Pat Conaghan (Cowper, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Social Services) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We've just endured an hour and a half of this hapless, hopeless Prime Minister and his merry bunch of men and women telling us how lucky we are to have suffered them for the past three years, how good Australia has had it, how you've never been better off and how he's the only person for the job. Well, you're taking Australians to be mugs. They're not silly. They know they're not better off. You know they're not better off. So let's talk about some facts in relation to the past three years, particularly in relation to the regions and a few examples from my electorate of Cowper.

Firstly, we had a 90-day review by Minister King, which ended up being a 200-day review of infrastructure projects that ripped $23 billion out of infrastructure projects in the regions. Labor doesn't extend past cities. They don't know what regions are, they don't know who regional people are and they don't care about regional people or regional areas. Out of that $26 billion in my electorate, $5 million was going to go towards a veterans centre. Labor took that and put it into Richmond, which has half the number of veterans. I have 9,000 veterans in my electorate. They took the funding—it was completely political—and lobbed it straight into Richmond. I am happy for the veterans in Richmond. You deserve a centre. But let's be real. Let's put this above politics.

The second thing they did was took away $17 million from Southern Cross University for stage 2 of the health campus. They want jobs, yet they take away funding for education in the regions and not just for education but for health. You can't get appointments with a physiotherapist for weeks, you can't get an occupational therapist and you can't get a speech therapist. What do they do? They take the funding away. Then there's $5 million of funding for Wrights Road. If you live in Port Macquarie, you know how bad the congestion is on Wrights Road. I get people emailing me telling me, 'I have sold my house because I can't live there anymore.' There was $5 million for the feasibility study.

Labor doesn't care about you. Labor doesn't care about the regions. Get rid of them at the next election.