Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party, Shadow Minister for International Development and the Pacific) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I look across there and I see so many people—ministers—who've let down country Australia. Regional Australians are feeling betrayed. We've got the infrastructure minister who put in a 90-day delay, which ended up being more than 200 days, and that stalled so much of the infrastructure in regional Australia. We've got the Minister for Climate Change and Energy and his new fuel efficiency standards. He's forgotten one critical point when he talks about the United States and the fact that pick-ups are still popular. They're largely exempt, Minister, from the Labor-style standards that America has in place.

Then we've got the water minister, who's just bought $205 million of productive water out of the Murray-Darling Basin. What that means is that all of that water goes out of those areas and goes flush down the mouth of the Murray and it's not used for growing food. What happens then? We have to import more food. What happens then? We've got less Australian home grown fresh produce, the best food anywhere. What that also means is that food prices go up. We've got a cost-of-living crisis, and Labor just wants to push the price of food up. Then we have the regional development minister yesterday talking about more mobile phone towers. That's fantastic if you're in a Labor electorate, but not all regional people live in a Labor electorate. Thank goodness!