Mr RAMSEY (Grey—Opposition Whip) (16:01): I am an optimistic person. I like to believe in the best of people. The MPI today is:
After two and a half years, regional Australians are worse off under this Government.
I have said many times that I don’t think members of the Labor Party come here to do harm, and I don’t think they mean to do harm to regional Australia. I think they are, in the truest sense of the word, just simply ignorant, and they don’t understand what it is they are doing to rural Australia.
I have been keeping a bit of a list of the things that I think are really biting and really hurting and have changed in this 2½ years of government. First is the cost of everything. Only the other day I was in a butcher’s shop looking at sausages that were $16 a kilogram. I can’t tell you what an obstacle this is for people anywhere, let alone in the country. Our electricity prices, despite promises of a $275 reduction, have gone up by 30 per cent. If you think that’s tough on households, imagine what it’s like for a small manufacturing business or a large retail centre or whatever it might be. Costs in the country are pretty tough on everything. There have been 12 interest rate rises under this government. The average mortgage is $35,000 worse off. Personal income taxes are up by 25 per cent. We’ve heard the government parrot about their tax cuts—the stage 3 tax cuts which were actually funded under the former government—but, in fact, bracket creep is taking care of those very, very quickly indeed.
The abolition of the live sheep trade is eroding confidence right across the sheep industry, not just in Western Australia. There are some orders on some ships at the moment, and we know not what the owners of the ships will do; they may depart Australia early. There is the recommencement of the indiscriminate water buybacks along the Murray River. I led a delegation from the top to the bottom of the Murray, talking to growers about what would this mean in their communities; I can tell you it hurts. The building of transmission lines and renewable energy parks through high-value farmlands is starting to meet with real resistance in our rural and farming communities, I can tell you. There is the abolition of the ag visa program; this was to provide a workforce for Australian farmers to sow and harvest crops—that is gone.
There is the drying up of road projects. I worked very hard to get major upgrades on major highways within my electorate, and we began the duplication of the Augusta Highway; it’s gone just on 30 kilometres. Work is still underway, I might say, but it’s the money that was allocated from the previous government, and it’s about to cease, and there is nothing in the forward estimates to keep this work going the rest of the way to Port Augusta.
On the local roads and community infrastructure, members just before me spoke about the increase in roads renewal. In fact, it has been put back in one hand—what was taken away from the left. The reduction of instant tax write-off measures for farmers and the imposing of the biosecurity levy on farmers—I think that’s stuck in the Senate at the moment. But the idea that farmers would be paying for the import inspections on non-agricultural products, like fridges, white goods, machinery, electronics et cetera, is quite preposterous. The vehicle emissions standard will come into effect in the middle of next year but with another $15,000 to $20,000 on the vehicles that we use in regional areas.
There is the abolition of the native title respondents fund for those landholders that find themselves in the position of having to fight to keep their rights on their own property. There is the commitment to expand Australia’s parks and reserves from 20 per cent to 30 per cent. I only heard the environment minister in a meeting this morning being very excited about the prospect of going from 22 per cent of land being under the protection of Australia to 30 per cent in the next five years. I can guarantee you that that land, that protected area, will not be coming out of the electorate of Sydney. It won’t be coming out of the electorate of Melbourne. It won’t be coming out of the central area; it will be coming out of the regions that I represent, and it creates holes in the economic fabric. There is the allowance of big emitters to buy up agricultural land set aside for emissions to meet the safeguard mechanism. The safeguard mechanism itself is actually undermining the metal refining platforms, like the steelworks at Whyalla, the lead smelter in Port Pirie and the copper smelter in Roxby Downs. It is making it more and more difficult. So it has been a tough 2½ years, I’d have to say, and I think the government needs to take a very close assessment of what they’ve done to rural and regional Australia. I would like to continue— (Timeexpired)