Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party, Shadow Minister for International Development and the Pacific) Share this | Hansard source

No, not real information, Member for Isaacs—not at all. It is information that is going to only allow them to get a Labor government, which has been very, very bad for the regions—a Labor government which offers you 70c a day of tax cuts in 15 months time. What's that going to give you? It won't get you Regional Express, let me tell you.

Then we've got the Labor candidates running around Riverina and Farrer, and what are they doing? They're also getting people to sign a petition which has been put forward by the Nationals member for Cootamundra in the state parliament to absolutely condemn the state Labor government about cuts to regional and rural health services, including ambulance services and including centralising pathology services in Cootamundra Hospital—putting them in Young. We've got the Labor candidates running around condemning state Labor. This is just perverse and so is that petition that Labor is circulating around Rex.

This comes from the federal Labor government, which we know in the budget put 'nfp'—'not for publication'—beside 'Murray-Darling Basin' because they don't want people to know how many water buybacks they are going to do. This is from the Labor government which took away the distribution priority areas, which forced doctors, which caused doctors, to leave rural and remote Australia and to go to the outer suburbs of Newcastle, Sydney, Wollongong, Gold Coast or wherever else. We now have fewer doctors, and that is a truism. The best thing that any parliament, any government, has done for the doctors is the Murray-Darling rural medical network. I put that in place, and you can see the benefits already at Wagga Wagga, Dubbo, Mildura, Bendigo and Orange. We're making sure that we've got young doctors training from start to finish and doing their course, because we know that, if we train them in the bush, chances are they'll fall in love with somebody in the bush, they'll fall in love with the bush and they'll stay in the bush. That's what it's all about.

It's not about Labor taking away the Local Roads and Community Infrastructure Program and all those other regional grant programs. That is on your watch. That is on your heads. At the next election, the only way to get Australia back on track is to vote Nationals, to vote coalition.

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