Sandy Macdonald (NSW, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Joyce is thought very highly of in Mungindi. There was $300,000-odd for their rural transaction centre, giving them access to carry out business, making their geographic position really unimportant in so many ways. I have another little one. I have a whole host of them here, but this is the last one I will give. I am just trying to give a flavour of the types of grants that were provided under this program. There was one for the kitchen of the Spring Ridge Community Hall, which also doubles as a childcare centre for that little community in the north-west of New South Wales.

To say that these projects were not valuable and worth while is one thing—actually, they were very valuable and worth while. Furthermore, they were not funded by any other method. When we came to government in 1996 these sorts of projects were not funded. It is one thing to say that we should review them—and I do understand a new government wanting to review programs—but I think it is pretty tough that the first announcement my good friend the new finance minister, Lindsay Tanner, makes is that $640 million is going to be taken away from regional Australia. This is at a time when a government comes in and finds a surplus of maybe $18 billion. That is the projected surplus. It may be more than that. If you look at Treasury over our period of government, Treasury was always out in terms of what the projected surpluses were. We always had far higher surpluses. So, despite certain prospects of an economic downturn in the past financial year, I cannot expect that the surplus will be below $18 billion. But the first people who take a cut, the first people to take a hit, the first people who have to walk the plank are those very people that the Hawke-Keating government punished so dramatically during their period of government. As I said, John Sharp, when he came to government as the first minister responsible for regional development, had nothing in the kitty. There was no money to spend on these projects.