Ron Boswell (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

A big, fat, Labor rat. I went to the list of cuts and, would you be surprised to know, out of the $643 million that was cut, $416 million—nearly 70 per cent of it—was cut in rural and regional programs? It was not only that, and you have to say this for Mr Tanner: he is honest. He said that the $643 million savings are an initial and modest down payment on those that will be announced on budget night. Honesty may be a virtue, but he is warning rural Australia to buckle up their seatbelts because on budget night they are going to cop it. Rural people know this and that is why they do not vote for the Labor Party. I would suggest to Senator Hutchins that the movement in votes for the Labor Party did not come from rural and regional Australia. So, of $642 million, $416 million was cut from rural and regional Australia.

Since the Labor Party came to power, I have listened to them talk, and all they seem to be able to do is talk up interest rates. Every day we have an attack on the former government for letting the inflation run to the extent to which we must have hikes in interest rates. I am even waiting for an announcement that we will have a credit squeeze that we have to have—reminiscent of the days of the previous Labor Party Prime Minister. That is one of the things that is worrying us. In December 1995, when the Labor Party were in power, interest rates were 5.1 per cent and they were 3.9 per cent in March 1996. But if we are to be blamed for that then let us be honest: today we had a breakthrough with regard to the lowest unemployment in Australia. If you are going to claim that we are responsible for the highest interest rates, then let us be fair about it and say that we were also responsible for the lowest unemployment rates. That is what the former coalition government has done; it has handed you one of the best economies that has ever been in place in the history of Australia. It has handed it to you on a plate, so do not destroy it and do not make cuts and take the knife to rural and regional Australians.

Some of the things we have seen cut in this package include $115 million in drought relief. I know Tony Burke, and I think he is a good fellow, but I do not know how he drew the short straw and got the portfolio of Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, because he does not understand it—and I would not expect him to understand it, because he comes from right in the middle of the city and has not had any experience. I bet he got a shock when he read in the paper that he has had something like $400-odd million cut from his department. Why would you cut $115 million from drought funding? Some people in southern New South Wales have not had a crop for seven years. They are just hanging on by the fingernails, trying to get up a crop this year. The $115 million was cut because it rained, but it does not rain money. It is going to take a long time for these people to recover. It takes a long time for people to recover after a seven-year loss. It may even be worse; they may not even get a crop now, but $115 million has been cut.

The other cut that has been announced in this package is in the farm business sector. FarmBis has been cut. How often have we heard, ‘We’re going to have an education revolution and educate people; we’re going to educate farmers; we’re going to make people more resourceful by education’? The first thing this government has cut, apart from the drought assistance, is the FarmBis and Farm Help programs. The Farm Help program puts food on the table. The FarmBis program provides training for farmers and workers in primary industry, but now it has gone just to save a lousy $3 million. I do not think that that will make any difference to the interest rates or the pressure on lending. Labor said that we would have an education revolution, and yet the Farm Help and FarmBis programs have been cut.

We have also seen Farm Help—$22 million this year—being cut. Farm Help is so important for people that do not have any access to any money at the moment—it puts food on the table. Apart from that, we have seen many other cuts just appearing. Here is one that I picked up today: $42 million removed from the budget for Renewable Remote Power Generation. This was a program that put power into places that were not serviced by the electricity grid. It was a program that we had invested in out there. In 2007, we had an additional $123 million, and we had put around $328 million into the program. That, by the way of solar power, gave access to lighting and generation to properties that were off the grid. I do not know what they are expected to do. You could argue that the Labor state governments should look after them and should provide them with access to power—but unfortunately that is not the case. Many times, we, as the federal government, had to step in to replace the services that were due to the people in rural and regional Australia. We were not responsible for them, but the only way they were ever going to get these services was if our government stepped up to the plate and made it possible for those people to access them.

One of the ways we did that was through the Regional Partnerships program. I was a senator that represented a number of electorates. One of those electorates was Capricornia. It was a Labor electorate and it was a regional electorate. I can say, without a word of a doubt, that that electorate was able to access many, many, many programs. If I had known that this resolution of the Senate was going to be turned into an attack on the regional programs, I would have been able to prepare on these initiatives. In the Labor seats—non-coalition seats—that I was the senator representing, I can tell you that there was no discrimination. If a seat was regional—it did not matter whether it had an Independent, a Labor person, a Liberal person or a National Party person representing that seat—it got the same access to these programs. We were able to put in many programs that provided employment. I can nominate many that I thought were absolutely brilliant programs. One of them was in the little town of Wowan—a little town that had lost about everything, but still had a service station and a pub, but did not have a community centre. It did not have anywhere for the doctor or the dentist to come or anywhere any other service could take place in that area. It had nothing there. We put in a building that could be shared by all people that wanted to offer delivery of services in that particular small town of Wowan.

That was only one of many, many programs that we put out. They were great programs. There is one in Blackall—a fantastic old people’s home—that we topped up. The people in Blackall were able to go out and collect money from the graziers and the townspeople, and they built this wonderful retirement village, by donation. Then they needed about $300,000 to top it up. This program was millions of dollars worth. We topped it up, and the old people of Blackall did not have to move away. They could stay in their retirement village and then move on to higher care, because of programs such as Regional Partnerships.

This did not just happen in National Party electorates and Liberal electorates; it happened in all electorates in regional Australia. It is all right to come in here and criticise that and draw the flak away from the cuts that this government has made in regional and rural Australia in the first two weeks. Like Senator Ian Macdonald, I am frightened of what is going to happen. I knew what would happen. To be honest, Mr Tanner has warned us of what is going to happen on budget night. I think it will be a holocaust for rural and regional Australia. I believe that we have seen the government, in its initial two or three weeks, take the axe to rural and regional Australia. I hope and I pray that this is not the forerunner of many more cuts—although I fear that it will be.