Mark Coulton (Parkes, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is always interesting, in a debate on regional Australia, to follow the member for Perth, which is one of those far-flung regional centres that was so disadvantaged by the last parliament that we had to spend about $14 million on their road to the airport. The member for Perth mentioned the freezing of the financial assistance grants, but she did not mention that the Roads to Recovery program is going to be doubled. For many of the regional shires she is speaking about, the net effect is actually a positive one, not a negative one.

I would like to address the comments made by one half of The Two Ronnies, my neighbour down here from the Hunter. The member for Hunter gives irony a whole new meaning. For those who are new here, we had a boundary change in 2010. There was wailing and screaming and protest from a bit of the Parkes electorate about having to leave Parkes and go into Hunter, but these things happen in a redistribution. A couple of towns from the Parkes electorate went into Hunter, one of those being Kandos, which happens to have a cement plant that had been there for 100 years. Guess what happened on the day after the election? They shut it down, taking 106 jobs and leaving generations of people unemployed. So I went up there. It was not in my electorate, but I thought that, as I had been looking after these people for a term or so, I had better go and see what was going on. The members of the union had come across from Newcastle and were explaining to the workers that losing their jobs was a good thing, because it was for a greater cause. The carbon tax was going to cool the globe and make us look good on the international stage. Kevin Rudd was going to Stockholm and we had to have something to sell, so they had lost their jobs for a greater cause. The member for Hunter did not make his way across there until some time later, and, when he got there, it was like: 'Don't mention the war; don't mention the carbon tax.' A lot of the people of Kandos are now fly-in-fly-out miners in Cobar, North Queensland and Western Australia, because the industry that sustained them—

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