Bridget McKenzie (Victoria, National Party, Minister for Agriculture) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you for your question, Senator. Everybody in the National Party—and especially our leader, Michael McCormack—is passionate about rural and regional Australia, about increasing local jobs out in the regions and making sure our regional communities have the support they need to grow and develop. It's our party that took an election promise many years ago around mobile blackspot funding. That was the National Party. Drought funding—that is delivered by National Party ministers.

The minister responsible for ensuring our mining industry continues to grow and prosper and employ Australians right across regional Australia is a National Party minister, and the minister responsible for rolling out $100 billion of infrastructure to connect our fresh, clean, green product from paddock to port and to markets around the world is the leader of the National Party, Michael McCormack. He's incredibly passionate about making sure that our regions grow and develop and that we get everything we need out there to make sure that happens—not just the practical pieces around roads and rail, bridges et cetera but making sure that we're opening up new markets for that product, backing our food processing sector and a range of issues like that.

In my own portfolio, we're incredibly passionate—and I think that was the intent of your question: to ask how passionate we are. It's incredible that a party that didn't even have an agriculture policy at the last election would stand up here and criticise the side of politics that's actually backing agriculture and backing mining. You don't have a plan for either. You want to shut the miners down and you want to make sure that agriculture doesn't have a live sheep trade. You would have shut that down.