Darren Chester (Gippsland, National Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans’ Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I must say that I feel privileged and the burden of responsibility which goes with being elected for the seventh time as the member for Gippsland, and I want to recognise the people who allowed me to get here. I also want to congratulate all the 150 MPs from across Australia on their success in the election. It's no mean feat to be chosen to come to this place, and you've all earned your space in the 48th Parliament.

Firstly, to the more than 55,000 Gippslanders who honoured me with their first preference, I say to you with great sincerity that I am determined to not let you down and to keep delivering for all Gippslanders. I want to acknowledge my family members who assisted me in this campaign and in previous campaigns. To my staff in Sale and Traralgon: without your dedication and hard work over a long period of time, I know that our success and margin in the seat of Gippsland would be greatly diminished. To the party members of the Nationals, our booth volunteers, our state and federal directors and their campaign teams—all of these people make a contribution to helping individual members win their seats, and I don't take that support for granted.

I also want to acknowledge the Australian Electoral Commission, its senior staff and workers on the ground, who made sure that we ran an election here in Australia which was not contested in terms of the integrity of the process and the result—the final outcome and the counting of votes. It is a good process; it's one that requires constant supervision and regulatory oversight. I congratulate the AEC on another great performance across the seat of Gippsland.

On my side of the house the final result in the election campaign was not the one we were hoping for. To deliver for regional Australians the Nationals know we need to be in government, because we don't get much out of the Labor Party. The Nationals, though, performed very well in this most recent election. We were able to hold all existing seats we held going into the election; we managed to transition three seats, which is always a difficult task in regional areas; and we came within one per cent of winning the seat of Bendigo, which would have been the biggest upset in Australia. We achieved the biggest swing in Australia, a 10 per cent two-party preferred swing, against the Labor Party in Bendigo, and the reason we were so successful in our own seats but also the seat of Bendigo is that our approach is to have local champions as our candidates. In this case, in the seat of Bendigo, it was Andrew Lethlean, a local champion, a grassroots campaigner and someone who is focused on the issues that matter to the people of Bendigo district and delivering on local priorities.

Our localism, our focus on local issues, stands in stark contrast to the Canberra-knows-best attitude which has come to dominate the modern Australian Labor Party. Sadly, when you look at the outcome of the election it has become apparent that Australia is more divided now on city-country lines than perhaps ever before. Regional Australians are being left behind by a government that makes no apology whatsoever for buying votes in the cities with policies like the HECS debt reduction. This proposal, which will go through the House this week, will potentially benefit 12,777 people in Gippsland but help 28,009 former students in the Prime Minister's seat of Grayndler and 25,901 people in the education minister's seat of Blaxland. Data from the Parliamentary Library which shows the average number of people who will benefit under this scheme in seats held by the Nationals in rural and regional Australia is 13,384 per seat. However, in the seats held by the Greens in the inner city, which were key targets of Labor going to the election, the average number of people who will benefit under this vote-buying scheme is 32,888—2.5 times the benefits, flowing into the targeted seats by the Australian Labor Party. This was industrial-scale tertiary-level vote-buying, with working-class people in my electorate picking up the tab for students who will earn more over their lifetime as a result of having benefited from Australian university education.

The address-in-reply, including in the other place, was consistent with the Albanese government's first term. There was no plan for the future of Gippsland and no plan for the future of regional Australia. In fact regional Australia hardly rated a mention in the entire speech. I think it was mentioned once in the entire speech. This was meant to demonstrate the government's second-term agenda. We shouldn't be surprised, because this is a cynical, city focused government which has been elected on the back of deception, misconceptions and the mother of all scare campaigns targeting the former member for Dickson. Throughout the campaign the Prime Minister repeatedly waved his Medicare card around and told Australians, 'This is all you're going to need to see a doctor,' but it's not true. We've now learned just this week that 23 per cent of GP clinics won't be taking up the new bulk-billing initiatives, so you won't just need your Medicare card; you'll need your credit card as well.

This is just like how the Prime Minister told the Australian people before the 2022 election that their energy bills would go down by $275. He repeated that claim I think 97 times in the lead-up to that election and, guess what, the bills went up in your electorate and my electorate as well. Now we have the most recent 'did he or didn't he' fiasco surrounding US beef imports and whether the Trump administration raised it with the Prime Minister during discussions. We have the trade minister, who told journalists:

Of course, the president of the United States has raised it with the prime minister.

But the Prime Minister says that's not true, and now the trade minister has had to back down. I want to know who pressured Senator Farrell to change his story. We know from previous experience this prime minister is very loose with the truth, whether it's on Medicare, on energy bills or now in relation to beef imports from the United States.

What we've seen—and you've got to give credit where credit's due—is that Labor are very good at campaigning. It's just a pity they're so hopeless at governing. This prime minister has promised to govern for all Australians, but the one-third of Australians who live outside our capital cities will believe it when they see it. If you take a look at the electoral map, Deputy Speaker Young, you'll see what I mean.

Rural, regional and remote Australians didn't buy what the Prime Minister was selling at the election, and there are plenty of reasons for that, as I explained to the House last week. It its first term, the Albanese government cut the guts out of regional programs. There's no pipeline of projects in regional Australia in this second-term agenda because the Prime Minister cut the Roads of Strategic Importance program and he cut the Building Better Regions Fund. They cut regional airports funding. They even cut the Local Roads and Community Infrastructure Program after turning up to the opening of all the projects. They cut the Stronger Communities program for a year, and then they brought it back. Who knows when they'll cut it again?

But, after all these cuts, the Albanese government triumphantly introduced the Growing Regions Program. Who can forget the Growing Regions Program? It was for $600 million over three years. But then they cut that too. It's quite extraordinary. You set up your own regional grants program and then you cut it anyway. Not satisfied with cutting all the coalition-era regional grants program, they cut their own program. It begs the question: why do they hate regional Australians so much? It's probably because regional Australians don't vote for them. Regional Australians have got the common sense to see through the bulldust. They don't vote for all the spin and the bulldust coming their way.

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