Mark Coulton (Parkes, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Hansard source

I think this might be my 16th or 17th budget appropriations speech. I have been listening with interest some of the previous speeches and I just want to start by issuing a warning to the government and my colleagues in the opposition. I won't be here at the next election; I am retiring. I think the speeches made by the Greens members in this appropriation speech should be sent to every household in Australia. They are absolutely terrifying contributions, because if there is a hung parliament next time and the Greens get the balance of power, this country will be in a world of pain. Listening to the member for Melbourne, the Greens leader, as he admonishes coal and gas. He lives in an electorate that is completely altered. I've been there at night-time. They don't even turn their lights off when they go home in those office towers. It's an electorate that relies on the resources industry not only for its construction but also its maintenance, and then to attack the very hand that feeds it—it is terrifying.

I should mention the irony in some of the previous contributions. The member for Melbourne talked about his concern for the Indigenous people. What about the 250 Aboriginal people who work for Whitehaven Coal at Narrabri? What about them? They would take their jobs away—good paying jobs that support their families. Just a word of warning: the Greens are a very dangerous organisation. They're not environmentalists, and if they get any more influence in this country than they already have then we're in serious trouble.

What I found interesting is the fact that this budget was quite narrowly focused. There was a lot of money for green hydrogen and not much else. There was some for other renewables, but the main focus was green hydrogen. Now, I actually believe that there will be a future for hydrogen, but at the moment it's an experimental fuel. There are a lot of issues around hydrogen, particularly green hydrogen, that have yet to be overcome—issues around transportation, the amount of water that it uses and, if it's going to be green hydrogen, the amount of renewable energy it takes to produce it. At the moment they don't stack up. Like it or not, in this country we are still reliant on traditional fuels to generate power. Whether the member for Melbourne or those opposite that admonish gas and coal like it or not, that's what is keeping the lights on in their houses at the moment. We don't live in a parallel universe where by wishing something it can happen. We live in the real world where we actually have to look after the industries that support us.

My electorate, the Parkes electorate, helped carry this country through the pandemic. It produces large quantities of clean agricultural produce, food and fibre. It produces minerals, coal, gold, copper, lead, zinc. Soon it will be at the forefront of rare earths and those minerals that are so important for modern technology.

But I think I should start by recognising what I appreciate in this budget under the Growing Regions Program. I should acknowledge the payments that came to my electorate for the Moree pool; for a Brewarrina PCYC and an indoor stadium—Brewarrina is a very good strong community on the Barwon River in my electorate, and this will be a wonderful proposal for them; and for the Gunida Gunyah Aboriginal Corporation in Gunnedah, for their community centre—they do a great job helping people in that area. In Dubbo the Wiradjuri cultural centre will be a great facility for the Wiradjuri people and the broader Dubbo community. It will not only be a keeping place and an important place for the Wiradjuri people; it will be an opportunity for visitors to the area to get an understanding of the Wiradjuri culture. I congratulate the Dubbo council for that. There's also the Narrabri tourism project. Once again, Narrabri is a very strong community, and having that addition to their tourism precinct, adjacent to the Crossing Theatre, will be of great benefit to them.

I listened to the member for Bennelong's contribution He spoke about all of the issues with health and the additional spending. My electorate is still reeling from the changes to the DPA, the distribution priority area, which was the incentive that took doctors to regional Australia. The first thing this government did was change that, and it decided to classify peri-urban areas like Wollongong, Newcastle and Geelong—and probably some areas in Deputy Speaker Wilkie's electorate as well—as regional. When that happened, western health lost six doctors in one week.

The lack of concern for regional Australia, and areas like mine, is absolutely breathtaking. We talk about this government wasting millions of dollars and splitting the country on a proposal for a voice that was ill thought out and not wanted, and I've heard speech after speech in this place about their care for Aboriginal people, yet time after time the projects that are important to those people get ripped out. At the moment I'm dealing with the weir at Wilcannia, where people were promised a weir that would raise the river by two metres, but it got packed back to one metre. So, while we care for Aboriginal people in this place, something that would really make a difference to that community—something that they really wanted and that the land council and everyone was behind—got cut back. That's the frustrating thing about the hypocrisy in this place. This place is like a university debating room where we talk about our virtue but nothing equates to what happens on the ground.

A great example is the Inland Rail north of Narromine. People in my electorate—not wealthy people but entrepreneurial battlers—saw the potential of the Inland Rail construction, went to the bank, borrowed money and bought trucks and excavators. Aboriginal people in Moree undertook training. They were working on that first section—Narrabri to Moree and Moree to North Star—and that all just got ripped out. I talked to a young fella the other day; he had to sell his truck and he's had to go and get a job because the work stopped.

