Michael McCormack
Riverina · National Party · Australia
“She told the local newspaper, the Daily Advertiser : He shared his personal story and he was just such a brave, compassionate man— and we heard that from the member for Chifley a moment ago. She continued: He was the most warm, caring, generous man.”
“He knew that he was going to succumb to the diseases that were afflicting his body, and yet he used his final months, weeks, days and hours to send a message to the nation about what can be done, what should be done and how we should act.”
“The coalition has concerns from the sector itself about the consultation process, including but not limited to the fact universities had not seen the bill before it was tabled. There are elements of the drafting surprising the actual sector.”
“My thoughts and love and condolences go out to Katie and his children, Emily, Matthew and Lucy. It is a profound loss that they have suffered. I listened closely to the words of the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition and the Minister for Health and Ageing yesterday before question time.”
“There are a lot of Australians out there at the moment who are very angry, and, when there is anger, there is unfortunately a race to the bottom when it comes to healthy debate. I don't need to remind the House about the sovereign citizen movement and what that can do to Australia and the nature and discourse of debate.”
“I do believe that children should be allowed to be children. We saw it in the veterans legislation, where there is now going to be a $5,000 cap on allied health for veterans to access important services. The Labor Party said: 'Trust us. We'll do the consultation over the next 12 months.' It's not good enough.”
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“According to what Labor's trying to do, it's going to move some maximum terms to five years. It's going to expand termination grounds to include serious misconduct—I would have thought that would have been there already—and, for most roles, unsatisfactory performance. If it were in the private sector, sometimes you can't get rid of people for unsatisfactory performance to save yourself. I know. I've been in those sorts of positions, and you have to manage people out. The difficulty there is that, if you make a mistake in the private sector that's going to cost millions or billions of dollars, you lose your job like that in an instant. You do it in the federal parliament, you get promoted. That's just the way it is.”
“That just gives rise to these teals and the Independents thinking, 'There is obviously something to be seen here, so we'll make a big fuss of it, and we'll go out into the media and we'll get all the undue attention that Senator Pocock and his cohort in the upper house often get about the power of statutory offices and the power of ministers.' Heaven help us! Ministers are there because they are given that responsibility by the Prime Minister because somebody has to look after certain portfolios, and hopefully Independents never will. That's the core issue. If you combine greater ministerial powers with weaker visibility, you won't get what's called in this bill 'modernisation'. I know this bill is there to supposedly 'modernise' governance measures.”
“Usually, the requests were from Labor—would-be ministers and shadow ministers pretending as though there was something behind every closet and under every box that needed to be in the full glare of the public. The Prime Minister himself said to me that it is just bogging down good democracy. I don't necessarily disagree with him on that score, but we do need to have public accountability. We do need to have transparency. I don't think, as with a lot of things, that this government is getting it right, with all due respect. The matters here—because this bill is not being proposed in a vacuum—do sit squarely within the same culture: reduce transparency, centralise control and weaken parliamentary oversight. I don't think that is a good thing.”
“But what we don't want to see is the teals—they're already out there making out as if they're running every precept of parliament and every procedure, yet they will never be around a cabinet table—let's hope they're not—making the decisions. Ministers make the decisions. The buck has to stop with them. I don't like to see the watering down of the ministers' responsibilities. But what we are seeing is transparency being eroded. Instead of lifting the parliamentary standards, what we've seen is Labor making accountability harder. I'm not that in favour—although I have had discussions with the Prime Minister about this—of charging for freedom-of-information access. That said, when I was the deputy prime minister, I would have about two staff members doing almost nothing other than answering freedom-of-information requests most days.”
“The party political system has served Australia well since 1901, since Federation. We have seen—and I can say that safely in this room right now because there aren't any of them here—the Independents and the teals make out as if they're running the show, and they are not. Labor's in power now. They won the most seats; government is formed in the House of Representatives. What we don't want to see—and this is just learned advice; take it on board if you will—is a situation that's happened in some European countries, where the independents or minorities are running the show and they're changing the prime minister every five minutes. We've done enough of that since, quite frankly, Kevin Rudd got speared halfway through his first term.”
“I don't think that we should have a bureaucracy down the hill getting the final say or rubber-stamping ministers' decisions. I say this with genuine intent: it's up to ministers and future ministers—and I'm looking at the member for Sturt because I'm sure she will one day be a minister—to not just take the word of their bureaucrats when they put papers that they need to sign into their in-tray, papers that will into law or into regulation matters or issues that are important and of vital concern to the general public. Make sure you read every item. What we've seen from this Labor government is a pattern of watering down a minister's responsibility. I think what it also does is erode the culpability, the transparency and the 'buck stops here' axiom for ministerial responsibility.”
