their side— (Time expired)

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