Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party, Leader of The Nationals in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a long way from Queensland to Geelong and Geelong is where I was on the weekend. Whilst I was travelling down from St George, I went past Thallon, which is a town that at times has up to 300,000 tonnes of grain stacked beside it. Unfortunately, the railway lines at Thallon only have the capacity to move rolling stock at 40 kilometres an hour. It is a town which really should have a flour mill—and which, in any other nation, would have flour mill—but does not have a flour mill. What it does have is a whole heap of trucks which cart grain into the Thallon silo. Then, when they need to move it, they cart it out of the Thallon silo—the legacy of that being potholes in the road.

As I travelled down, I also passed Moree, one of the richest agricultural shires not only in Australia but, at its peak, in the world. We went past Coonamble, one of the big prime wheat-growing areas; Dubbo, a massive stock-selling area; and Deniliquin, a town which has the capacity to feed up to 20 million people. When you think about it, that is quite an honourable thing for our nation to do, especially when you consider how this is a time of privation in the world and how people are going without. They produce rice at Deniliquin and rice is a staple. As a staple, it flows from the very top to the very bottom. If we did not produce that rice, someone, whether in the Southern Sudan or on the Thai-Burma border, would starve to death. I think that is one of the greatest things our nation can do—to produce food that feeds people.

You continue on and you go past Shepparton and Mildura, towns with a great horticultural capacity, and you finally end up at Geelong. Geelong is a very admirable town with a great manufacturing base—the pride of our nation and an essential element of our nation if we ever end up under attack and have to have a quantitative expansion of our metal-producing and fabrication industries to support our armed forces. It would be places such as Geelong which would do that. But what is sad is that, of all those towns I mentioned, only one got anything from the $150 million first round of the Regional Development Australia Fund, or RDAF, grants—and that was Geelong. Geelong got $10 million in one grant for their football stadium. The Cats are a great football team, but they got $10 million. All the other towns got nothing. I think they also got $10 million for the library and heritage centre—so $20 million in all, while nobody else got anything.

That is sad—sad for the people of Thallon when you think that some of that money could have gone towards a flour mill, which could have added so much to our nation's economy. It is sad for the people who could have had a stock transit centre in Broken Hill—$550,000 to aid proper animal husbandry and the humane treatment of animals. It is sad for people in other towns, in Ballarat and Bendigo. In one of those towns they needed to refurbish a kindergarten because it had asbestos in it. They put an application in but they got nothing. It is sad for the people on the Lind Highway up near Hughenden, who need to seal the road to try to stop cars bouncing off it and improve road safety in the area. It is sad for Mayor Jo Shepherd out at Cunnamulla, and it is sad for the mayor of Roma. They required funding but did not get anything.

It is disappointing that two thirds of the funding went to one third of the seats, and those seats were held by Labor Party members and Independents. Simon Crean said when he started this process:

We've got to get away from pork-barrelling ... this sense that you only hand out stuff around election time. We've got to get away from this notion of just football grounds or sports stadiums or local halls to investing in communities, investing in our skills and our youth, our education.

I agree totally with Simon Crean—the problem is, he did not follow his own guidelines. He just started handing out things to mates: $8 million went to Tony Windsor for one building in Armidale, Freeman House; $6.2 million went to the member for Denison. But the Labor Party regional seats in Tasmania got nothing at all. I think $7 million went to an art gallery in Newcastle. As I said, there was $10 million for a sports stadium. This is extremely inappropriate expenditure of our funds. This fund is not a big fund but it is a fund that means so much. At the end of all this, I think only 6.3 per cent of the applicants got money. We were accused of pork-barrelling, but when we were running our program 72 per cent of the applicants got funding. Now it has become quite ridiculous.

I think when the Labor Party are handing out money like this they are preparing for an election. Janelle Saffin got herself $3.2 million for a hall. What do you say to all those other people who put so much effort into filling out these applications to be part of this process because they thought the process was genuine? It obviously was not. We have to be fair dinkum—'regional' has to mean authentically regional. The largest amount of funding with a nominal 'regional' in front of it has gone to a road around Perth airport—$480 million. Unless that road goes all the way to Kalgoorlie, I cannot see how you can call it regional. For me, regional is personified by dark starry nights and furry animals on the road; long drives and CDs—basically, remoteness. It is not just that some of these places got money—good luck to them; it is the amount that they got. Massive amounts of money have been delivered to places like Perth. The centre in Hobart that looks after Antarctic expeditions got money. Good luck to them, but under this scheme Hobart is now a regional town and Perth is now a regional town. This is absurd.

The myregion website is a classic example of Labor Party management. For a long while all this website had was a photo competition for regional Australia. At first it had three photos, and they were a photo of the Sydney Harbour Bridge—there is an interesting part of regional Australia—a photo of the Gold Coast and I think a photo of a paddock. On inquiring into this, we found out that the website has currently got seven people looking after it and so far it has cost the Australian taxpayer in excess of $400,000 to run. This is why we start running out of money.

Last week I thought the government had a good week because they only borrowed $200 million. But I saw on Sunday that they have extended their debt again, by another $1.7 billion. They have in excess of $215 billion in gross debt. They talk about a surplus and say that in a couple of years time they might get a $1 billion surplus or a $2 billion surplus, but they borrowed more than that in the last fortnight. We are going to have to pay this money back. It all has to be paid back. That sort of amount—$1,700 million—equates to around 3,500 average-priced houses. This is happening day after day, week on week, under the auspices of the treasurer of the millennium, Wayne Swan. I know those opposite might be thinking about changing their leader. I know there are few concerns there, and I hear that the Treasurer, Mr Wayne Swan, was talking very intently to a person called Mr Smith over at CHOGM. They were locked away in a corner, having a long, deep and meaningful discussion about the future of the Labor Party. What I can say to Mr Smith, if he is about to get the mantle—I also watched the foreign minister, Kevin Rudd, give a little expose on stage—is this: if you are going to change the sheets, change both of them.

Senate adjourned at 22:29