Pat Conaghan (Cowper, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Social Services) Share this | Hansard source

I'd like to start by thanking all the Australians who have contributed to Labor's first budget surplus in 30 years, and they are the regional Australians, particularly those regional Australians who work in the natural resources sector or, as the Treasurer puts it, 'those things that we sell overseas'—very covertly put in the budget speech. Those things that we sell overseas are gas, coal and iron ore, which have seen this government able to put forward its first budget surplus in a very long time. The Treasurer can knock back that fact as much as he likes, saying that obviously the resources sector is making an important contribution. But the fact is that they are the X factor; they are the reason that this government has seen a budget surplus.

Secondly, again—and I'm not repeating myself—we should say thanks to regional Australians, not for providing the tax dollars but for making the sacrifices, and by sacrifices I mean that this budget has ripped out the vast majority of previously planned infrastructure projects to the tune of $23 billion. Sadly, one of these was stage 2 of the Southern Cross Health Precinct, an operational health precinct that would have seen up to 48,000 patients a year. Lismore has one, and that's how many patients they see. Can you imagine how much pressure that would take off the health system within Coffs Harbour? That's 48,000 consults.

I note my friend across the floor, the member for Solomon. I thank him for his service to our country. We also lost a veterans centre: $5 million had been put aside for a veterans centre. We have the highest cohort of veterans on the Mid North Coast in New South Wales. The data speaks for itself. Yet the $5 million that was put aside for not one but three hub-and-spoke-model veterans centres was taken away. To compound this, the director of Soldier On in Port Macquarie has just been told that she's been made redundant. Where are these people going to go? Where are these veterans—who served our country, who gave us our freedoms, who put their lives on the line—going to go?

And it took up to two weeks before the budget announcement to announce that another $120 billion worth of infrastructure projects were going to be put on pause. I heard a previous speaker talk about colour-coded charts. Well, the ANAO said that they were all worthy projects, and these were all worthy projects. Yet they're going to sit there for who knows how long until the minister decides what she's going to do with them. Many of these cancelled or on-hold projects were not even about helping the regions grow. In fact, we aren't even being thrown enough scrap in the budget to sustain our current populations, particularly in the coastal electorates like Cowper that have seen unprecedented levels of growth as a result of COVID-19, with people moving away from the major cities. Everybody's suffering from the housing crisis, but it is at a peak in those coastal areas. This is money that is now not going to maintain or improve our roads, not going to provide adequate communications in the regions, not going to housing development projects, with the removal of the Stronger Community Program, and not going to support our critical volunteer groups.

You would think farmers might be given something, but in this budget they are being slogged with a biosecurity tax that keeps our nation's $90 billion agricultural industry safe and food on our tables. It just makes no sense that we would slog our farmers. In terms of this budget, there has been a lot of backslapping and hoo-ha, but it will do nothing for the people in our regions.

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