Bruce Scott (Maranoa, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise this evening to talk about something I am quite passionate about and that is how we can halt the slow decline of many of our rural communities across Australia—those lovely little country towns. Once upon a time Australia was dotted with thriving small towns, many of which, not long after Federation, lived on the agricultural wealth of the region and—I see the member for Lyne here—on the wool industry. We used to talk about, in the history I learned at school, ‘riding on the sheep’s back’. In those days we had about eight to 10 million people in this country. Today we are a nation of in excess of 22 million and growing.

Contributing to the decline in the fortunes of our agricultural sector in Australia have been the harsh realities of economic rationalism, government choices in some cases and the pulling up of railways. In Queensland the forced amalgamation of many shires has had a significant impact on many country towns through the loss of part of their workforce. Many of those country towns once had a local government which was at the heart and centre of the community, because local government is about local issues, and many of those communities have just lost heart. They still have fight in them, but they have lost heart because they feel that the government is not supporting them. The amalgamation of those shires has led to a number of them continuing to decline in size.

We have to reverse this decline before it is too late, Mr Speaker. Our capital cities, as you and many in this House would know, are growing beyond the capacity to meet the needs of the people who want to live there. They have traffic congestion and water shortages, just to name a couple of issues. These large towns continue to grow, with ever more people wanting to move into our capital cities. There is an opportunity to attract these people to regional and rural areas, but we must change the perception that many city people have of our country areas. We need to lose this image that rural communities are just like that old, lonely roly-poly running across a drought stricken plain. That is the image that some have of our outback towns, but we must change that perception because it is not the reality.

Regional, rural and remote communities so often offer opportunities for many types of businesses. There are opportunities galore, but we have to be able to encourage people to move into rural communities and out of our congested capital cities. We must tap into that potential and attract and encourage people to move out of our capital cities. There really are great benefits in making the tree change and we must strongly promote those benefits.

The future of much of our rural and remote Australia is a case of ‘if we build it they will come’. One example where the infrastructure has been built in my electorate is in outback tourism. It is a growing opportunity—hospitality, motels, the tourism attractions—that we have out there. It is certainly changing the economy of many of our towns. But we have to build the infrastructure. To halt the decline in our rural communities we must make serious investments in infrastructure.

The government often talks about nation building, but so often these nation-building projects are in our capital cities. I am not saying that our capital cities do not need this infrastructure. They certainly do. But many of them have suffered from short-sighted Labor state governments over the past decade, in particular in my own state of Queensland. If we had just a third of the money from royalties out of our mining sector going back into our rural communities we could invest it in roads and other essential infrastructure and see people moving out into these rural communities. But where does this money go? It goes into the capital cities. It is spent in the capital cities, yet the wealth has come from the rural communities—from things like the coal seam methane gas extension that was only announced last Friday by the Minister for Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities, Tony Burke.

The minister announced, for instance, that that Santos and British Gas project for LNG, which is to be exported out of Gladstone, is going to drill 6,000 holes in this coal seam methane area. Yet there was no announcement about money being invested in the Warrego Highway. All of that infrastructure to build the coal seam methane gas industry is going to pass over the Warrego Highway. We have to have royalties being returned to the regions where the wealth comes from to build this infrastructure. (Time expired)