Mr COULTON (Parkes—Chief Nationals Whip) (18:27): I rise tonight to speak on this Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2023-2024 and express my concern about how the Albanese Labor government seems to have abandoned regional Australia and particularly my electorate in a whole range of ways. In some ways, I can’t believe it’s on purpose. I think it’s just out of a lack of understanding and ignorance about how things work.

But just little programs. One that I’m particularly proud of and that I was involved in way back in 2013 was the Stronger Communities Program. Any member would know the benefit of those small grants—$150,000 per electorate. Those small grants that went to sporting clubs, service clubs and the like were so well received. It wasn’t a lot of money, but in a small rural community it can free up a committee to actually do what they would like to do, whether it’s coach a footy team or look after a local community service club. It does help them not having to raise those funds. That’s been abandoned.

Local Roads and Community Infrastructure Program which was a great boon to communities through local government. It now no longer exists. If you drive right around Australia, if you drive around  my electorate, you can see fantastic projects that have been funded under this scheme. It’s gone.

The program that is particularly close to my heart, Inland Rail, the minister has been completely incompetent. The minister commissioned Kerry Schott to do a review. The Schott report was critical of some aspects, largely at the management level and the board level. But the Schott review clearly reinforced the business case—the need for the Inland Rail—and the importance of it going from Melbourne to Brisbane. For those who might not understand, the Inland Rail is an intermodal capital city link. It’s designed to take the pressure off the highway system for that city-to-city freight that goes up and down—the truck that goes up and down the Newell Highway in my electorate every 70 seconds. The Inland Rail would save millions of tonnes of carbon. It’s very efficient – I think it’s 150 trucks one train would take off. That’s the business case, from the outskirts of Melbourne to the outskirts of Brisbane. What’s particularly exciting for my electorate, though, is it then gives a high-capacity, high-quality railway line for my exporters to send grain, or cotton or other produce to port. At the moment the link that the previous government funded that connects the parts of the Inland Rail that are completed to the port of Newcastle has already been a great boon to the grain-growers in my electorate.

There is a bit of misunderstanding about Brisbane. There’s this thought that there’ll be no connection to the port of Brisbane and that there will be difficulty around that. But, once the Inland Rail gets to a point—and I think the current government might be looking at Ebenezer—with that link that would go from there to the Brisbane to Sydney line, there already is a standard gauge connection to the port of Brisbane. You can’t double-stack grain or cotton or minerals for that matter. So that connection will already be there.

For the minister to basically put on hold the project north of Narromine has created great uncertainty. There has been the removal of the funding for the grade separations that local councils fought so hard for. The one in Moree in particular was actually part of the original funding for Inland Rail, so it wasn’t additional infrastructure spending that they could remove, but they did. That grade separation, that bridge that would cross the Newell Highway and the Inland Rail to the special activation precinct that is going to be built at Moree was a vital part of infrastructure that would eventually lead to a heavy vehicle ring road around Moree. And communities right through my electorate, there has been an enormous commitment. Whether it is Moree council, Narrabri, Gilgandra or Narromine—they have all put in an enormous effort and an enormous amount of resources to get to this point. Now they’re been told that it’s going to be pushed back to 2027. It’s just not acceptable.

You’ve got to understand that, on the strength of the announcements that Inland Rail was to be constructed, people have invested in trucks and earthmoving equipment. A large number of Indigenous people in Moree undertook training and were working very, very hard and very successfully on the completed Narrabri to North Star stage 1 section. They’ve all just been put on ice. They’ve gone from employment back on to unemployment because of this break in the progress. So I call on the government to get that project going again because, if it loses momentum, the possibility of doing this project in a timely manner just gets harder and harder. Sadly, despite my efforts and my offer to help—because I have an understanding of this project—the only interaction I’ve had from the government was when they tried to get me charged for trespass because I had the temerity to have a photograph taken on a level crossing near a railway line. That’s the small-mindedness that we have to deal with. I’ll go to health and the changes to the distribution priority areas. For those who don’t know, DPA or distribution priority area was a program that encouraged, particularly overseas-trained doctors, as part of their obligation, to go to a regional area. And it worked quite successfully. The first thing this government did was to open up distribution priority areas to peri-urban and large regional areas. The week that that was announced, Western Health—an area with small western towns—lost six doctors that week to places like Wollongong, Geelong and Newcastle, because there was no financial reason for those doctors to stay there. That has had an enormous impact on the health delivery for my town.

