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

In his 2023 budget address the Treasurer described our nation's fiscal good fortune, the improvement to our bottom line, as a result of 'high prices for the things we sell overseas'. He wouldn't dare mention those things. He couldn't mention coal, iron ore, gas or agricultural products—those things we sell overseas. That was an insult to Australian farmers, blue-collar workers and people in hi-vis jackets who go out there and work in the mines. Labor has declared war on all these industries with policies which actually make it harder for regional Australians to live and work in the communities they love. The wealth of our nation, the strength of the budget, is on the back of hardworking regional Australians on our farms, in our mines and in fishing and timber, and this government shows no respect whatsoever to any of those industries. It is their work which pays the nation's bills, and we need a government that is actually committed to a stronger, safer and fairer country, not a government that is dividing our nation, like this Prime Minister and his ministers.

The city-country divide is getting worse under this Prime Minister, and the worst example of this needless division was the ill-conceived Voice referendum. This was a self-indulgent vanity project. That was one of the problems. Wasting $450 million of taxpayer money was another problem. But constantly lecturing regional Australians about how they should think about and treat their Aboriginal friends and neighbours was the most galling aspect of this referendum. Now Labor is out there defunding the practical projects in regional areas because the people involved didn't toe the party line on the Voice. I am sorry—it gives me no satisfaction to say this—but I don't recognise the modern Labor Party. It has lurched so far to the extreme left and abandoned blue-collar workers for Green votes in our cities. This government have had two years in office, and all they've done is cut regional grants programs, whinged about the previous government, turned their backs on the hardworking families in rural and regional Australia and then paraded around regional Australia taking credit for projects they had nothing to do with. Regional Australians are worse off under this Prime Minister. Regional Australians know their families are worse off, the communities they live in are not as safe as they used to be and Australia is heading in the wrong direction under an extreme left-wing government.

One of the most important skills of political leadership is identifying things that aren't broken and don't need to be changed so you can focus on fixing the real problems in our community. Instead of making things better for regional families, we've seen Labor decisions at state and federal level to place additional costs on our farmers. We've seen Labor decisions to abolish the native hardwood timber industry in Victoria and to increase the cost of our favourite vehicles, and the biggest agricultural funding announcement in this year's budget, the biggest announcement affecting the agriculture department in the whole budget, was to destroy the live export industry in WA. That was the biggest announcement in agriculture: to destroy an industry in Western Australia. This Prime Minister and his cabinet are the most urban focused executive I've seen in my time in this place. There's hardly anyone in that cabinet room with even a partial understanding of life in rural and regional Australia, and they continually take the city focused advice of their bureaucrats. This Canberra-knows-best mentality is destroying confidence in our rural communities.

In closing, I want to give the Labor Party and the cabinet a bit of a tip: if the Greens are cheering your decision, it's probably a pretty bad decision. If the light green teals are also cheering you on, then think again. Seriously, the teals are just Greens with trust funds. It's obscene to watch members from some of the most privileged communities in this nation demanding, for example, that timberworkers in my community lose their jobs. Not only that, having succeeded in abolishing the timber industry in Victoria, now they want to see the ban go nationwide. The teals and the Greens sit back in their high-income-earning suburban seats, enjoying all the spoils of life created from the hard work of regional Australians, but that doesn't stop them coming in here and campaigning to take their jobs away.

We are very fortunate. We all live in the greatest country in the world. There is nothing wrong with Australia that a good government can't fix. I'm proud to come in here and represent the people of Gippsland in this place, and I will never stop fighting for a fair go for them and all regional Australian families.