Bridget McKenzie (Victoria, National Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Development) Share this | Hansard source

Listening to the tone-deaf senators tonight highlights why regional Australians have had enough, why they feel hopeless and abandoned by a prime minister who said he would govern for all—but, as it turns out, not if you are in the regions. They're furious because their ability to produce food and their land values, social cohesion and private property rights are being trashed by the Labor Party's pursuit of net zero. Even the Paris Agreement states that rural and regional communities and food production should be protected in any future transition, and yet who is assessing that impact here in Australia? The social, economic and environmental damage to communities that is being done right now is real, and the government knows it.

What happened in Ballarat this week should give every member of parliament pause—real pause. Farmers and regional communities, people who feed and clothe our nation, have been told that transmission towers, wind factories and solar farms will carve their way across their land whether they like it or not. Their property values, their property rights, their prime farmland, their close-knit communities are all at risk. They're all under threat in a vain attempt to shrink the nation's carbon footprint by imposing industrial-scale grids of steel and concrete across some of the most productive farmland in our country. And, somehow, apparently, they are wrong to be angry about that. Somehow, pollies in the Labor Party and the Greens think that they shouldn't be offended.

The Prime Minister rightfully got heckled in Ballarat. Of course he was embarrassed, but that tells you something about the mood in regional Australia. We're very polite people. The Prime Minister and his Labor MPs in this place have subsequently drawn quite extraordinary comparisons between that protest in Ballarat and extreme demonstrations in Melbourne invaded by Neo-Nazis. There's no equivalence—none. The Ballarat protest was spirited, passionate, at times angry, and rightfully so, but it was peaceful, and the Prime Minister knows it. It's okay to lock the gate against gas companies, but it's not okay to lock the gate against foreign owned industrial-scale renewables. Talk about hypocrisy.

Even the Minister for Climate Change and Energy, Chris Bowen, has grudgingly admitted that. He said::

The transmission rollout, the wind factories, the solar farms and the hundreds of kilometres of transmission lines are being opposed by communities.

No, Sherlock, Mr Bowen. They are vehemently opposed. Farmers, law-abiding citizens, are saying they will lock their gates. They're prepared to go to jail to protect their property rights and their children's future. And, your solution, Mr Bowen, to offer them cheaper power bills and compensation—well, I'm going to hold you to that. The National Party will hold you to that, because right now regional Australians see this for what it is: a top-down, big-end-of-town agenda imposed on people who feel they have no voice and no choice.

When the Prime Minister and his ministers start invoking Neo-Nazis, when they take one woman's rope prop at a town hall meeting and smear the entire farming community, they're not listening. It's the worst kind of deflection. It's also the worst kind of gaslighting. That rope was a warning, Prime Minister, of the despair that is real in regional communities that your policy is impacting. Just think about it for a moment. What if a government or a foreign owned company marched into your home, onto your property and started destroying it? The truth is, until farmers and communities are genuinely engaged with and their concerns addressed, these protests won't stop. Regional Australia will keep speaking out loudly and clearly, and those of us that have the great honour and privilege of representing them in this place will also continue to be their champions against a Labor Party supported by the Greens who want to see livestock production and food production in this country stopped and disappear under swathes of steel and concrete for an international obsession that has gone too far.