Russell Broadbent (McMillan, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

He is a decent guy, but he is not a patch on the former Labor candidate for Gippsland, who was Jane Rowe. Jane Rowe was one of the better Labor candidates I have ever experienced, and I have been around this place since 1990. She was decent, she was hard working, she was feisty, she was determined. And what did the Labor Party do to her? They ripped the ground out from under her in one foul stroke and they brought in someone of no consequence to the Labor Party whatsoever. Jane Rowe was an outstanding candidate for the Labor Party. She had put the work and the years and the effort in. And what did they turn around and do? They just dumped her.

Who did you upset when you did that? You upset a former agriculture minister in the Cain-Kirner government, Keith Hamilton, and his wife, Kath Hamilton, great Labor stalwarts of the Latrobe Valley. I know them well, and you have destroyed the grassroots of your own party by what you have done in thrusting this candidate onto Gippsland. This candidate is not a believable Labor candidate in this marginal seat. Have you decided you do not want a bar of this seat? I can tell you what you are doing and what you are not doing: you have taken $1 billion, as the Leader of the Nationals said, out of all of your programs that affect regional Victoria and Australia. Let us put that out of the way. We know what you have done; that is on the record. What we have done for Gippsland is put in the Pakenham Bypass—and thank heavens we got that completed before you got in because you would probably have taken the white lines off that too, if you could have. You would have refused to put the white lines on the Pakenham Bypass. That is how stingy you have become.

I know that there is no future for this Labor government in rural Australia, and that is why the member for Brand would have been part of this. As a former Secretary of the Australian Labor Party, he knows full well what seats he wants to win at the next election. He is not interested in rural Australia. Their inroads have gone as far as they can possibly go and they have made a decision: ‘Yeah, we’ll give the $2 million to Moe; yes, we’ll do the Traralgon sports ground that we said we’d do. But we’re doing it grudgingly; we don’t want to do it. We’ll just impose our candidate from head office in Melbourne and dump on Jane Rowe and her family completely. We don’t care if we upset the whole of the Labor Party across Gippsland; we just want to implement what we have said we will do.’ This is the Rudd proposal for rural Australia.

Why did you take money from the Traralgon Bypass? That is plainly ridiculous. It is not a sensible move—Traralgon needs it.

You have both talked about this election campaign. I wanted to talk about rural issues. Member for Brand, you were obviously very prepared in what you were about to do and responded in an exhortation on behalf of a candidate you have never met and do not know, who has never been in the party, has not got your history in the party and has not got the history of the other members who are sitting here and who deserve to be in this place. You are promoting someone who has no right to be in this place and, on Saturday, if we can do our best with Rohan Fitzgerald and Darren Chester, we will make sure he never gets into this place.

What you have not done is protect jobs in the coal industry. You have not even expressed a view that you might actually care about what is happening in the power industry down there. You have an alignment with Bob Brown. Bob Brown has an agenda about the Hazelwood power station. He wants a notch on his belt and he is going to use the Labor Party and the Rudd government to get that notch on his belt. He wants a trophy. He keeps saying, ‘Hazelwood power station: dirtiest power station in the world, if not the whole of the galaxy.’ Actually, it is quite an efficient power station that can be brought on line, raised up and then brought back. It is a very good power station that supplies 27 per cent of our power in Victoria and, therefore, pours into the national grid. It is a very important operation. There are 500 jobs swinging around that now. You may not work in the power industry in Gippsland, but there are many people that, if they do not work in it, know somebody who does work in the power industry. They will be treating their vote very carefully on Saturday, because they know that every Green vote is on its way to the Labor Party every time they slot one and that that is a cross against the power industry in Gippsland.

The Rudd government is not saying anything—it does not want to offend any Green voter. It is not actually a believer in clean coal. It is not a believer in all the effort that the previous government put into clean coal. It is not interested in the fact that there has been a great decline in the number of dairy farmers, as reported in the paper. It is not interested in the real issue of how to get doctors into rural Australia. There was not even a mention of that during the campaign. These are crucial issues for people who represent regional Australia—and, if you do not understand that, you do not understand anything about communities that need hospital services. In the Labor Party manifesto in Gippsland, there is not one mention anywhere of what the Rudd government is going to do about the hospitals, because it is running away from the issue of doctors in hospitals. The CSIRO, which used to be the great information gatherer for farmers and future farmers, has been starved of funds and it is selling off property and closing down its facilities.

The member for Brand was speaking today about a six-year-old audit report that showed that the process actually worked. The auditor had a look at it and said, ‘Here are the recommendations I am putting forward; you should be making some changes.’ Those changes were made by the former government, and there were processes implemented so that Regional Partnerships, which when you came into power was completely above board, went into many Labor seats. They were very good programs. Regional infrastructure is terribly important to what happens not only in Gippsland but right across the whole of Australia, and you have reduced the funds that are going to go into regional infrastructure. I will look forward to the program you may put in place next year. Regional arts have suffered under what you have done. You talked about Darren McCubbin. You have actually taken money off what your own candidate used to do. He was involved in arts in Gippsland up until a few weeks ago, and now you have removed money from the area where he was doing all the good work that the member for Brand just talked about a few minutes ago. It is unbelievable what the Labor Party do not know about their own program, their own candidate and what is going on in Gippsland. You are running on the Rudd line—‘Rudd will get us over the line here.’ You have not considered local people. You have not considered your own local branch members, let alone the local voters in the seat of Gippsland. Why haven’t the Labor Party recognised that the local people down there are going to make a local decision about whom they want to represent them here in Canberra? They will vote for a local person who has credibility in politics.

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