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

I thank the member for Eden-Monaro for reminding me about the 'drought round', as we described it in WA. It was a round of the Building Better Regions Fund which was restricted to those areas that had been drought declared. At the time, my electorate, which covers 866,000 square kilometres and 38 local government authorities, was not drought declared. We were subsequently, but after that particular round of the BBRF closed. Therefore my communities, the 38 local government authorities across my electorate, had no access to funding during that round, which led to a very high demand and very high expectations of the most recent rounds.

Across my 38 local governments in O'Connor, I had 18 projects put up—significant projects of over a million dollars—for a total of $40 million. Part of the reason for that was not only that we were excluded from the previous round, due to not being drought declared at that time, but also because of the Western Australian Labor government, which, once they were elected in 2017, discontinued the previous coalition government's Royalties For Regions Fund. This fund was predicated on the royalties generated in regional Australia being reinvested in the towns where those royalties are generated—particularly in towns like Kalgoorlie, Leonora and Laverton across my electorate. They produce an enormous amount of royalty income for the Western Australian government and a billion dollars of those royalties was to be predicated to regional development. This year, in Western Australia, iron ore alone has produced $11 billion of royalties for the Western Australian government. None of that money is coming back to regional Western Australia through regional development programs at this point in time. What that's led to is the only source and access of regional development funding is the building better regions program. As I say, this led to a massive oversubscription with 18 projects at $40 million. I'm very proud that I wrote letters of support for every single one of those 18 projects. The member for Macquarie, who was on her feet recently—I'm told that some proponents in her electorate complained that they didn't receive letters of support from the member for Macquarie, so that's interesting. But, certainly in my case, I've advocated for every single one of those projects, and I was very pleased that six of those projects got across the line to a total of $14 million.

We've heard accusations by the Labor shadow spokesman and others in the media that this is a pork-barrelling exercise. Well, I can assure you that my seat, on 65 per cent two-party preferred, is not a marginal seat. It's not a seat that the government is trying to defend or trying to win. It's a regional seat that covers an enormous area with 110,000 hardworking citizens, spread across 38 local government authorities and over 120 different towns, that deserve support from their federal government.

I'll quickly run through some of the projects that we've funded. The Kalgoorlie-Boulder basketball stadium—Kalgoorlie has a state-league basketball team that have been playing in very, very substandard conditions, so that $5 million to go towards the $13 million project will be very well received. The Esperance Bay Yacht Club is to upgrade the marina, which will also allow cruise ships to dock their tenders, will increase the tourism visitation and is another important project of $2 million. The Albany Motorsport Park, with $5 million from us out of a $10 million project, will create a state of the art motor complex in Albany, which will, once again, draw hundreds if not thousands of visitors to the region. That was just touching on some of those projects.

I want to wrap up by talking about the Nyabing Progress Association. Nyabing is a little town of about 200 people, and the shire probably has around 400 people in it. At the recent regional Australia committee visit to my home town of Katanning, Rachel Browne, who's the treasurer of the association, appeared and explained that they needed a new community hub in their town. The community, and I'm talking about a community of less than 200 people—member for Corangamite, before you get on your feet—raised over a million dollars to put towards a project, a community hub that they needed, and we contributed $900,000. I'm very proud of that and I'm very proud of them. (Time expired)

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