Luke Gosling (Solomon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

We know from leaks within the honourable member's divided and shambolic muppet show that the money has been allocated for Darwin for the city deal but we're still waiting after 516 days. If that doesn't reek, I don't know what does. The NT government and the City of Darwin are ready to go, so what's holding that funding up?

I know that the former speaker talked about decentralisation. It's not supposed to be from regional Australia to large capitals on the east coast, but that's what we've seen with the Australian Electoral Commission. It has—wait for it—moved the Indigenous Electoral Participation Program staff, public servants in Darwin, to Brisbane so that they can service regional areas of the Northern Territory from Brisbane. That's one example. Just getting rid of the ATO in Darwin is another example. Slashing the number of Public Service staff in the Australian Bureau of Statistics office in Darwin is another example. Slashing jobs with the Australian Broadcasting Commission in Darwin is another example. And now we hear they're after the BOM, the Bureau of Meteorology. Is there a federal public servant that you won't cut out of regional areas of this country?

Of course, we saw under the former Deputy Prime Minister that the APVMA was moved to his electorate. Public servants go to some regional areas of Australia, but, apparently, for everywhere else, including areas of Australia that get cyclones, they're looking at withdrawing the Australian Public Service, like weather forecasters, out of the Top End of Australia. It's just nuts. It's bordering on immoral, and that's not even the worst of it. Take Charles Darwin University, this Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government is ripping $30 million out of Charles Darwin University. As the previous speaker, my friend the member for Braddon, said, 'If you don't understand the importance of regional universities'—like Charles Darwin and the University of Tasmania's campuses around regional Tasmania—'then you don't understand regional Australia.'

So you've got a lot of work to do in the current government, for however long it lasts, to, as the member for Indi said, get a regional Australia plan, a strategy. It'd be a good start. Start getting to terms with the real impacts of your policies on regional Australia. The Northern Territory government is leading by example, and I'm leading by example. I'll give you a quick couple of examples of how. They've got a population strategy. They're putting their money into our local community, where they're waiting for the federal government to do anything at all. I recently ran a population strategy, because we're serious about the absolute need for us to build population in regional Australia, and we want some support from the federal government.

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