Barry Haase (Kalgoorlie, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Infrastructure, Roads and Transport) Share this | Hansard source

That is right: he had not bothered to actually observe them. He had made a blanket decision that anything approved by the Howard government to actually improve life in the bush rather than make it more expensive must be pork-barrelling. So, rather than bother to look at these projects to determine whether or not they were worthy of funding, he condemned them all out of hand as being pork-barrelling. But, because of the tenacity of this coalition opposition, he has had to backflip. And isn’t that such a good thing, when you consider that it is the public, the voters of Australia, who are going to benefit from such a backflip? He has finally seen sense. He got a bit of heat. He was under the blowtorch on the Sunrise program and he caved in because he had not read his brief. He did not know what he was talking about.

So many of the ministers in this Rudd government are not prepared to take advice from the departments. We understand that already. But one would have thought that Minister Albanese, having had so much to say about how dreadful the act of pork-barrelling was and how undeserving these Regional Partnerships projects were, would have at least had the opportunity to look at them before going on air and having to finally declare that there were in fact some very deserving projects amongst them. We knew that all along. Because of our tenacity, he has now backflipped and is talking about funding the 86 that had been promised funding but which this rotten government took the funding away from.

So we have a situation whereby we have a government on the ropes, prepared to backflip. We will keep the government under the blowtorch of public scrutiny and we will well and truly make sure that when we find fault we expose it to the public. I am very confident that when we keep the blowtorch of attention on this government it will cave in. We will find the fault. We will make sure that public pressure is maintained and we will make sure—mark my words—that the public know about it and ministers have to think twice about the decisions they take that will impact negatively on regional Australia.

We have so many issues to pick up on when we want to bring some focus on the actions of this government. The question has been asked of me on numerous occasions by people in my electorate: what is it that makes an ALP government so metropolitan focused? We have heard so often from those who are well informed that this budget was an old-fashioned, high-taxing, high-spending budget. Many have compared it to the Whitlam years. The suggestion is: ‘Here we go again! What will be the next Khemlani affair?’ But I suggest to those who ask this question that it is not surprising. We have a cultural divide—almost. Members of the Labor Party are primarily those who have not worked for a living. They have held down a job in a union position, in the main, and they have always wanted to work on and maintain the divide between ‘the bosses and us’. They do not realise, of course, that what they are supposed to do is represent the public at large. The public at large deserve better. What is more, they expect better. So when people say to me, ‘Why is it that the Rudd Labor government hate the people in the bush?’ I simply explain to them: ‘They don’t do it out of malice; they do it out of ignorance because they do not understand the bush. They never have.’ You have to go back as far as the days of the great unionists—Mick Young comes to mind—to find Labor politicians in this place who really understood the bush.

I come from the bush. I know what bush people think. You only have to look at a political map of Australia that is coloured blue, green or red and, apart from one seat of the Northern Territory, you are hard pressed to find the red patches representing rural seats held by the Labor Party. My mob think that the Labor Party ought to be left in the cities that they understand. The sad reality in Australian politics is that, because of the lack of even distribution of the Australian population, you find governments like the Rudd Labor government being elected. You find them handing down budgets that deal out dirt to regional communities. You find good projects like Investing in Our Schools and the Commercial Ready projects of AusIndustry ditched because the Rudd Labor government simply does not understand the bush.

I say to members that we have a lot to realise as far as truth is concerned when dealing with this new government. We have much to focus upon. In the lead-up to the election we heard so much about how we were going to reduce grocery prices, reduce fuel prices, reduce interest rates and therefore create greater housing affordability. So many of the Australian public were obviously convinced that they were going to see practical change that would reduce the costs of their day-to-day living. Instead of that, we have discovered that this government is intent on the upward process of watching. We know about ‘foolwatch’. That has been heralded with great fanfare. We are now hearing about ‘grocery watch’, and the next thing will of course be ‘child care watch’. Methinks that the coalition have a case to introduce ‘spin watch’. We know that the Australian taxpayers, the voters, are sick of this watching brief. They want some action. They want to know why it is they were fooled into voting for a group of people who are capable only of watching, not actually of getting on with the job of doing something about fulfilling their election promises. Collectively, Australian voters feel absolutely dudded by this Rudd government.

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