In the work on the Newell Highway now, the $250-odd million is still money that was allocated from the previous government. The Local Roads and Community Infrastructure Program has been cut. With the Stronger Communities Program, there was just $150,000 to each electorate, which helped the local CWA hall maybe upgrade to a safety ramp or which got a barbecue for the Lions Club or some nets for the tennis club. Little things like that just got ripped out. Roads of strategic importance, where roads that would link onto the Newell Highway and help the productivity of the local area—gone. LRCI, one of the most popular projects with local government—gone.

What we're seeing now is ministers from this government coming into electorates like mine to cut the ribbons of projects that they can—projects that they are taking credit for but that they didn't fund or construct. Just the week before last, Senator O'Neill had nearly a week in my electorate—fair enough. I've acknowledged the money under the Growing Regions Program, and, if she had asked me, I would have stood alongside her as those announcements were made. In the country, we are civil. We do know the right thing to do. When Senator O'Neill came to open the museum, funding under the Building Better Regions Fund, and cut the ribbon despite the fact she had no idea about the project, I was gracious and welcomed her. That's what country people do.

But, in the electorate, she had the temerity last week to say that the rorts and the slush funds had come to an end. So the rorts and the slush funds had come to an end; she turned up in my electorate to announce this. What I've decided to do is ask the government and Senator O'Neill: which one of these projects is a rort, which one came from a slush fund and which one is not appropriate? Is it the $265 million for safety upgrades on the Newell Highway, the $176 million for a new bridge in Dubbo or the $39.4 billion for the Clontarf Foundation, one of the biggest game changers for young Aboriginal boys at school? I think 10 or 11 academies in my electorate have seen these lads stay at school and go on to employment and further education. Is that a rort? Did that come from a slush fund? There was $35.2 million for the Moree Intermodal Overpass. Well, they've withdrawn that—it's gone.

There was the Hargraves Lane and Federation Street bypass in Gilgandra, the Newell Highway and Oxley Highway intersection upgrades and the $25 million for the cancer centre. Don't they think the people of western New South Wales are entitled to have cancer treatment? Is that the rort? The Indigenous people and the people that live in western New South Wales who were dying because they couldn't get to Sydney were then getting world-class cancer treatment in their area, in Dubbo. There's a PET scanner. Professionals have come from all over Australia to staff that. Is that a rort, Senator O'Neill? I'd like to know.

There are more projects: Tooraweenah Road, another highway, the Wilcannia weir, which has now gone from a two-metre weir to a one-metre weir. There was $12.5 million for Pooncarie Road, because when the Menindee Lakes went dry because of drought, I went to the tourist association, and I said: 'We can't make it rain. What do you need?' They said, 'We need better access from the south for the tourists to come with their caravans because our economy relies on that.' So we funded the upgrade to Pooncarie Road. Was that a rort? A terrible thing to do—unbelievable! What about the $10 million for the Burke small stock abattoir that went to the council so they could put in the infrastructure for the abattoir that is now employing 150 people in Burke? Is that the rort? We gave $9½ million to the Australian Opal Centre—a centre that will highlight the unique beauty and the rarity of the Australian black opal from Lightning Ridge. That $9½ million in Commonwealth money came from the previous government, but apparently that's no good either.

It goes on and on and on. There was $8.7 million for the Broken Hill CBD revitalisation, and $8.2 million for the County Boundary Road at Croppa Creek. It doesn't sound much, does it? But what if you lived on that road and you had to get your produce to market and you couldn't do it after rain or you couldn't get fertiliser in because the road was wet and unsafe? What about the $7.6 million for the new rural medical school and for those young people who are actually doing their medical degrees in Dubbo and who are now in their second year? There are 520 applicants for those positions. They are some of the brightest young minds in regional Australia. Apparently that's not a good thing either. I've got another page of such projects here—so much frustration in this place. We've seen from the Greens that we live in some sort of a parallel universe where we talk about how we want to improve the lives of Aboriginal people, improve the environment, and do this or that, but they have not one single clue how, practically, to do that. Then all the funding that gives some quality of life to the people who provide the wealth of this country gets ripped out.

This is probably the last chance I will have to make a speech on an appropriation bill, and I find it incredibly frustrating. It shouldn't be like this. Good luck to the member for Bennelong with all the electric bus interchanges and medical centres and things that he's got in the inner suburbs of Sydney, but the people of regional Australia deserve better than this. They do not need to be ignored, and this budget, apart from what we've seen with the divisive Voice, has done very, very little for the people of western New South Wales.

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