I’ve got to point out that the Parkes electorate is just under half of New South Wales. It has the second-highest Indigenous population, percentagewise, of any electorate in this House. My frustration is that there has been a lot of discussion from this government about helping the livelihood and welfare of Aboriginal people; at the same time, they’re taking away all the projects, all the programs and all the funding that employ these people: Inland Rail; removing doctors through LRCI; taking 450 extra gigalitres of water from the Murray-Darling Basin—that production water. Who do you think is employed by that? What would be the biggest employer in a town like Moree? It’s the irrigation industry. Who works in that industry? Aboriginal people. It’s absolutely scandalous—not to mention the corporates. We have bank CEOs who won’t work on Australia Day to show their affinity with Aboriginal people, while they close the branches at Lake Cargelligo, Warren, Gilgandra, Moree, Gunnedah. Who’s impacted by that? Aboriginal people—particularly older people, who would struggle with the technology to go online. So the duplicity and double standards coming out of here, with ideology, pontificating about their greatness, while absolutely gutting the very people they say they represent, is scandalous.

There are the changes to aged care. With the best of intention—and I don’t want to have a crack at Minister Wells, because she’s been personally quite helpful with some of the issues I’ve got—these issues have been caused by the changes to have 24/7 registered nurses in country aged-care facilities. So these facilities struggle with compliance. They’re paying exorbitant wages for agency nurses to fly in, fly out, into towns like Broken Hill and Cobar. Last week in Broken Hill, Far West Health, in an effort to free up critical-care beds, told 19 frail aged people that they had to move. I spoke to a person whose father has been told they have to go to Balranald, 450 kilometres away. He has dementia; his wife has dementia; they can’t live at home; they can’t live unsupervised. So here you have these people who’ve been together all their lives, and, for the last years or months of their lives, they’re 450 kilometres apart! This is what happens when you have government policy that doesn’t understand regional Australia—not to mention the attacks we saw on community pharmacy. Hopefully, we’ve seen some sanity come back.

The divisive nature of the Voice campaign. As I said, I’ve got the second-highest percentage of Aboriginal people in my electorate. They voted 80 per cent no. The Aboriginal people of Wilcannia, Bourke, Brewarrina, Moree—towns with very, very high Indigenous populations—said: ‘No. We want to manage our own affairs. We don’t want another bureaucracy in Canberra. We just want to be like everyone else.’ In here, once again, I was accused of racism and all sorts of things. The Aboriginal people in my electorate are people. They have the same issues as everyone else. They want to educate their kids. They want to be able to see a doctor. They want to have somewhere for their parents to go when they can’t look after themselves. They want a job. It got caught up in this ridiculous debate that absolutely divided families in my electorate.

On the water buybacks: water is life in my electorate. This is such an ideologically driven thing, because the 450 extra gigalitres wasn’t part of the Basin Plan. One of the advantages of being in this place for a while is that you get a bit of a memory of what goes on. The 450 gigs extra wasn’t part of the Basin Plan – it wasn’t part of the plan that was agreed upon in a bipartisan way. It wasn’t part of the plan I voted on. It was a political fix for Senate votes in South Australia cooked up by Julia Gillard and the current Leader of the House, Tony Burke, in the lead-up to the 2013 election. It can’t be delivered, but, basically, that water has now been removed. If you want to know what happens when water is removed from a community, I welcome anyone to come and visit me in Collarenebri. When Minister Wong purchased the water from Collymongle station, the biggest and probably only employer in the district closed down and we went from  a prosperous community to a welfare town.

It is a frustration, it really is a frustration. With the benefit of doubt, I don’t think the Labor government is deliberately trying to attack my electorate, but inadvertently, through their lack of understanding and ignorance on every level that you’d like to mention, the people of my electorate are copping it. They’re starting to come up to me in great despair. I haven’t even touched on the IR laws, where some of the larger farms are going to have to have a union organiser. The shearing industry that has prospered since the AWU declined, now is going to be tried to be taken over. I could go on for much longer. I am terribly concerned. The sooner this government wakes up to itself or moves on and lets someone come in and run the country that knows regional Australia, the better.