Joanna Gash (Gilmore, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

This government is short-changing inner regional Australia and, in particular, regions like Nowra-Bomaderry in my electorate of Gilmore. Despite our growth being faster than even that of Sydney, this government has ignored our area, classing much of Gilmore as just an offshoot of a capital city. How ridiculous. My claim is backed up by a new study released last month from the Grattan Institute which shows that more than $2 billion of government regional development funding is being misspent every single year. The report claims that the government is saturating remote areas in funding to the detriment of inner regional and coastal areas such as Nowra-Bomaderry, which is only a very small part of my electorate of Gilmore. On average, two new Australians are moving into Nowra-Bomaderry every single day. Two people a day may not sound like much, but each of these people needs accommodation, health services, employment, recreational facilities and much, much more. On top of this, Nowra-Bomaderry is facing exponential growth in key industries like defence, aviation support, manufacturing and tourism. Only yesterday it was announced that a $40 million dollar international helicopter-support facility, the only one of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere, is to be based in Nowra—a much needed job creation program.

Nowra-Bomaderry is struggling to cope with unprecedented growth, and our ageing infrastructure is already reaching capacity. We are a regional area crying out for government support. Currently, a large proportion of government regional funding is allocated with the intent of stimulating growth in highly regional areas. Growth is good, but it seems that the government believes that by stimulating economic growth, through its regional Australia policy, all of regional Australia's capacity problems will be resolved. This approach has been followed by the government for many years, despite the evidence showing that it has made no real improvement to regional Australia as a whole. What this policy has done, however, is saturate highly rural areas with frivolous funding at the expense of new infrastructure in booming coastal regions like Nowra-Bomaderry. While Nowra-Bomaderry is facing high growth with no capacity, highly regional areas are facing high capacity with no growth at all. This is all thanks to this government's failed approach to regional development.

The funding fight has traditionally been between metropolitan and regional. This government has made the fight between inner regional and outer regional. The fact is that Nowra-Bomaderry is just as regional as the rest of them. Gilmore is a very tricky electorate. We have population growth rates far above average, yet the average age in Gilmore is 43—the second oldest in Australia. Almost every second resident in Gilmore owns their own home—we have the fourth-highest rate of home ownership in the nation—yet only four out of 10 Gilmore residents have achieved education past year 10. We are a booming region, yet the average income for a family in Gilmore is only $967 a week, one of the poorest in the nation. What does this show? It shows that Gilmore is crying out for government investment, and that this government has walked away. Between 1996 and 2007, the coalition government invested more than $2.1 billion into Gilmore alone. I call on this government to face the fact that it has failed regional Australia and that it is time for it to really understand what regional Australia is all about.

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