Rick Wilson (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I think the member for Hunter is getting a little bit embarrassed by the number of people on this side saying that he is a good bloke, so I will not say that, Member for Hunter, but I will say: you've got a great sense of humour and an enormous amount of chutzpah to put forward this motion that the government is failing rural and regional communities. I will come to Labor's history in rural and regional communities in a moment, particularly in my electorate of O'Connor.

But I want to tell you a story, Mr Deputy Speaker. In early June, the national accounts came out, and there was a slightly higher than expected growth figure. I think it was about 3.25 per cent—the Treasurer is nodding his head over there—and our good friends at the Fairfax Media group, looking for a way to put a negative spin on it, ran a story that said which areas were missing out on the economic growth. I thought I had better take a look at this story just to find out. So I opened up the online story. They had 150 electorates across Australia and their economic growth for the 2014-15 year. Much to my very pleasant surprise, it confirmed what I had suspected: the electorate of O'Connor was growing faster than any other electorate in the country, at 11.7 per cent. I know my Western Australian colleagues over there would welcome that number. There was only one other electorate that even came close, and that was the electorate of Durack—my good friend Melissa is the member there—and that represents about 95 per cent of regional WA. But, to be fair, probably we were bouncing back from some of the previous government's policies. I will just touch on them briefly.

On live exports: we saw in 2011 the closure of the live export trade, which did not just affect those northern cattlemen, Indigenous communities and other people who relied on that trade; it crashed the entire cattle market across Western Australia. People down on the south coast who had never sold a beast onto a boat saw their cattle prices halved. Sheep prices also halved because of the complete lack of confidence in the live export trade. So we were recovering from that particular piece of policy, and then there was the carbon tax.

The carbon tax pushed up electricity prices. So, whether you were a food processor, a miner or just simply a farmer or small-business man getting on with a business, you were whacked with an extra cost. Removing the carbon tax gave us an economic boost across the electorate. Of course, my electorate is one of the iconic mining electorates in Australia, with the town of Kalgoorlie in it. So, even though the mining tax was aimed at the iron ore industry and the big miners—

Mr Keogh interjecting—

And I see the National Party in WA have picked up your ideas, and I will be fighting that to my last breath too; do not worry about that. I will be fighting that mining tax to my last breath, because the impact of that mining tax is exactly the same as the impact of your mining tax—that is, you can go after the big ones, but what it does is crash the confidence in the rest of the industry: the small, the mid-cap miners, the explorers and the people trying to raise capital. The confidence goes out of the industry, and jobs disappear in towns like Kalgoorlie. So it is great to see that we got rid of the mining tax.

The member for Hunter asked: when did we last hear about the agricultural white paper? When I am out talking to farmers, they are talking about aspects of the white paper all the time, like the doubling of farm management deposits from $400,000 to $800,000 to allow farmers to put money aside so that they can support themselves in drought times—not go to the government, cap in hand, asking for money, but support themselves. That is a great initiative, and I congratulate the minister for agriculture on that. As to accelerated depreciation on water, fodder and infrastructure—to be able to write that off over three years—once again, that is an issue that allows farmers in my electorate to provide for themselves to set aside fodder and water for difficult times.

I am going to run out of time, but on free trade agreements I say: free trade agreements are already starting to pay dividends in my electorate. Meat processors are finding that access to markets in China, Japan and Korea is way better than it was. We are seeing record high prices for livestock in sale yards. That is a direct result of our free trade agreements.

I just want to touch very quickly on telecommunications. I have 60 mobile phone towers in O'Connor; $17 million of government investment leveraged $53 million from the Western Australian government and Telstra—60 mobile phone towers, covering 133 of the 177 mobile black spots in my electorate.

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