Sam Birrell (Nicholls, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Many of my constituents in Nicholls are doing it tough at the moment. They have endured floods and suffered the agony of seeing the rising water invade their homes. An already challenging time for the people of Nicholls is made even harder by the first budget of this government. The forecasts in the budget make it clear that the cost-of-living pressures will continue to bite and a typical family will be $2,000 worse off by Christmas.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese promised that if he won government there would be no-one held back, no-one left behind, but in Labor's first budget 30 per cent of Australians who live in regional and rural areas, including Nicholls, have been held back and left behind in three key areas: cost of living, child care and infrastructure. Groceries are eight per cent higher, not just because of natural disasters but also due to the Labor-made disaster of scrapping the ag. visa. Our ability to grow our own food and provide high-quality, reasonably priced and locally sourced food is under pressure and it will get worse with Labor's plans to rip more irrigation water out of the Murray-Darling Basin through damaging water buybacks. It will get worse, because we can't get enough workers into agriculture. The impact of these anti-agriculture policies means more expensive food and more foreign food. Families will feel that at the check-out.

Retail electricity prices are predicted to go up by 50 per cent, while the $275 promised by Labor to reduce electricity bills is now long gone. Businesses in my electorate are staring at gas costing more than triple the current price when their contracts are renewed, which could make some manufacturing and food processing unviable. Interest rates have already gone up, and they're predicted to go up further under Labor, and more and more homeowners are facing mortgage stress.

One of the big-spending measures in Labor's budget is child care. I have no argument with cheaper child care, but you can only get cheaper child care, or child care at all, if you can find a place, and too many areas in my electorate and across rural and regional Australia are childcare deserts.

I was hoping this would be a wellbeing budget, a budget that supported vital projects in my electorate that are dealing with critical issues of workforce shortages in allied health and of entrenched disadvantage. As a result of this budget, we need to find another funding pathway for the Seymour wellbeing hub, an important project that will tackle entrenched disadvantage by improving access to health and mental health support. I'm also calling on Labor to back the new rural clinical health school, a partnership between La Trobe University and Goulburn Valley Health, to train the nurses and allied health workers we desperately need.

A lot of the projects that these things were going to be funded through have now been axed. Everyone will feel the pain of this budget, but it will hurt mostly rural and regional— (Time expired)