NSW Nationals Conference - Wagga Wagga
12th June, 2009
One advantage of being on this planet for a fair few years is you know the old Biblical phrase "there's nothing new under the Sun" rings about as true today as it ever did.Back in 1965, Gough Whitlam expressed the view that if you didn't live in Sydney, you were an infidel. The then deputy leader of Labor said: "Cities and civilisation go hand in hand. By derivation, civilised men are those who live in the cities - pagans are those who live in the country."
Fast forward a few decades and we come to Paul Keating. In 1992, he boiled down regional Australia to be nothing more than "an agrarian society which produced a bit of wheat and wool and minerals".
Paul Keating also famously said "if you're not in Sydney, you are just camping out".
Let's move forward to the present day occupant of The Lodge, Kevin Rudd. He's a Nambour boy, which as you are aware is a regional town just outside my Queensland electorate. He has been very careful about what he says publicly, but we are indebted to the unlamented former Labor leader Mark Latham for this quote about Mr Rudd's private views from his Diaries.
When shadow foreign affairs minister, Mr Rudd would often say "once you leave Brisbane and cross the Pine Rivers you can hear the sound of banjo music".
For those that aren't aware of the reference, the 1971 movie Deliverance features the famous Duelling Banjos scene where a cross-eyed hillbilly is pitted against a city-dwelling fiddler. Once the instruments are packed away, much blood and mayhem ensues, and I don't think the movie did much for tourism in backwoods America.
I don't think Mr Rudd's remark does a lot for the personal esteem of Queenslanders living north of Brisbane either.
But his actions too speak more than his words. When he was "running Queensland", to use his words as Wayne Goss' right hand man, he swept through regional Queensland, closing 46 court houses, 13 rail lines, sacked 403 teachers, slashed 600 jobs from the Department of Primary Industry and abolished all of the local ambulance, hospital and fire brigade boards.
I remind you of these quotes because we should never forget what Labor's real attitude is towards regional Australia. It is dismissive, destructive and sneering. If it thinks of regional Australia at all, it is as a cash cow, to be sliced and diced when times are good or bad. It sees regional Australia as being largely populated by people who don't vote for it, and when in government it is payback time.
In New South Wales, you have lived under the Labor yoke for 14 years. I do not need to tell you how this once great state has gone backwards, particularly over the past six or seven years, debt ridden and with shambolic services.
At a Federal level, we are now approaching 19 months of hard Labor. And with cuts to just about everything that might be considered regional, seven million Australians have a very difficult time ahead of them. We are working hard towards ensuring that their sentence is as short as possible.
Those comments by past and present Labor prime ministers also show just how backwards the ALP's view of regional Australia really is. So many of our cities, towns and communities feature strong diversified economies, vibrant social lives and a real sense of belonging that you never get in a large city.
The Nationals are not just the party of farmers, although they of course are a big part of our base. We represent sea changers and tree changers, small business, working men and women and in fact anyone who lives in regional Australia. We are increasingly seen as the party of regional Australia, grounded in the regions and taking forward regional expertise and ideas for consideration in Canberra and Macquarie Street.
Last month's Federal Budget brought forward measures which shocked many, but one that has provoked a powerful reaction from thousands of people is the changes to the Independent Youth Allowance.
For so many regional students, the gap year between Year 12 and further education has become a rite of passage. It is the chance to break studies for a period and get some meaningful work and to grow up a bit before beginning a different stage in life in a new environment. The year can also enable a student to qualify for the Independent Youth Allowance once either a certain period of working hours has been completed or $19,532 earned.
In the Budget, Labor changed the system, apparently to stop the children of wealthy parents being able to double dip. But as so often happens, Labor used a sledgehammer to crack a walnut. Now we find that at least 30,000 young people are unfairly left in limbo in the middle of their gap year; terribly concerned that they will either have to study in poverty or give up their studies altogether.
Many of your Nationals MPs and senators tell me their have never received such a strong response from constituents. Students, parents and educators have all bombarded our offices with letters, faxes, phone calls, emails and texts of concern. The Young Nationals in particular have been taking up this issue on behalf of other young people living in regional communities who must move to study at universities in the city, or even city kids who want to study in places like Wagga, Armidale and Bathurst.
