Kristy McBain (Eden-Monaro, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Regional Development, Local Government and Territories) Share this | Hansard source

God! While those opposite are trying to work out which side of history they want to be on, we are talking about regional families and looking at how we can ease the cost of living. They're already upset, as I said, because we've doubled Roads to Recovery, whereas they sat idly by and did nothing when local councils asked for more money. What they did was freeze financial assistance grants, which took a billion dollars from local councils in all of our communities.

I want to remind them of what they did when it came to the supermarket code of conduct: they introduced a voluntary code. That was great for our farmers, wasn't it? 'Let's ask the supermarkets if they'll be nicer to farmers.' Were they? No. On this side of the House, we said, 'That's not good enough; we're going to introduce a mandatory code.' But what did those opposite do? Did they vote for a mandatory code of conduct to protect farmers? No, you didn't. You wanted to leave the supermarkets to let rip and do whatever they wanted to farmers and other primary producers. On this side of the House, we said, 'Not good enough—we are going to protect farmers and small businesses with a mandatory code of conduct with multimillion-dollar penalties for those who breach it.' On big business versus farmers and families, I know who I stood with: I stood with farmers and families. I made sure there was a mandatory code of conduct to protect people.

We are investing in people, in skills and training and in services. These are the investments that regional communities are calling for, and that's exactly what we are doing. We delivered prac payments because we know it's important to support people when they are training to deliver services in our regions.

Our Cheaper Home Batteries Program has been so incredibly important. Ray from Braidwood in my electorate got in touch. He said his home battery system has already lowered his electricity bill. In the first month since he installed his battery, his bill dropped to $22—22 bucks. High-five, Ray. It's also really helped him to change his views and his habits on how he uses his electricity during off-peak periods. I want to make sure that in this House we are supporting regional communities and regional Australians just like Ray, and those opposite are fighting climate wars which should have been dead 20 years ago. They're out of touch with regional communities and they're out of touch with reality.

Speaking of utilities, let's talk about the NBN, which is incredibly important for driving productivity in rural and regional Australia. Whether you work from home, you have a small business, you want to access health care or you are studying, it's important to have connectivity. Under those opposite, when they were in government, there was a deliberate underinvestment in communications. Instead of narrowing the technology divide, they widened it.

It is so important to keep our communities connected. Just 15 minutes away from here, half of a suburb called Jerrabomberra had had fibre to the premises. Those opposite, when they came to government in 2013, ripped up the contracts and said, 'That's not important enough to us,' so for more than a decade the other half of the suburb was still dealing with copper—copper dropouts. It took another Labor government to come back and finish the rollout.

It took a Labor government to deal with the data caps that were on Sky Muster satellites. During COVID, I had members of my community who were trying to learn and work from home saying, 'We got 10 days into the month and we hit our data cap,' because those opposite had data caps on satellite plans. Does that make sense in a regional community? It took us to come to government and say: 'That's not on. We're not having that.'

There has been a massive investment to expand full-fibre NBN to more than 2.1 million premises across the country. It is so important in our regions to make sure we're connected.

And, while I'm on it, there's the Universal Outdoor Mobile Obligation. We went to an election saying: 'This is incredibly important. The technology is there. Let's make the telcos do it.' Those opposite couldn't even get on board with that, for regional communities.

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