Joel Fitzgibbon (Hunter, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture) Share this | Hansard source

Sadly, the Prime Minister's first budget was a shocker for rural and regional Australia. It is fair to say that those on the other side of the chamber spend a fair bit of time talking about the interests of rural and regional Australia, but they are all talk—very rarely do they deliver.

The minister is at the table and he will stand up and say, 'Well, we saved the diesel fuel rebate.' They saved the diesel fuel rebate. They create this straw man and then we are all supposed to breathe a sigh of relief or, indeed, thank them on budget night for not abolishing this important subsidy for rural and regional Australia. They will tell you that there is $100 million in the budget over four years for additional research and development in agriculture. But they took more than that back out from research and development elsewhere and in areas which are critical to rural and regional Australia, for example, the rural industries' RDC, the CSIRO, various other RDCs and our CRCs.

They will tell you about the $370 million new quarantine facility in Victoria. There he is, the minister, turning the first sod. This was fully funded by the former Labor government.

He will tell you that there is drought assistance in the budget, announced after a well-publicised drought tour by himself and the Prime Minister—plenty of pictures, plenty of television cameras involved. Then there was a big announcement: $280 million for farm finance—and I have a picture here of the Prime Minister out there with the farmers and with the minister, looking very concerned about the impact of the drought on our farmers.

The SPEAKER: That isn't a prop, is it?

And yet here we are, three months on after the television news pictures and the newspaper shots, and not one cent of that money has flowed on to struggling farming families.

He will also get up and say, 'We had to do these things to rural and regional Australia because the former government left us with debt.' We do not have time for that debate today but it has been prosecuted by others pretty well, including by the shadow Treasurer and the Leader of the Opposition. And we will continue to have that, no doubt. There is no doubt in my mind that it is a confected budget emergency and that these are unnecessary cuts.

But there is one area which is absolutely uncontested. Indeed, no-one from the government has sought to contest it. It is the fact that this budget, with its tax increases and its funding cuts, falls disproportionately on rural and regional Australia. If you put up fuel taxes it adds to transport costs, and that fuel tax becomes embedded in everything we purchase in rural and regional Australia, including our food. This is a big hit on people who live in the bush.

Of course, Madam Deputy Speaker, if you add a GP tax—

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