Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm here today to say what an incredible week Tamworth has had. On Saturday, we opened the Northern Inland Centre of Sporting Excellence. This is a multimillion-dollar facility that works on the back of the AELEC equestrian facilities there. With a hockey field, a velodrome for bikes and the athletics field, it is an exceptional front door to Tamworth.

On Sunday, the government announced it would invest half a billion dollars into the new water infrastructure at Dungowan Dam, something I've been fighting for—and you know it—for so long. We put $75 million on the table and we finally got there. This is an incredible addition to the extension to Chaffey Dam. If we hadn't got that, Tamworth would have run out of water.

Now, with the instrument landing system that we invested in for Tamworth airport, we have now secured the Foreign Investment Review Board approval for Virgin Airlines to go forward with its flight training school, and CAE want to be in there as well. This will be one of the biggest flight training schools, if not the biggest, in the Southern Hemisphere and it will drag further jobs into Tamworth. We are building this city. We are making it better. We are making the investments and bringing in the jobs. This has been a truly outstanding week for the Peel Valley and for the city of Tamworth.

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