“I think it's important for the Westminster system. Does this particular piece of legislation assist and aid that process? Time and again, this government's instinct is to control information, to sidestep scrutiny and to move what would be seen as key decisions out of the parliament's line of sight. And that is a pity. As I said, I am a believer in the Westminster system, and a big believer that ministers have to have accountability. Ministers must have the final say. I have stood in this place and in the House and talked about my concerns about how our ministers' responsibilities are being watered down because, at the end of the day, the buck has to stop somewhere. And, generally speaking, it always was the minister's office—the minister's pen.”
“And these things—mobile phones and social media—have had a part to play in this. This particular bill, the Commonwealth Entities Legislation Amendment Bill 2026, might be seen as being a perfunctory bill, and it is. But we've just seen, in the House of Representatives just now, another successful bid by the government to shut down debate, unfortunately. The Chief Government Whip, the member for Lalor, has gone in and moved a motion to stifle debate, and this happens again and again and again. When Labor came to office in May 2022, the Prime Minister elect, the member for Grayndler, said at the time, 'We will be more accountable; we will be more transparent than the last mob.' Labor hasn't been. And, unfortunately, that has added to the distrust of party politics. And I love party politics; I do.”
“It is a shame, because you don't get to be elected to the House of Representatives unless you get a high proportion of votes, and we should have accountability, transparency and respect for those office holders. We should. I can remember when I first came to this place in 2010. Harry Jenkins, the then speaker, said, 'Don't ever look across the parliament and think that someone there doesn't deserve their place here, because they've earned the number of votes required, they've earned the respect of their electorates and they've earned their place to sit in the House of Representatives.' The Senate's a different story altogether. I'm not paraphrasing Mr Jenkins, but that is a truism. But, regrettably, there isn't the same respect for members of parliament these days.”
“He was the member for Wagga Wagga in the state parliament from 1957 to 1975 and then he stood for federal Parliament and won. He served Farrer from 1975 to 1984 and then, after a redistribution of boundaries, Hume from 1984 until his retirement in 1993. When my late father, Lance, was farming along the Olympic Way and Wal was driving past back to his home in Wagga Wagga and saw Dad, he'd pull up. I can remember the two of them having long conversations over the fence. Dad would always say to me, 'Now there's the local member,' and he was so highly respected—as he should have been. I don't think the electorate in general has the same respect for politicians—certainly not for party politicians—and that is of deep regret.”
“The Commonwealth Entities Legislation Amendment Bill 2026 is, supposedly, presented as a governance modernisation measure. It is aimed at aligning certain statutory office holders with, apparently, contemporary accountability standards. It applies to the following entities: the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research, the Australian Trade and Investment Commission, the Australian Safeguards and Non-Proliferation Office and the Office of Parliamentary Counsel. Australians are, at present, living under one of the most secretive and least transparent federal governments that we have seen. I recall as a boy growing up on a farm at Brucedale—nine miles, we used to say, from Wagga Wagga. I can remember the then federal member—he'd been a state member before that—the honourable Wal Fife, the late Wal Fife.”
“They're proud to beat their chest about it and proud to spruik it. They condemn us for supposedly not supporting it. I listened carefully to the contributions of the member for Holt and the member for Moreton. The member for Holt talked about $36 billion being taken out during COVID. She said it 'had depleted or emptied' some of their superannuation pools of money. But what she didn't say is that it's investors' money. What Labor people never understand is that it's actually the money of the investors. It's not their companies' money. It's not the unions' money—although she did mention the unions, because Labor members are always beholden to unions. I can say that, having been a member of a union for 21 years; nobody can criticise me in that regard.”
“They go on: Investors in First Guardian, many of whom switched from highly regulated super funds into the product, face little prospect of recovery directly from the fund, with liquidators in December saying just $1.6 million of $446 million tipped into it had been recovered—not enough to pay their fees. In order to recover money for investors, the corporate watchdog has instead launched a series of lawsuits against companies responsible for overseeing the fund. Have we heard the Treasurer explain what was going to be done for those investors? Yes, many of those investors switched from highly-regulated super funds, but they did it based on good information, and, let's not forget, they did it during a period that Labor was in government. Labor talks about being the party and the government of superannuation.”
“Can you imagine, Mr Speaker, being one of those people on the cusp of a well-earned retirement, looking forward to your twilight years, knowing that you had that nest egg there, and all of a sudden having it taken away? It's so very unfair, and it's on Labor's watch—on this government's watch. In a 10 February 2026 ABC news article, business reporters Ben Butler and Nassim Khadem wrote: About 12,000 Australians poured $1.1 billion in retirement savings into the two funds, which collapsed in 2024 and 2025 amid what incoming ASIC chair Sarah Court has described as 'industrial scale misconduct'. They're not my words.”
