Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

This federal budget brought down by the Treasurer, the member for Rankin, will be remembered for all time as the broken promises budget, the low-incentive economy, or LIE, budget. This budget has let so many people down. Whether in the regions or indeed the cities, so many people feel so badly represented by this government of broken promises. I want to focus on the regions because that is where the resources that keep the lights on come from and that is where the agriculture that keeps the food on our tables and the fibre on our backs comes from. It is the regions which have been neglected, which have been deserted and which have been overlooked by this Labor government. This Labor government promised so much more when it first came to office in May 2022 and then, three years on, made a series of promises which have now been broken—a breach of faith with the electorate which placed its trust in the government.

We talk about trusts. We look at how many farmers have their arrangements and their farms wrapped up in trusts, which will now be raided and which will now be absolutely torn apart by this Labor government. When it comes to trusts, it comes to farming succession plans—farms which go from one generation to the next—and that is a breach of faith, when the government had said it wouldn't look at trusts and at changing the rules around them. There is also a breach of faith when it comes to the capital gains tax situation—something that the Prime Minister, quite angrily and quite vehemently at press conference after press conference, said he would not change, on around or more than 50 occasions. He was quite vociferous about this point, and, now, with the budget, he has turned his back on those people, those aspirational middle Australians.

I refer to a 1966 publication called Men of the Murray. It's a book written by Gordon Wentworth Broughton, who was born in Deniliquin in that southern Riverina country in 1888. It's a fascinating book. The author served Australia in both world wars. He is a fine Australian. In the frontispiece, the very first paragraph says:

How little we really know of other people's lives and their jobs becomes acutely obvious as we read this story, Men of the Murray.

It's fascinating to see. On page 199—when I picked this wonderful little publication up, it was the first page I opened—it states:

In the years before the creation of the immense storage at the Hume Reservoir, the Murray occasionally stopped running completely. Once was in 1914, and I saw it near Swan Hill in 1923, when we stepped across a trickle three feet wide and four inches deep, "flowing" from a stagnant pool held back by a clay bar.

The difficulty with the water situation is that much of the infrastructure around the Hume Dam, Burrinjuck and the great Snowy Hydro scheme—a scheme set up for irrigation not necessarily producing electricity—is now near a century old. You would think that a sensible, practical government with a vision to the future would be investing in water infrastructure. No, not this government. What this government wants to do is to buy water out of productive use, take it away from the farmers. Yes, it will compensate the irrigators for doing so, but in the process it will distort the water market. Who are left high and dry out of all this? Well, it's the baristas, it's the hairdressers, it's the motor mechanics in those river communities.

Student enrolment at Coleambally Central School in the past decade has almost halved. Hundreds of kids are now no longer being educated at Coleambally. Why? Because, people from that New South Wales irrigation community, which was set up for irrigators in the 1950s, have deserted the area, and why wouldn't they when we've got a government that doesn't believe in Australian made and grown food? Obviously they don't, because they continue to buy water out of the consumptive pool. Well, we will stop that.

Water for the environment is important. I'm the first to admit it, and the river communities will say that too. Without a healthy river system, they have nothing. But all this government believes in doing is buying more and more water out of the system. For what? Much of the policy will lead to some of those low-lying areas around those river communities being flooded. They can't push the water that they've bought out of the mouth of the Murray fast enough, and it is a concern.

Well, we have a better way. We have a much more improved way of dealing with the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, a plan to which I moved a disallowance motion in 2012. I have not changed my position from that day to this. The coalition's principles are that we will end further reductions to the amount of water available for farming jobs and productive use, targeting an increase in the amount of water set aside for farmers, towns and businesses to use in the consumptive pool to deliver a future for basin communities and reforming the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder to return surplus water not required to meet priority outcomes to the temporary consumptive pool for farmers, towns and businesses to use, to lower prices. That's what it does. It distorts the water market.

Interestingly, the CEWH, the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder, holds 72 per cent of the available water in the Murray-Darling Basin—all but 28 per cent. It is the largest irrigator in the country, and it does not have to equate and be accountable for every single drop of water it uses. But our farmers do, and our farmers do because they pay for it, and they are held to strict requirements that the CEWH is not. I have nothing against Simon Banks and nothing against the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder, but what they are doing needs to be held to account. At the moment I believe it is not so. There is a better way.

