Andrew Broad (Mallee, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The people who live in my patch work very hard, and often the things that we're trying to get for them are basic infrastructure so that we can get the products that they produce to the marketplace. We can make sure they can make a phone call—some of those basic things. But there are also things that make rural communities liveable. I just want to say to the people who live in Mildura, I'm going to fight very hard so you can get $10 million towards an indoor basketball stadium. These are poorer kids who are playing basketball every Saturday morning, and the courts are just used flat-out. There is value in investing in community infrastructure. They build communities, they give people that sense of a great place to live and, if we can have more kids more active more often, we'll have a healthier society.

The other thing I want to get is $5.2 million for the Swan Hill riverfront development. Swan Hill's a beautiful town but, if you drive through Swan Hill, you forget that it's next to a river. We want to open that up and link those two things. The other thing for Horsham is $8.8 million to expand the Wimmera intermodal freight hub. It's something that the previous member, John Forrest, was very passionate about. It's a success. It's essentially taking shipping containers of a high-value product, keeping them in the country, putting them on a rail and sending them straight to port. It's been built and it's now overloaded. It's now full, which is testimony to our economic activity, but we need to expand it so we need some more money. They are things I'm going to fight for. Good people in our part of the world need good projects, and I'm here to work with them to make sure they're delivered.