“Farmers are already faced with the prospect of paying higher fuel costs because of the situation in Iran, and let's not forget the high energy prices which just keep going up and up. The people that that hurts most are small-business owners and farmers, farmers who grow our food and fibre. Another thing that you won't hear from those opposite in their speeches on this important bill is the situation surrounding Shield and First Guardian and the collapses in the managed investment schemes. I appreciate that the government is planning to tighten the rules around MISs and to give the corporate watchdog, the Australian Securities and Investment Commission, more power to demand information. But those Shield and First Guardian collapses cost people their life savings. It destroyed some people, unfairly and tragically so.”
“Thankfully, they could admit that that error needed amending, and it has been amended. But will you hear any member opposite, in their contributions on the Treasury Laws Amendment (Building a Stronger and Fairer Super System) Bill 2026, admit that? No, I don't think you will. I certainly don't think you will hear any admission that this was going to be an unfair slug on our farmers, who are already, particularly in Western Australia, facing the reality that, if they sell sheepmeat to the Middle East, they won't have a trade in the future, with the live export ban. Farmers in the Murray-Darling are facing the prospect of less water because more productive water has been taken and used for the environmental purposes that this government is pushing.”
“Because it had increased in value, they were going to be hit with a tax bill. What were they supposed to do—hive off a paddock or three to pay the tax bill that those opposite wanted to slug them with? Thankfully, public perception and people power has seen that particular element of this particular piece of legislation removed, and thank goodness for that. The government has agreed to index the $3 million threshold, preventing bracket creep from slowly expanding the tax base over time. What we see through those two concepts alone—the unrealised paper gains, protecting SMSFs holding farms and small businesses from being taxed on gains that they have not made, and the indexation of the $3 million threshold—is the government and its Treasurer admitting they got it badly wrong.”
“The Treasurer has some explaining to do. He really does, because this legislation bells the cat on his failure. On his watch, what we saw was a proposal by the Australian Labor Party to put in an unrealised capital gain. Who would that have hurt the most? It would have hurt farmers, who already do it tough with the vagaries of the weather, of markets and of international volatility. They were going to be hit with an unrealised capital gains tax. Let's call it what it was: a tax, a proposed slug on them, which would have been so very unfair. With that unrealised gain, what we would have seen would have been farmers whose properties went up in value, increased in worth, then being hit with a tax bill on the price of that land going up even though they weren't going to sell it.”
“Not only that—we were able to, obviously, fly in vaccines and health professionals to regional and remote communities, including the member for Leichhardt's. So it's important. Aviation is a huge player in regional Australia. It shouldn't be that, when you are in pain, you have to catch a plane. Certainly, with today's limited air travel, we should have more health professionals in country areas, and we certainly work towards achieving that through the Murray-Darling rural medical school network et cetera. There are certainly a lot of issues confronting the government, and one of the most important of these is regional air travel. Anything the government can do to help that, I will support.”
“I know you would share that view, Member for Indi—although I won't verbal you, seeing as though you're in the chair—given your close proximity, obviously, in Wodonga to Albury. I heard the member for Leichhardt talking about the airport upgrades. There's nothing new there; the coalition had that as well. I'm proud of what we did during COVID, when we kept Virgin—which was on its knees—Qantas, Rex and other airlines in the skies, because I knew, and we knew, that planes in the air meant jobs on the ground. And I have to say that, when 26 airlines of a size comparable to Virgin at the time went belly up across the world, we were able to maintain all of our airlines across Australia, and that was very important.”
“One of those regional routes was Wagga Wagga to Melbourne—there was also Albury to Melbourne—and now Wagga Wagga people are disadvantaged by the fact that they only have limited access to Melbourne via the aviation route, and that is deeply disappointing. The former member for Farrer and I have both written to Qantas seeking explanation. I realise they're a business and I also appreciate that they have to operate according to shareholders, according to their margins et cetera. But I think Qantas is big enough to sustain more regular flights to Melbourne from both Wagga Wagga and Albury. Whilst I appreciate that they were operating with less than half of their passenger capacity, it's simply not good enough for the national carrier to just dump that route full stop.”
“I note with interest that Labor has a fund to help councils which have suffered losses through the Rex downturn, and I sincerely hope that Wagga Wagga is able to recoup some of the money that it lost when Rex hit troubled skies. I'm pleased that Rex has got a new owner, but I'm very disturbed by the fact that Qantas has dropped its flights from Albury and Wagga Wagga to Melbourne. Of course, when Rex decided to get too big and take on Qantas on the Melbourne-to-Sydney route and many, many other capital-city-to-capital-city routes, it took on a behemoth. It certainly did and it certainly found out the hard way that you don't get a future by doing that. Obviously, Qantas took on some of the Rex regional routes as well.”
