Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Hughes said yesterday: 'It's a misnomer to assume it is only the National Party that represents the voice of rural and regional Australians.' Senator McKenzie called her the member for Woolloomooloo during the course of this afternoon's proceedings, so that's going well! The truth is Senator Hughes is right.

Mr Joyce who, heaven help us, is the Deputy Prime Minister, said, 'The National Party represents the poorest electorates in the country.' The claim checks out. ABC Fact Check has checked it twice. It's absolutely correct. There is a relationship between National Party representation and poverty. The relationship is not a casual relationship; it's a causal relationship. A hundred years of National Party representation of some of these seats has delivered a century of impoverishment. If you vote Nationals, it's a very predictable result. If you vote Nationals, manufacturing jobs go offshore. If you vote Nationals, public services get privatised. If you vote Nationals, your health services get cut if you are in a country town. If you vote Nationals, your TAFE gets closed down and 150,000 apprentices disappear. If you vote Nationals, the dairy industry disappears. Indeed, if you vote Nationals in New South Wales, your Murray-Darling Basin water disappears to spivs and speculators. The National Party's representatives deliver social misery, unemployment and impoverishment.

It turns out today the Auditor-General said that half of the regional grants—do you know where half the regional grants money got spent? In the big cities. The Prime Minister, for all the positioning, all the pantomime, the look-behind-you action that's going on, all the briefing, all the carry on, has got this figured out. The Nationals are irrelevant. It's going to be a cabinet decision.

Senator McKenzie said today, 'We're going through our own internal processes.' Well, that's what they do best: go through their own internal processes, endlessly self-absorbed. Mr Littleproud said, 'We've only had four hours to consider this.' They've had more than 70,000 hours. It took less time to put a man on the moon than it's taken the National Party to figure out what they're doing about industrial development and clean technology in the regions. For all of the action in here, for all of Senator McKenzie's pantomime and carry-on: Don't worry about it, Senator McKenzie. The Prime Minister's got it figured out.

If the National Party really stood up for regional Australia, there'd be two things that would happen. First of all, they would have spent eight years figuring out a policy framework that delivers jobs, lowers emissions and drives down electricity prices. That's what they would have done. The Prime Minister said, 'If you have a go, you'll get a go.' Well, what happens if you have 21 goes? That's how many goes this Prime Minister's had, and the National Party's had no impact on this area of policy.

I tell you the second thing you'd do if you were the National Party and you were really going to stand up for the regions. You'd grow a backbone. You'd get serious. You'd really mobilise. When former Prime Minister Hawke and former Treasurer Keating decided that Australia shouldn't own a national airline anymore—a significant, momentous decision in the history of public ownership in Australia—do you know what they did? They had a national conference of the Labor Party. They took the debate on, they provided leadership and the wings of the Labor movement came together and thrashed it out and got a result. What do you see from this lot? Backgrounding, whinging, whimpering, crying, moaning about each other. There's no courage. There's no fight. There's no struggle. There's no spine. There's no backdown. There is no capacity for this quisling political party to represent regional Australians, if there ever was. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.