Christopher Back (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am delighted to have the opportunity to comment on the proposed Paid Parental Leave program to promote post-parturition participation, to improve productivity and profitability, towards parity, in a particularly and peculiarly appropriate process. And how wrong Senator O'Neill is when she comments on the value of this particular program to rural women. As Sharman Stone, the member for Murray, said the other day, in response to a question from a female ABC interviewer: 'You enjoy these benefits, don't you? You in the ABC enjoy them. Commonwealth and state civil servants enjoy them. Employees in insurance companies, banks and big mining companies all enjoy them, don't they?' Do you know what the ABC interviewer did, Senator O'Neill? She was silent, simply because, as we all know, this is not a welfare payment; it is equally applicable to anybody across the spectrum. This Paid Parental Leave scheme is going to allow women to stay in small businesses. Over time, as we all know, women have left small businesses to join banks, insurance companies and the public sector. So, far from this being some sort of an accusation against rural and regional Australia—which is a little bit rich coming from the Labor Party, who would not know where rural and regional Australia was—Mr Deputy President, I can say to you, after an entire life associated with rural and regional Australia, that the bush is very, very happy with the coalition.

Senator Furner asked a question about my friend Tony Seabrook, who may have made a comment about the diesel fuel excise. Let me tell you what Tony Seabrook said in June 2011, when then Prime Minister Gillard and then Agriculture Minister Joe Ludwig cut the knees and the legs out from under regional and rural Australia by banning the live export trade, affecting not just northern Australia but sheep producers, grain producers and, particularly, cattle producers and damaging the relationship with Indonesia, which Prime Minister Abbott, Foreign Minister Bishop and Defence Minister Johnston have only recently been able to start to repair.

I am delighted, as an ex-academic in a rural and regional university, to comment on the benefits of the higher education changes which have been brought in by the Minister for Education, Christopher Pyne. I met with one of the vice-chancellors yesterday, and we discussed the benefits of sub-bachelor degrees. I could speak for some time about how those young people who did not quite make it into university initially will be able to get financial support, through HELP, to do sub-bachelor degrees, which will start them on a process possibly even through to doctoral and postdoctoral studies, something which the Labor government, when it was in power, never, ever legislated for.

In the short time left to me, I would just like to comment on how Labor decimated the bush when they responded to the global financial crisis. We heard the nonsense from then Prime Minister Rudd and Treasurer Swan about how they saved the nation. There were four reasons this nation was saved.