David Littleproud (Maranoa, National Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture) Share this | Hansard source

On election night the Prime Minister said, 'No one held back, no one left behind.' That's unless you live in regional and rural Australia. And there's no greater betrayal than that of the Murray Darling Basin Plan—the plan that they have torn up and are now taking an additional 450 gigalitres away from. The Leader of the House was here in this parliament with me when it moved the legislation to protect those regional communities in 2019, and now he walks out on them and on that reform that was going to ensure regional communities survive. We are not going to take away the tools that farmers need to produce the food and fibre. Every Australian will pay the bill for the betrayal of this government. The Leader of the House, who was here as the opposition spokesman, now leaves because he knows that he worked in a bipartisan way to deliver the basin plan. To have the new government tear it up and destroy regional communities is epitomising of what this government has done to regional and rural Australia.

Not only have they taken away the Murray Darling Basin Plan, ripping another 450 gigalitres of water—that's the Sydney Harbour, every year, that is taken away. That's less food and fibre, 26 per cent less production, which means supply goes down and your prices go up at the checkout. They've also taken away more than $7 billion that was put aside for water infrastructure. The member for Riverina, as the infrastructure minister, put it aside for Urannah Dam and a new swamp dam in Wyangala. It was all about giving us the tools that we need to produce food and fibre to drive down the prices that people are experiencing now. The competition minister sits across from me right now—I even tried to work with him in a bipartisan way, giving him insight into competition reform and how we actually do it. I even gave him the offer to bring forward every review. We could see that the supermarkets were not just doing farmers over but they were doing consumers over. He sat on his hands and didn't even get the ACCC involved when cattle prices went down by 60 per cent at the farm gate but came down only eight per cent at the checkout. They didn't think there was a problem. They didn't think that someone might be hurt. Oh no, I'm sorry—

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