Sam Birrell (Nicholls, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Regional Health) Share this | Hansard source

():  I rise to speak about Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2025-2026, Appropriation Bill (No. 2) 2025-2026 and Appropriation (Parliamentary Departments) Bill (No. 1) 2025-2026 in relation to the budget. It gives me an opportunity to talk about the things that are important to my community and my electorate of Nicholls, which is, as many people in this place would know, in northern Victoria. The northern border of it is the Murray River. The Goulburn Valley, which is obviously the Goulburn River, comes up through the middle of it and provides fantastic irrigation, water, fertile soils—some of the greatest agriculture in Australia—and the ability to grow, manufacture and process food that not only benefits Australia domestically but earns great export dollars.

However, I feel this is under threat from the policies of the Labor government in relation to energy, water, infrastructure and labour. I think that, if you want to see an example—not the only example but an example—of the entrepreneurial spirit that has built Australia, you can go up to the Goulburn Valley. See what waves of migration and that entrepreneurial spirit have done—arrive with nothing and build it into a terrific business based on the principles of liberalism and the free market.

In relation to energy, obviously there's a lot of talk in this place about net zero, which is an ambition. It's an ambition I support. It appears to be somewhat more of a slogan than a policy. I said in my maiden speech that climate change is an important and serious problem facing Australia, but the transition is an incredibly nuanced and complex problem. If we get it wrong, all that will happen is that businesses will see that Australia is too expensive a place to do business, and they'll move the business, the economic opportunities and the jobs offshore, along with the emissions. So in terms of reducing global emissions, which I think is the desire of many people, we will have achieved nothing. But we will have damaged our own economy and the future of our generation.

I don't think the energy transition is going as well as the minister would have us believe. I have serious doubts about thinking that you can do the energy transition limiting yourself to a very small number of technologies. I think we have to have a much more technology-agnostic approach to this area. I worry about legislating ourselves into a corner where we could seriously damage our economy in trying to reduce emissions, which—let's face it—given the percentage of our emissions compared to the rest of the world, wouldn't have an overwhelmingly significant impact on global climate change. There's not only that. The rollout of wind turbines, solar factories and transmission lines is happening without social licence and without community consultation, causing great distress and great anger in the regions. That needs to be addressed. We need to have an honest conversation and an honest answer from the government about what this is going to cost. It's very difficult to make assessments of what you should do without knowing what it's going to cost, and we don't know that.

In relation to water, I was very vocal in the last term of parliament about incredibly regrettable changes to the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. I thought they were unnecessary. I thought they were based on politics and not science. I've been following this, having been involved in irrigated agricultural agronomy before I came into this place. As CEO of the Committee for Greater Shepparton, I was trying to futureproof the economic prosperity of the Goulburn Valley and the Greater Shepparton region up to the Murray Valley. It's based on irrigated agriculture; that's what we do. We grow 90 per cent of Australia's pears and over 50 per cent of Australia's apples, and we produce a significant proportion of Australia's dairy products, particularly those that get exported. That all relies on access to reliable and cheap irrigation water. When governments come in and want to pull a whole heap of that water out of what we call the consumptive pool for irrigation and put it into environmental accounts that, in many cases, do not get used, it damages our economy. It damages Australia's ability to export food, and that's something that we do so well. It's an area I'm very passionate about.

There were a lot of compromises through many governments, from the Gillard government to the coalition governments, and with the states. There were many compromises that were made to reach an agreement that not everyone liked but everyone was able to live with. The previous minister came in and said, 'I'm going to tear those agreements up. I'm going to tear up a socio-economic neutrality test.' That test, which protected basin communities, had been painstakingly arrived at by state premiers, many of them Labor state premiers. I want to pay particular tribute to the former water minister in the Andrews government, Lisa Neville, who was very constructive in this area. That test was torn up and taken away, and we've ended up with regrettable and unnecessary water buybacks.

Agriculture is really important to my region, and it's important to Australia from a cultural perspective, from an export perspective and an employment perspective. It's also important for our sovereign food capability. I'm very proud to have been involved in the agricultural industries. I had a go at uni when I first left school and tried an arts degree. It didn't quite work out, mainly because of my immaturity, which some people might say still exists.

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