The Nationals have led the fight back and the Coalition has committed to moving amendments to aspects of the Government's legislation. We want to end the retrospective nature of these changes, as they are hitting students in their gap year right now, months after they made a considered decision about their future. They acted on the advice of their school, counsellors and Centrelink but now the rules have been changed mid-stream.
The Nationals will be referring the whole issue of education for children living in regional areas to a Senate Standing Committee under the Chairmanship of Senator Fiona Nash, for review.
We are seeing a similar response to our campaign on improving rural health. I applaud all New South Wales parliamentarians for the campaign they have run to expose the disgraceful outrages as a result of the under-funding and under-resourcing of this state's rural health services and Department of Health.
But beyond that, I would like to salute the magnificent performances under immense pressure of the doctors, nurses and other health professionals who have gone beyond the call of duty and even dipped into their own wallets and purses to help keep regional people healthy.
They are the real champions, and we are championing their cause. Together we will restore local control to health and fix public hospitals.
It is obvious that Kevin Rudd has given up on this task. When opposition leader, the Prime Minister set a deadline of June 30 for the states to get their health services up to standard. It was the core promise of all core promises. He solemnly declared they must fix waiting lists or the Commonwealth would take over health. Situations like those where an Ivanhoe mother gave birth by the side of the road after being turned away from a hospital, Dubbo nurses had to borrow bandages from the local vet to wrap patients, or the time meat was removed from the menu at Coonamble Hospital because the rural health service did not have the money to pay its bills had to end.
Kevin Rudd has only twelve working days left to meet the deadline he set for himself.
New figures released this week show the median waiting time for elective surgery continues to get worse - 20 percent worse than five years ago. In New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and Tasmania, the number of waiting list procedures performed has actually declined over the last year. An extra 30,000 people were admitted to hospital because of inadequate out of hospital care. Waiting times for those waiting patiently in line continue to increase.
People awaiting cataract and other ophthalmology treatment wait twice as long as others on the waiting list - yet Labor proposes to reduce MBS benefits for this kind of surgery!
There cannot be a single person who believes that things have gotten better under NSW Labor.
That seemed to be Mr Rudd's view too, when he was in opposition. His pledge was that if the states did not turn things around, then he would initiate a referendum allowing the Commonwealth to take over the hospital systems. It is clear that Mr Rudd's bravado in opposition has evaporated in Government.
I can confidently predict that when June 30 rolls around, Mr Rudd will be doing nothing of the sort. In fact, my other prediction is that he will be resort to the blame game again, blaming the Coalition and the doctors and everyone else for the mess created over the past 14 years in NSW.
As I said earlier, a Federal Coalition Government will work with the states to introduce local hospital boards, where local specialists and members of the community make the decisions about what happens in their local hospital.
Another the issue where The Nationals have made the running is exposing the Rudd Labor's proposed emissions trading scheme for what it really is: a job and investment destroyer that will do nothing to improve the environment.
What the ALP has created is a hump-backed beast that would demolish Australia's industries where we have a competitive advantage, drive up energy prices massively, send livestock producers broke, hollow out regional communities and costs hundreds of thousands of jobs. All this without saving the Barrier Reef or a single polar bear.
Climate change and how an individual nation and the world might respond is a complex issue which I cannot spend the time discussing at length today. But I have long believed that it is a sound policy to take insurance against the worst. As those who insure their homes or cars know, if the cost of the premium is too high then people tend to opt out and the system fails. What we are being asked to accept by the Federal Government with its proposed ETS is much the same.
Just the other day, a senior official in the Obama Administration revealed that the United States felt it did not need to have its own national legislation passed before the world meets in Copenhagen in December to discuss a global response to climate change.
If that is the case for the biggest greenhouse gas emitter, then why does Australia need to meet the rushed and artificial June deadline set by Kevin Rudd?
Suffice to say that if the Prime Minister insists on the Senate voting on his ETS before Copenhagen, then The Nationals will vote against his legislation, as we have done in the House of Representatives.
At such a difficult time for our economy, introducing an ETS of the sort proposed verges on lunacy. Rudd Labor has already driven us towards a forecast debt of $315 billion - that's $15,000 for every single man, woman and child in Australia. An ETS will only make things far, far worse.
