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

Before I start, I note the very heart-felt words from the member for Longman on that very sad event. I've said this before in this parliament, but I want to reiterate it. It's a very sad statement, really, but a very real reality for people living in regional Australia. That is that this government has given up and does not show any concern about regional Australia. I can tell you from my patch and a lot of my colleagues', over here on this side—this side of the parliament, with Nationals seats and regional Liberal seats, dominates representing regional Australia. There's a reason for that. It's because regional Australia has given up on the Labor Party and the Greens, teals and Independents as well.

Why do I say that? I say that for two major reasons. One is that they demonise us. That side, inner-city elite MPs demonise regional Australia. I'll give a whole lot of examples of that later. They then, of course, then go over the top of that and ignore us and neglect us. In some cases, they even take advantage of regional Australia when it suits them. You would think, 'Why would you demonise regional Australia?' I remind this chamber—I do it nearly every time I stand up in this place, when I can—that regional Australia is responsible for over $400 billion of exports of goods and services from this country. As a country, we exported about $660 billion worth of stuff. Over two-thirds of that come from, guess, where? It's from regional Australia. Regional Australia is the economic backbone of this country.

You might think that they might say thanks. You might think that the inner-city elite MPs over there and the inner-city elite MPs on the crossbench—the teals and the Greens; I'll excuse the member for Mayo from that—might say thank you. But, no. All they do is demonise it. One of those exports—and I'll go through a couple in a minute—is food. We obviously generate all the food. The farming and agricultural sector is all in regional Australia, as are the mining, the coal, the iron ore, the gas—all those major exports. None of those are in the cities. None of those are coming out of inner-city Melbourne or Sydney, where a lot of city elite MPs on the other side and on the crossbenches live. That's the unfortunate—or the fortunate—reality.

Let's go through a couple of examples. There's one thing we've seen. The inner-city elite MPs—the Greens, the teals and the Labor Party—sit in their apartment blocks on their leafy, inner-city streets. One of the things these MPs done in this last parliament which has devastated part of regional Australia is say, 'We're going to ban live sheep exports from this country.' That was a shameful decision. It's devastated a lot of communities, especially in Western Australia. But they know best! They watch the ABC. They read the Guardian newspapers, and they know what should happen or shouldn't happen with live exports in this country. They ignore the fact that we have the best animal welfare standards in that industry. They ignore the fact that those communities have done a great job at improving that export industry because they know best. Because of their leftie media and their inner-city elite opinions, they're going to ban that industry.

I've said it before, but I can say that, under a Dutton-Littleproud government, that decision will be reversed. That industry can breathe easy knowing that they're generating wealth for this country and jobs for this country. It's also an insult from them, because what they're also saying to our trading partners, the importers of live exports, is: 'That product that you want to export isn't okay.' That's what they're saying. The Leader of the Greens is saying that any country that imports live sheep shouldn't demand that. They shouldn't have that. So it's an insult to a lot of countries in the Middle East and an insult to our partners in Indonesia. These people do this for a lot of different reasons that we shouldn't have judgement on, and we do it in a very humane way with some of the best standards that we could have.

The member for Sydney is another inner-city elite MP. What has she done in this parliament? She has taken water from our farmers. She said, 'You're greedy. You shouldn't get as much water as you do.' This water's growing our fibre. This water's growing our food. It is really important to a lot of our communities in the Murray-Darling Basin, but they've said, 'No. You shouldn't have it.' Do you know what they want to happen to that water? They want it to roll out to sea. They have this ideological obsession—again, the Guardian newspaper's on board and the ABC's on board—that the River Murray mouth should never be closed. Why should it never be closed? They say that it's better environmentally. Before we put in a weir and lock system—before you could hold water back—that mouth used to close all the time, because water used to roll out more quickly. But, no, the inner-city elite MP Tanya Plibersek, the member for Sydney, knows better than country people. She knows better than regional people and, again, she has demonised what we do. This basin plan is going to kill towns and communities, which they don't care about.

I just want to touch on two other issues, which are more in state jurisdictions, but we obviously have input to them, especially fishing. I don't know if you realise this, but we import over 70 per cent of the fish that we eat in this country. Why do we do that? We do that because fishing is bad as well! We overfish; we do terrible things. So guess what we do? We import fish. We actually have really sustainable practices. Our fishermen know how to do this. They know the areas that you don't fish in when it's breeding season. They know the parts you don't go to, because they want to be able to fish every year. In fact, back in the seventies, the fishermen were telling the department the types of areas they shouldn't go to and when they shouldn't go to them. They were educating them about what to do. But now, no, the bureaucrats in the fisheries department and the inner-city elites say, 'That's terrible.' The ABC and the Guardian tell them that we overfish, so we get our fish now from countries that do sometimes exploit their regions, because we aren't fishing places in Australia that we should. We're surrounded by water, and we can't get enough fish to feed ourselves.

The other one—I know this has been very important to the member for Gippsland and other members on this side—is hardwood timber. Again, guess what? The ABC doesn't like it; the Guardian doesn't like this; inner-city elite MPs don't like this. We have a great, sustainable hardwood timber industry. There's nothing better and more renewable than when you have trees grow up. If they listened to the forestry industry, they'd know that it's even better for carbon sequestration for a new tree to grow where an old tree was, because it absorbs more carbon, but, again, inner-city elite people know better! You know better, when you're sitting in inner-city Melbourne, what they should be doing with hardwood and where they should be doing that in country and regional areas.

And there's the whole national parks story. I've seen farmland in my region turned into national park. Do you know what happens when you turn that into a national park? It becomes a weed infested debacle and a fire tinderbox filled with weeds and feral animals. We saw that in the bushfires, and also with koalas. Do you know what the first thing koalas do when something is turned into a national park? They leave it because they can't crawl around the ground—there are too many weeds there—and they come onto farmland.

There's also a lot of sanctimonious hypocrisy on that side over there and on the crossbenches, when I say they take advantage of regional areas. It's especially prevalent right now, with the reckless renewable policy of those opposite. I told a story once before in this chamber where the member for Warringah had said that six wind turbines and a hectare of solar panels wouldn't be okay in North Head because of the cultural and historical significance of the environment in that region. So North Head can't take six wind turbines and a hectare of solar panels, but, you know what, all those elite city MPs are okay for regional Australia to—guess what?—get 60 million solar panels and about 20,000 wind turbines. And that's okay—there's no cultural environmental significance with that. That's all fine, apparently, for regional Australia to do that. Again, it's sanctimony and hypocrisy from them on that. I can say quite legitimately, that, although they talk about the environment, the environmental damage being done with the new transmission system that is needed for their reckless renewable policy is not okay.

I'm going to run out of time, but I'm going to quickly mention some other things about the neglect of regional areas. One of the first things this government did was get up and talk about Medicare. You can't even get doctors in a lot of regional and country towns. One of the reasons is that they changed the definition of a 'distribution priority area', and that took out doctors from regional Australia to the suburbs. That side is a disgrace to regional Australia, and so are the teals and the Greens.

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