Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party, Shadow Minister for International Development and the Pacific) Share this | Hansard source

Not an excellent minister—says: 'We're not going to build water infrastructure at Wyangala. What we're going to do is build better roads to provide escape routes for the people of Forbes.' Go figure. Better escape routes—really? Why wouldn't you build a better piece of water infrastructure, to grow agriculture and to floodproof Forbes, rather than build better escape routes for the people of Forbes who have been flooded six times in 12 years? It just doesn't make sense. When you build water infrastructure, you improve jobs and skills. It's like Snowy Hydro. It's like the Sydney Harbour Bridge. It's nation building.

Labor talks about lowering emissions by investing funds in regional Australia. Regional Australia is already doing its part to lower emissions—much more so than urban Australia. But Labor doesn't recognise that fact. It thinks regional funding and jobs and skills funding is all about lowering emissions and doing those sorts of things. It's about building capacity, building community capacity, improving jobs and skills. At the moment you can't find workers in regional Australia, more's the pity. What is the government doing about it? It beggars belief.

I was talking to Neville Jolliffe, who has just bought into the independent grocery store at Coolamon. He already owns the one at Forest Hill, near the Royal Australian Air Force space—you might be interested to know that, shadow minister for veterans' affairs. Neville and his wife, Jodi, can't find workers. This is the situation not just for grocers, hairdressers or coffee shops; it is right across regional Australia. In every area of endeavour, you can't find workers—and it can't just be because of COVID. But what's the government doing about it? 'We're putting in place Jobs and Skills Australia and we're appeasing our union mates.' We're not getting the advice we should from captains of industry, from those people out in real Australia—and by 'real Australia' I mean regional Australia—to see what we can do to lower inflation, to see what we can do about improving the job lots and livelihoods of those captains of industry in regional Australia who want to employ people, who need to employ people, who want to make sure their business doors stay open.

I often hear about the trillion dollars of Liberal debt. It's nowhere near a trillion dollars—nowhere near it. The Labor talking points don't acknowledge the fact that, by investing the money that we did during COVID, we saved at least 60,000 lives. We saved at least 700,000 jobs through JobKeeper. We saved millions of small businesses, which were able to keep their doors open because of the investments we made and the funding we made available during that time. Of course, we're still not out of the woods when it comes to COVID-19—and you would agree with that, Acting Speaker, the member for Macarthur—

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