People may be lulled into thinking that an amount like $315 billion is nothing to worry about. But it is a huge amount. If you converted $315 billion into $10 notes and laid them end to end, they would reach all the way to the moon - and back - 5 and three quarter times. If we still had $1 notes you could make 50 trips to the moon and back.
If you paid off the $315 billion at the rate of $1 per second, it would take almost 10,000 years to extinguish the debt.
Laughably, the Prime Minister and Treasurer also say they are the only ones that can get us out of the financial mess they created. The dynamic duo are arguing that the economy will suddenly start growing at a heroic 4.5 percent in 2011, maintain that fast speed for two years and then slow slightly to a still express pace of 4 percent over the following four years. This would amount to the longest period of express growth in this country on record.
This is a scenario that only those who claim to have been abducted by space aliens could consider feasible, yet sadly it has been taken at face value by far too many economic commentators and journalists.
One slip in that growth forecast, and Labor's debt repayment strategy falls apart. And someone else - just like in 1996 - is called in to clean up the mess.
Finally, I would like to talk about water, which is always a major issue and particularly in this part of the world where the worst drought in our history continues to wreak considerable damage.
As you would know, the previous Coalition government engineered a $10 billion water package. We developed this package, began the work and took it to the verge of national agreement, but were stymied by the political gamesmanship of the Victorian Government.
That package contains $5.8 billion to be spent on farm and irrigation system modernisation. New irrigation infrastructure means better use of existing water and less water drawn out of the rivers systems, so the environment benefits too. More for the farm - more for the river. In the Mallee for example, exposed channels have been converted to pipelines reducing evaporation levels of up 98 percent to virtually nothing.
Sounds like a win-win, right? Well, the Rudd Government has spent only about 0.1 percent of that $5.8 billion and has instead decided to concentrate on buying up farms and their water rights.
The latest example was this week where the historic Booligal Station on the Lachlan River was purchased by the Commonwealth for $1.6 million. The former owner said the buyer had come in with "a price I could not refuse".
I do not know if other potential buyers might have wanted to maintain Booligal as a working farm, but they would have had no hope of competing with a cashed up Commonwealth with more than $3 billion to spend on vulnerable farms and their water rights.
Last month the Government spent $303 million buying up water licences of the Twynum agricultural group. Effectively, the Federal Government has bought air - it is a drought but even in good times much of the Twynum water never makes it to the Murray - but Labor has sent more than $300 million to the Argentinean owners of Twynum.
So much for preserving our environment, stimulating Australia's economy and creating local jobs.
The disastrous purchase of Toorale Station near Bourke cost 150 jobs in a region where jobs of any sort can be hard to find. A once productive farm will be turned into a national park, and again the purchase involves only air.
Climate Change Minister Penny Wong tells her fellow South Australians that these sorts of purchases will get the Murray going again and fill the Lower Lakes. Surely even she does not believe that.
Senator Wong has confirmed during Senate Estimates that no work has been done by her department or any other to assess the impact on regional communities of these water buybacks. None at all. It did not seem to occur to her that if you shut down the biggest farm, the cotton gin closes, bringing the end nearer for all the farmers and their home town. The hospital closes, then the supermarket, the doctor goes and the policeman, the school numbers thin. Labor's thin air water buyback today kills another town tomorrow. But does Labor care?
This is all about placating deep green inner-city voters who think the world can survive on organic vegies grown in backyards and that farmers are environmental vandals, stealing water that would otherwise be flowing into the sea.
This concentration on farm buybacks, at the expense of local communities and our national food security, while money provided to improve farm and system infrastructure is not being used, is incompetence, criminal neglect, ideological blindness, a scandal and a national tragedy.
The Nationals in government will restore the balance. We will use buybacks only as they were originally intended - to acquire stranded assets or support restructuring. We will ensure that the billions of dollars available are spent on restoring, rebuilding and modernising the system infrastructure both on and off farm and introducing new technologies. Our plan will not only deliver improved productivity to the farms and new hope to country towns, it will also provide more water for the river and the environment faster than Labor can ever do.
We will maintain food and fibre production but also get the Murray Darling flowing again, especially once the drought breaks.
The Nationals is the party of regional Australia. Labor has proven it is not. Help us get rid of them, for good.
