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

I say to the member for Canberra: all the best. I'm a member from regional Australia, as I think everyone knows by now. I want to talk, though, to the people of metropolitan Australia. Often, it is said, there is a divide, and there is. There are different experiences in the country compared to the city. But what happens in regional Australia and the policies that affect what people do in regional Australia affect people in metropolitan areas. If a government is not looking after the regions, then it's not governing for everyone. And it's not only affecting the regional people; it's affecting people in the cities as well. We all live in this great country together.

Obviously, the thing we have in common, apart from the need to breathe and drink water, is the need to eat. Agriculture is critically important in this country. The people in places like my electorate, the food bowl of Australia, are incredibly proud of what they do, because they want to see people enjoying healthy, sustainably produced Australian produce. This government is making it harder for businesses to produce healthy, sustainable, Australian produced produce. Their changes to the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, the live export trade and the biosecurity tax that, thankfully, got scuppered in the Senate—all of these things, along with a raft of others including some renewable rollouts on agricultural land—make it harder for people to do that.

I believe we will see an increase in food prices, because if you make it harder for Australian farmers to produce you see an increase in food prices. An increase in food prices is not good for people anywhere in Australia. If you damage food production, you're not governing for all Australians.

The electricity grid transition is not going well. The Prime Minister promised all of these people a $275 reduction in their electricity bills based on some RepuTex modelling, which he's now running away from, at a rate that even the member for Canning couldn't catch him!

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