Darren Chester (Gippsland, National Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It's with an enormous sense of sadness and frustration that I stand here today to report back to rural and regional Australians that, if you live outside capital cities, we received a very clear message in last night's budget: Labor doesn't understand rural and regional Australia, Labor doesn't respect the contribution we make to the nation and Prime Minister Albanese doesn't trust us to make good decisions for our own communities.

There are three specific examples in last night's budget where localism is dead and Labor's passion for centralising power into Canberra is increasingly obvious. Labor ministers can't help themselves; they have to have control. The first example is the Local Roads and Community Infrastructure Program, which was a coalition initiative under the previous government. That program gave power to local councils. Thousands of community infrastructure projects were implemented by local councils, with them deciding what their local priorities would be for funding, rather than Canberra deciding what those priorities were. That program has now been stripped away. There is no new funding for local councils under the LRCIP program. That program will end. Urban councils—and most colleagues on the other side represent urban areas—will hardly notice it, because they have other sources of income. But this will be devastating for rural and regional areas, where they are more dependent on federal grants, as a proportion of their revenue, to build good community infrastructure. Many rural and regional councils receive more than 50 per cent of their funding from the federal government.

Another example of Labor completely failing to understand how rural and regional communities work is the Stronger Communities Program. This is a program where volunteers, using their own money through fundraising, sausage sizzles and selling tickets at the gate to different events, raise money and then leverage off that with small grants from the Commonwealth, with $150,000 for each electorate. It's fair. Every electorate gets $150,000 through the Stronger Communities Program. Last night that was abolished by the Labor Party. In the last round of that program there was a million dollars worth of applications in Gippsland for the $150,000. It's an incredibly successful program. Labor's answer? 'Locals can't possibly know what they want to do with that money. They can't possibly make local decisions. We will abolish the program and let Canberra centralised bureaucrats make all the decisions.' That's further proof that Labor just have to have control of people's lives in rural and regional Australia.

Contrast those decisions with the decision to have 10,000 more bureaucrats here in Canberra. Contrast those decisions with the decision by this government to move the disaster recovery offices from the regions back to city offices. It's a bizarre move to limit their freedom and control their activities. Last night's budget sends an appalling message to everyone who lives and works in regional Australia. Labor don't understand how small communities work and don't trust them to make good decisions, so they abolish the programs that give us the power to make our own decisions.