Sam Birrell (Nicholls, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Regional Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in this grievance debate. There is a bit of grievance in regional and rural Australia at the moment, and it's something I continue to hear across my electorate of Nicholls. For those of you who aren't aware, it's the food bowl of Australia. It's northern Victoria. It's a place where so many people have come for so many years to set up amazing businesses using the natural assets that we have. Those natural assets are irrigation water thanks to the Murray Goulburn-Murray Irrigation District scheme, the incredible fertile soils of the floodplains and, perhaps more than anything, the new entrepreneurial spirit that has arrived in the Goulburn and Murray valleys over many years, as well as to the south in places such as Seymour and Kilmore.

What concerns a lot of people across my electorate and, indeed, across regional and rural Australia, is that policy that's made here in Canberra is increasingly detached from realities on the ground in the regions. The downsides of those policies are being felt hardest in those communities, and those communities are saying they just don't understand us in Canberra. That is a function of the way that the Albanese government has been running this country for the past four years. What looks like a neat policy decision on paper here in Canberra can be very different in a place like Shepparton, in a place like Kilmore, in a town like Cobram up on the Murray River, in Yarrawonga and in Echuca. It's not only in my electorate; it's also in Gippsland, and my good friend the member for Monash is here.

The lived reality is that all of these people moved to the regions—some many generations ago—because they wanted to set up, primarily, agricultural businesses. Those agricultural businesses lead to these other businesses, because, particularly many years ago, it was impossible with the logistics that they had to get fresh product—fresh fruit, fresh milk—everywhere across Australia. We set up preserving industries where we can make fresh produce into non-perishable produce. There is no better example than the SPC fruit cannery, set up more than 100 years ago, where peaches, apricots and pears were put into cans. Now they're put into snack packs, and those products have gone around Australia and around the world.

At this point, I commend the speech I heard from the member for Deakin about Australian procurement. I agree with a lot of what he said, but I would advise him to go and talk to the Jacinta Allan Labor government in Victoria and ask her why the Victorian health procurement agencies insist that people in Victorian hospitals should be eating Chinese-preserved fruit when we're growing so much of it and producing so much of it in Shepparton. I'll leave that with him but I agree with a lot of the points he was making about procurement. Procurement, particularly state government procurement, can lift industries in regional Australia.

Another industry that was very strong was the dairy industry. We started with a butter factory in every town, milk going to different places, but now we have an incredible industry that value adds and makes cheese, makes infant formula and sends them across South East Asia and beyond. If you're putting Perfect Italiano on a pizza or a lasagne, it was made in Stanhope in my electorate. It was the toil of those incredible dairy farmers who get up very early in the morning, milk cows, go back and do it again at about 3.30 in the afternoon, and all of the people associated. So when those farmers tell me that policy decisions in Canberra make it harder to run their businesses, I've got to come up here and talk about that.

When Murray-Darling Basin Plan policies made by Labor take irrigation water out of the consumptive pool, it means that everyone who's left using irrigation water has to pay more for it. They have to pay more to keep the system alive, to keep the system going, and they have to pay more when they're buying temporary water because there is simply less of it there. They have to pay more because fertiliser has gone up. Fertiliser could be made in Australia and it will be made in Australia, in north-western Australia, with the permanent facility using north shelf gas. But that was a project that was supported and funded by the previous coalition government. It's incredible, the amount of credit that this current Albanese government is trying to take for that project. But it was set up and signed off in the NAIF back in the previous coalition government. That's a good step. But I don't see anything else that the Albanese government is instigating to make life easier for farmers and the people in these regional industries.

People in regional Australia have great grievance because these farms are all small businesses. A lot of the processing facilities are actually small businesses in the scheme of things. They are telling me that there are more government agencies wanting to clip the ticket on the way through. They say it's become worse in the last four years, indeed, under the reign of the Victorian government, which will hopefully soon to come to an end; we need a change of government in that state desperately.

The input costs for a dairy farmer include getting his or her herd, building the dairy, buying irrigation water, paying wages, buying fuel, buying urea—all of these things. But government compliance is going up as a proportion of the cost of their businesses. Now, when government compliance is saying, 'Well, you need to fill this out. You need to produce that form. You need to do this report', it is basically making sure that a bureaucrat gets to clip the ticket of this hard work on the way through, not to mention some of the changes to capital gains tax. When these people finally sell this asset that they've spent their life building up, the government wants to take more money out of that hard work. I seriously hope there's a backflip to that because there needs to be. The commodity prices are going up, government compliance is going up, and that is not sustainable if we want strong, dynamic private industry in this country. That is what I am hearing across regional Australia. It's a pattern of taking it out on the regions, and people are getting mighty sick of it, I can tell you.

During the previous coalition government, I wasn't in parliament. I was a community member of the Greater Shepparton community. There used to be regional infrastructure funding that would provide these wonderful places, whether regional cities like Shepparton or smaller places like Kilmore, like Seymour, like Echuca, like Yarrawonga, like Cobram, assistance from the federal government to develop the infrastructure that they need. Regional communities need that because we don't have the density of population. The councils don't have the rate base, so they need that federal government support. The previous coalition government understood that, and there were some incredible pieces of infrastructure built.

The Echuca-Moama Bridge has changed the lives of the people who live in those two communities that straddle the Murray River. There was one narrow bridge for a huge amount of traffic to get across. It made being there pretty unliveable because you couldn't go and see anyone. You'd get in a traffic jam to get over one side of the river. Even more importantly, there's so much industry that exists on either side of the river. There are farms in New South Wales; the processor is in Echuca in Victoria. There are farms in Echuca. There might be something that they need. The trucks couldn't get across. The coalition government came together, worked with the state government, which was then a coalition government, and funded the Echuca-Moama Bridge. It has changed the lives of people who live there and the economy. I don't see the big regional infrastructure projects being funded the way they used to be under the previous government, and that's productivity-enhancing infrastructure. We want great industry and great businesses in the regions because the tax that that earns helps the rest of Australians. We want the city people to be able to benefit from the productivity and the dynamism that we have in the regions, but the government has got to assist by funding infrastructure and, in many cases, just getting out of the way and letting hardworking Australians who have got an appetite for entrepreneurialism and risk run their businesses.