Mark Coulton (Parkes, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'd like to touch on a few things this evening that are of concern to me. I might just comment on the member for Canberra's contribution a little while ago. It was quite a thoughtful contribution, and I'd just like to add to it. With the current debate in this country and the actions of people around the issues in Gaza, Israel and the West Bank, it's of great concern to me that this country is tearing itself apart, moving into tribes and almost supporting different sides of this conflict like it were some sort of a football competition when we're seeing absolute death and destruction on a daily basis: the original attack by Hamas that killed so many innocent people, and the 40,000 Palestinians that have lost their lives since then. In this country, we're tearing ourselves apart, and it's not making one bit of difference to those people in the Middle East. Whether it's the Israelis or Hamas, do you think they care about whether we've got university students camped out or members of parliament offices being graffitied? It's of great frustration. Most people in this place know that I'm very close to the Palestinians. I've spent time in the West Bank, and I know a lot of Australian Palestinians as well. The level of this debate in this country is not helping them, and I think it's certainly not helping Australia.

But my main reason for standing this evening is the level of debate in this parliament. Someone asked me recently, 'What's it like in parliament?' I said that, in recent years, it's been a bit like witnessing a high-school debating club, where you don't really have to back up what you're saying with facts and figures; it's more about your feelings, your passion, without any real responsibility for achieving what you're talking about. I'll give you a few examples. Earlier this year, the Greens and the teals had a motion to ban fossil fuels, coal and gas. It was mainly gas that they were concerned about. These people live in the parts of Australia that would have more reliance on fossil fuel than anywhere else. Your technology, your everyday equipment—there's not one thing that we use at this moment that does not require fossil fuels. Take this wooden lectern. How do you build that without a saw that's made out of metal? Everything we have has an element of fossil fuels. And yet we've got members of parliament, who are supposedly highly intelligent, successful people, basically arguing to bring this country into poverty. It's incredibly frustrating. The teals were so concerned about gas that they hired a helicopter with two motors—one wouldn't have done—to fly around my electorate to look at the sites of coal seam gas to show their disgust at the gas industry, and they burnt massive amounts of fossil fuel while doing that.

There's a bit of a theme that comes through different things, where members of parliament, in order to show their virtue to their electorates, are basically expecting my constituents to change what they're doing. The energy debate is a great one. We're not seeing any changes to behaviour with regard to the use of energy or the generation of energy in the capital cities, but there's an expectation that, in my part of the world, we're going to see a massive rollout of solar, wind and the accompanying transmission towers. My electorate has led the way. Dubbo has the highest uptake of individual rooftop solar of any town in Australia. I was involved in some of the early large-scale solar plants, at Nyngan, Broken Hill, Moree. We're leading the way, yet there is always the expectation that regional Australians will do more and more to make the wealthy people in the cities feel better about themselves. There is never any change there.

If we're talking about climate change and reducing our emissions, one of the greatest projects to have environmental benefit but also economic benefit is the Inland Rail. One train, I think, takes 150 trucks off the Newell Highway, along with the associated fuel used, carbon emissions and all of that. The first thing this government did was scale back the rollout of Inland Rail, with no activity north of Narromine, where the tracks stopped. As a result, we're seeing the disadvantage starting to roll through, with contractors in Moree, Narrabri and Narromine who had invested money to upgrade their equipment now finding that they're in liquidation because the project has stopped. I'm a firm believer that this project will need to go ahead. It's a game changer for this country. But this government has pulled the funds. Once again, the people in the bush pay the price.

On the Murray-Darling Basin, I've heard numerous speeches in this place about making sure we never have the rivers run dry again. Newsflash, folks: the northern Murray-Darling Basin is an ephemeral system. It has flooded and gone dry since time began. The idea that some sort of legislation that is enacted from this building in Canberra is going to change that is a vanity.

What we're seeing is water being indiscriminately brought out of the consumptive pool as part of the 450 gigalitres, which was not part of the plan. It was an election ploy back in the Gillard era for South Australians in Adelaide. This water that's been purchased in the northern basin can't be delivered. Do people not know that the Gwydir is a terminal stream—that it doesn't connect through? If you wanted to get a megalitre of water, say, from Dubbo through the Macquarie Marshes up to the Barwon, down the Darling, through the lakes, down to the Murray and down to Adelaide—which, by the way, is not in the Murray-Darling Basin—it is nearly an impossibility.

What we are seeing is that we're impacting the financial viability of my communities for something that has no actual, positive impact for anyone, but it's selling the story. We've seen those ridiculous ads on TV, where we've got coastal rivers and citrus orchards from Turkey and all sorts of things, pretending that could be the Murray-Darling Basin. It's an absolute nonsense.

The other one that's been incredibly divisive and very hurtful for my electorate was the debate around the Voice. My electorate voted 80 per cent against the Voice, and, you've got to remember, I represent the second-highest percentage of Aboriginal people of any seat in this place. So my Aboriginal constituents clearly did not want this Voice. But, in the parliament, we heard these virtuous speeches where, basically, I was accused of being some sort of racist by people who would not know one Aboriginal person on a personal level. It was a philosophical, feel-good argument but absolutely clueless about the people that it was supposed to impact.

Aboriginal people in my electorate are people. They've got the same issues as everyone else. They want to educate their kids. They want to be able to get health care when they need it. They need a road to drive on. They need to be able to buy groceries that they can afford—all the things that everyone else does. Yet we had this ridiculous, divisive, $450 million debate that not only divided Australia but was very offensive to the people that I represent from western New South Wales.

We have a responsibility in this place to actually back up what we're saying with some form of fact and reason, not to just signal how you feel about things because of your virtuous nature. We are more than that and we should start acting like it.