Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party, Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Mallee for her question and acknowledge that regional Australia has been the absolute bedrock of the Australian economy for decades. Our economy once rode on a sheep's back but it now rides very much on the back of a thriving resources sector and a much broader agricultural sector. Those sectors are all based in regional Australia.

Since the global pandemic outbreak at the start of 2020 our government has provided $311 billion of support—to health care, to families and to businesses, many of them small businesses that would not have otherwise survived but for the assistance that we provided, and also to farmers, to factories and to so many people who found themselves on the welfare queues, through no fault of their own, for the very first time. But thankfully there are more people in employment now than there were prior to the pandemic. The unemployment rate is lower now than it was when this government came to power in 2013. That is $311 billion of support through JobKeeper, through JobSeeker, through HomeBuilder, through COVID health care and through aviation rescue packages, which have ensured that many of those regional and especially remote communities received frontline medical personnel, face masks, respiratory devices and all the things they would not otherwise have received but for the Regional Airline Network Support, Domestic Aviation Network Support.

This government has been at the forefront of keeping our people safe, keeping the wheels of industry moving and getting things done—getting the job done whilst making sure of a full economic recovery from COVID-19. There's still a long, long way to go, and we all acknowledge that. We have seen the economy rebound strongly out of recession and grow to be larger than it was pre-COVID. As I said, there are more people in a job today than there were pre-COVID, and that is because of the policies we have put in place, because of the measures we have put in place through the budgets and through what we've done to support the economy. And this government has delivered major infrastructure projects right across Australia: 449 major land transport infrastructure projects have been completed since this government came back into office in 2013. Our $110 billion 10-year pipeline of investment is supporting 100,000 workers. As I went around regional Australia and metropolitan Australia last week I saw the benefits of that: hi-vis workers, excavators, pushing around dirt, and asphalt being delivered for the first time and being laid on roads that had never, ever seen that bitumen exercise. That is what we're getting on with.

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