Kevin Hogan (Page, National Party, Shadow Minister for Trade and Tourism) Share this | Hansard source

It is with a bit of sadness that I propose this MPI. Labor, for many years now, whenever they've been in government, have always been in an alliance with the Greens. Now they are in an alliance with the Teals. So we have a Labor-Greens-Teals alliance. What their actions, any decisions they make and the legislation they pass show is that they don't like regional people. They certainly don't like what they do.

Why would I say that? It's because, in this country, in the calendar year of 2023, we exported $650 billion worth of goods and services. I can tell you three-quarters of that, over $400 billion of that, came from rural, regional and remote Australia. I can tell you right now that they don't like what we do. They do not like what people in regional Australia do.

Of the four major things that we sell and the four major things that fund Australia's standard of living, the first one is iron ore. I had the great privilege last year to go to Port Hedland. I was out at a mine for a couple of days. I went and saw the wonderful infrastructure at Port Hedland. It produced over $100 billion for this country last year. Just by coincidence, the cabinet had a meeting that day in Port Hedland. They all flew in, had a meeting at an undisclosed location and flew out. That was their commitment to Port Hedland and the iron ore industry. There was no meeting with the industry, no minesite visit and no trip out on the water to have a look at what happens.

Another one is coal. Coal generates, depending on prices, $100 billion a year to this country. When have you ever heard the Prime Minister or the Treasurer talk about the coal industry? They won't. That's because they represent the inner-city elite. If you look at a map of Australian electorates and you look at the big regional and rural seats, you will see the colour green for my Nationals colleagues and the colour blue for my Liberal colleagues covering vast sections. The vast majority of the map looks green and blue because we represent the people who do this stuff.

The other big export is gas. The best the Treasurer could do was last year in his budget speech. The closest he has ever got to mentioning any of these industries was when he said 'the things that we sell overseas'. He couldn't mention the word 'gas', couldn't mention the word 'coal' and couldn't mention the words 'iron ore'. I've had the great privilege to go to Curtis Island to look at the impacts and investments in Darwin in the Northern Territory—they are funding Australia's life.

I will spend time on this later, but the last area or industry that funds this country's wealth is farming. From that side of the chamber over, you'd think that they'd look at this and go: 'You know what? Thank you for the electorates that you represent,' because we feed you, we clothe you and we make the products that build your houses. But there's no thanks; there's just demonisation from the other side. Unfortunately, it's because there has been a shift in the politics and trends of this country that that side—especially the Greens and the Teals and the Prime Minister—represent the elites. They represent the entitled people, whereas we are representing people who are having a go and creating wealth in this country.

Let's go to our farmers for a moment and go through some examples of what this government has done in this term that have demonised our farmers and regional people, what they do and how they do it. The most obvious one I'll start with is the most recent one, and we saw demonstrations last week—it's the live export industry. The Leader of the Nationals has said this many times in this House: we have the best animal welfare standards in the world, but from that side of the chamber and over, no—they demonise it because of the people they represent: the inner city. Let's go back 12, 13 or 14 years ago, because this has been going on a long time. We had the ABC—I can't remember who compered the program, but it would have been a Laura Tingle clone, as there are lots of them at the ABC—run a Four Corners report demonising the live export industry, and then what happened? Within days they shut the industry down because all the inner-city elites said: 'We know the facts; we've just watched the Four Corners report. We know how terrible this industry is. We've never seen one and probably have never been to a live export ship, but we know because we watch the ABC and we live in the inner city.' The government back then shut the industry down overnight. What we have seen is just a repetition of that. Besides the great shame of that decision, that was damaging not only to our live exporters but also our beef at the time. That wasn't bad for our farmers; it was exceptionally bad for our international relations. We had key trading partners and key neighbours who relied on that for their protein. But no, that's not important to this lot! It's all about the inner-city elites. It's all about the ABC and the Guardian. 'They know everything, we'll listen to them and we'll make our decisions about what this country does and what we can do and what we can't do—even though they don't represent most of the people who do that.

Regional people have worked this lot out. In Perth on Friday, we saw the protests there. My Western Australian colleagues were there. The movement is on and regional Australia have worked out that this lot do not like what they do. Another example I want to give is that in this term of government we have seen the Murray Darling Basin Plan. For all of my colleagues who work and live in this area, the devastation that is going to do—this is actually a pretty weird one, because you have got the inner-city elites who have worked out that the mouth of the Murray River should never close. That's weird in itself, because before we built the weir system you'd have a drought and the mouth would close up all the time, but we now have a weir system and we hold water back. They have now decided to take that money—and do you know who they're taking it from? I know you know. They're taking that water—and that money, effectively—from regional people, from farmers. That would decimate a lot of our farming industry. It's going to decimate a lot of country towns and regional centres. It just shows that this government, with their friends the Teals and the Greens, have no idea about regional Australia nor do they care about our farmers or how we do what we do.

There are other issues. My good friend the member for Gippsland—we saw some of this in the state government as well, but sometimes state Labor can be worse. They have now decided that we can't selectively harvest our own hardwood. So we're going to have a record amount of houses built but we are not going to have our own hardwood. If you talk to people about that, they go: 'Well, it's not good, but we do it very selectively. We do it very environmentally sensitively.' So now we're going to get it from Brazil or Indonesia. Or they're going to go over and ransack the forest there and do it there.

This is another one: marine parks. It's probably more state government related, but I know that the previous federal government, when Labor was in power from 2007 to 2013, had things to do with this. We import over 70 per cent of the fish we eat. That's absurd for an island country with the fishing grounds that we have. Our fishermen know where to fish, they know how to fish and they know how to protect breeding grounds. But, no, in their wisdom Labor governments, state and federal, have decided to shut down fishing. So we now import and eat fish from ravaged fishing grounds in South-East Asian countries. Again, it's just the absurdity: they don't like what we do and they don't like how we do it even though, as I said, we clothe them, we feed them and we make the products that build their houses. But they demonise everything we do. As I said, the Australian public—or the country public—are onto them.

We've seen other examples: another brainwave they had was to bring in a fresh food tax. That was going to be great for our farmers as well. What would it do? That would increase the cost of food. So the brainstorm there was to bring in a fresh food tax and increase the cost of living. Fortunately, we were able to block them on that one.

My time is running out, but I have a lot more to say. I could go through the renewable ransacking they're going to do for the environment. They want to build 28,000 kilometres for a new transmission system, Deputy Speaker. If you could see how that's going to ravage the environment—and I know that the member for Warringah doesn't want wind turbines in her electorate, but, hey, how dare we ever protest against wanting them in our communities!

Again, I'll just say that country people have worked this lot out. I've said it two or three times before: we feed you, we make the products for you to build your homes and we clothe you. Country people know that you don't respect them and they have sussed you lot out.

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