Regional Australia is being buried alive, and the people who dug the grave won't pay for the funeral. The government didn't stumble into this; it built it. For decades, policy has gutted regional Australia, reallocated productive resources, killed industry and stripped communities of opportunity and any reason to believe in a better future. You cannot drain a town's economic lifeblood and then act surprised when something moves in to fill the void. Into communities already hollowed out comes ice, and it finishes the job. Parents are lost to addiction, grandparents raise children and children grow up amongst violence and trauma that will follow them for the rest of their lives. Domestic violence, family collapse, psychosis, depression, suicide and drug fuelled crimes are tearing through the regions like an unattended bushfire.

So what are the services we require? We require treatment, and we require mental health professionals, not families waiting months for services that take too long to come. The government presided over the economic death of these communities, and it has failed to fund the undertaker. We need to restore economic productivity. We need water. We need to get our processing assets back. We need our logistics running again. We need our wholesaling and distribution businesses up and running again. This will give us the opportunity to do exports.