Sam Birrell (Nicholls, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'll try to make an intelligent contribution to this debate about cuts, delays and broken promises. The first cut, the most important and deepest cut affecting farmers in my electorate, is the cut to the amount of water that farmers can use to grow food for Australia and for food exports. That's the biggest cut. It's a cut that's been delivered by the minister for the environment, trying to rework the Murray-Darling Basin Plan into something that is going to satisfy the Greens breathing down the neck in her electorate and the other electorates of Labor Party people who are worried about losing their seats in inner cities.

That's all very well from a political perspective, but that agriculture is so important to our nation for our sovereign food manufacturing capability and for our exports. You need water to be able to grow this food. I did agricultural science at university, but even those who didn't should be able to understand that you need water to be able to grow food. So much good food is grown in the Goulburn Valley: apples, pears, peaches and dairy. It's processed and then exported. I've got some fantastic people doing things in my electorate, earning money and, as the member for Page said, earning export dollars for Australia, and the Labor Party is taking away the tools that they need to do it; that's all they're getting from the Labor Party.

Cutting water for food is not the only thing they're cutting. They're also cutting the important grant programs that provide infrastructure that we need in the regions. We had a lot of good infrastructure programs, and one of the most important ones was the Building Better Regions Fund. It was a great bucket, and it funded a lot of important things in my region and other regions. It funded regional seats across the aisle, not just National Party or Liberal Party seats. It's been taken away and replaced with their own programs. I acknowledge there was some money in those programs but not enough to satisfy demand. When we got to the cruel hoax of a budget the other night, we found there's no more funding for the regional grant programs—no more funding! If anyone didn't get a look-in the last time, they're not going to get a look-in again—cuts and delays!

Now, broken promises—well, the whopper of the promises is $275 off your power prices. It should never have been made, because the Prime Minister didn't understand that the model was so threadbare that their policies weren't going to deliver it. But clinging at something to try and win the next election, he ran around saying, 'If you vote for the Labor Party, you will get $275 off your power prices.' How many times did he say it? How many?

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