This government in this budget stole $191.6 million from pest eradication. When we talk about pest eradication, we talk about carp, which make up around 80 per cent of the biomass in the Murray-Darling system. We also talk about rabbits. They are infesting communities in my electorate. I visited the Junee cemetery the other day to take a look for myself, and many of the century-old headstones are in danger of toppling over because of the rabbits that are burrowing beneath. We're also talking about pigs: there are more pigs in Australia than there are humans. But the government is taking away the money to control these feral pests, including foxes and blackberries—you only need to talk to Carlie Porteous of the Murray Region Forestry Hub, in New South Wales, to know what a problem the infestation of blackberry is—and mice. I'm told we have a big problem with mice at the moment in Western Australia, and it's coming to an eastern state near you! What did we see last time there was a mouse plague? Well, we had the Greens running around saying—wait for this—that we should rehome these little rodents, rehome these furry little pets. The member for Bruce laughed. I'm not kidding! That's what they said. That is the Greens way of controlling mice. Of course, they were getting in grain bins. They were getting in the beds of farming children trying to sleep at night, and I'm not exaggerating. Then we have the Greens wanting to rehome the little critters. I mean, this is the Greens attitude. And when the Greens get anywhere near economic policy, you know you're in trouble. You know that anything that they say can't be held up as common sense.

But it gets worse. In the appropriations that the government wants to put in place, there is not the infrastructure spending that we desperately need in regional Australia. The roads are crumbling. They are actually unsafe, and we've seen money stripped away from the Local Roads and Community Infrastructure Program—money for safer, better roads. Certainly in my electorate, I'm yet to see the $140 million promised by the member for Eden-Monaro before she entered parliament during the by-election. She is now the regional development minister. What I want to see from the member for Ballarat, who also happens to be the infrastructure minister, and what I want to see from the member for Eden-Monaro, who is the regional development minister, is for them to go in to the cabinet process and shake those city-centric frontbench members up and say, 'Where is the fairness for country Australia, for rural, regional and remote Australia?' Because it's not there at the moment, and it's their job to represent the people who send them to Canberra to do a job. If they don't do that, the city-centric frontbenchers will always ride roughshod over them. They will.

It doesn't matter what political persuasion the government is, the regional members have to stand up and defend the fairness of funding for country people, because, if we don't, who will? If we don't, no-one will, and that is the truth of the matter. At the moment the members for Ballarat and Eden-Monaro are failing in their jobs, failing in their duty, and regional Australia is suffering as a result. It's so sad and it's so wrong. When you look at the infrastructure spending, the Labor government will pat itself on the back and say, 'Well, the inflation rate is down.' Well, yes, it is, but only on the back of the fuel excise being halved, a provision which was demanded by the coalition opposition. It generally takes a whole lot of public outcry and the opposition standing up for what is right to get the government to do what's right for and on behalf of people in this country.

Then we see $21.4 million cut from regional communications funding—that is, mobile phone communication, mobile towers. I hear so often, to the point where I'm sick to the back teeth of hearing about it, about colour-coded spreadsheets. There were colour-coded spreadsheets when the coalition was dealing with infrastructure spending. But those colour-coded spreadsheets were there to make sure that there was fairness and equity across the board. We do also see colour-coded spreadsheets from Labor. But, the trouble is, they only have one crayon and it's red in colour. The round of mobile telecommunications infrastructure spending after the 2022 election was all red, all Labor. The only seats that gained better mobile coverage were those seats which happened to be represented by Labor members. This is so wrong.

We saw during our terms in government—those wonderful glory years of the coalition government, of the Nationals and Liberals running the show—fairness. We saw equity. I know because I was the person responsible for making sure that infrastructure was spent for regional people, not just regional people who happened to be in National Party seats, not just regional people who happened to reside in Liberal Party seats, but regional people, whether they were in a Labor-held seat or whether they had an Independent as their member. And that is the way it should be, because regional people keep the lights on. Regional people provide the hard work and the perspiration. They roll their sleeves up. They do the right thing so that we have our public schools and our public hospitals funded, and that is the right way. There are priorities. This Labor government has missed all of those priorities.

That's why I say that this budget is a budget of broken promises. This budget only provides for a low-incentive economy—the LIE budget that unfortunately the Treasurer will probably tell us we had to have. Well, we didn't have to have it. There is a better way. The better way is to make sure we put in water policies, housing policies, migration policies and farming and agriculture policies that will work for and on behalf of the national interest and protect those regional Australians who protect this country. I haven't even gotten to the veterans, who have been absolutely deserted by this government, but I will certainly have more to say about that in future speeches. We need to protect those who protect us.

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