“Regional Express's home is very much in Wagga Wagga, and, indeed, 180 people at those hangars at the Wagga Wagga Airport can't be wrong. It's the maintenance base and the base for so much of Rex's activities, and they pump $12 million worth of wages into the local economy each and every year. It was important that Rex, when it did hit turbulent skies, got help from the government. I very much appreciate not only the Prime Minister ringing me whilst I was overseas at the time—returning my call—but also the minister for infrastructure and transport, the member for Ballarat, talking to me, because they knew how important Rex was not just to Wagga Wagga and the Riverina but, indeed, to the wider regional economy.”
“The member for Leichhardt quoted Love Actually , and that's a favourite movie of mine too. I promise I won't show the chamber the little Love Actually clip I once shot whilst I was Deputy Prime Minister—maybe it might come out one day! But, to quote the airport scene, the Prime Minister, Hugh Grant, said this: Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. And indeed any prime minister these days would have enough reason to feel gloomy about the state of the world. We live in troubled times; we do. But, rather than just standing up here and giving brickbats, as sometimes opposition members do, I do want to say to the government that I acknowledge the support that it has provided Rex Airlines.”
“I think when you're the government of the day it's beholden upon you to run a candidate in a by-election, particularly a by-election in a seat such as Farrer, where the Labor Party—and I will say the true believers, because that particular seat, which was founded in 1949, has always been held by either the Liberals or the Nationals.”
“I know there will be a by-election in the electorate of Farrer, and I note the Prime Minister was in Albury a week or so ago. Interestingly, Albury was the birthplace of the modern Liberal Party in 1944, when Menzies talked about the forgotten people—and, indeed, they were being forgotten. The Liberal Party will contest that by-election, as will the National Party. It will be a contest for the ages. But I'll tell you who may well not be there—the Labor Party. Labor has already signalled it may not run a candidate.”
“I certainly know that, when we were in government, there were bids to have a fuel supply in Toowoomba, a fuel supply in Parkes—on the intersection of the east-west and north-south rail lines—and a fuel supply in Western Australia, to help not only the mining industry, which I know is so prevalent in Flynn and elsewhere in Queensland, but, indeed, agriculture. Agriculture provides food and fibre not just for our domestic use but also internationally. We grow far more food than we could ever hope to feed to our own nation; that's why it's such a huge export. More than that: when we talk about small business in this place, it often gets forgotten that farmers are small-business owners and operators. At the moment they are very much being cruelled by bad water policy.”
“by leave—There's never been a more important time than right now to talk about small businesses because small businesses are facing the brunt of not just domestic shocks but, indeed, the reverberation of what is happening around the world. I spoke a little earlier about the Iranian situation, which will cause a spike in the price of energy, as in fuel—and fuel, like electricity, is the economy. Certainly, we know this in regional Australia. It might be all well and good for the energy minister to spruik about the 34 days of available diesel and fuel in Australia. We need to, in fact, increase that—we do—and we could well do it.”
“Go into a small business—not just a coffee maker but the little owner-operators, the bespoke stores, the unique stores in your own electorates—and talk to them. More importantly, listen to them. Then come back and explain to the parliament what you're genuinely doing to help those small business operators who are doing it really, really tough at the moment. They need our genuine help, not just as a parliament but as consumers ourselves.”
“Following attacks on Iran, oil prices surged on 2 March, with Brent crude rising around 7.4 per cent to up to as much as $82 per barrel. It was $67 a barrel before this happened. Shane Wright, the economist from the Sydney Morning Herald , suggested yesterday on Insiders that it could get as high as $100 a barrel. I know Labor came in, and the Treasurer, the member for Rankin, was very fond of saying that the fuel price was caused by Ukraine. He'll use this as an excuse now. It's always, 'The dog ate my homework,' with the Treasurer. There's always that excuse. Labor, and the Treasurer in particular, have the levers available to them to fix the economy, to help small business, yet all they do is to come in here with their talking points and read them assiduously. Do something about actually genuinely helping small business.”
“Not many of them have actually ever run a small business. They've come up here through the staff or they've come up here through the union movement, but none of them have ever got their fingernails dirty owning and operating a small business, starting at dawn, finishing at midnight and doing it every day, day after day, and then taking home less pay than the workers themselves. I say shame on Labor because they should go into their own electorates, go into a small business and see what's driving them. See how hard they're hurting at the moment, because they are indeed hurting. They're really, really doing it tough. What they're going to be encountering next, particularly in regional Australia—I'm glad the member for Leichhardt is here—is a rising cost of fuel. Indeed, there's a price spike caused by what happened in Iran at the weekend.”
“How do they, as the member for Adelaide says, keep the doors of business open when they're paying more and more and more for their power bills? Energy is the economy. While Labor have got energy policies that are going to hurt small business by way of rising power bills, you're going to hurt those small businesses—small businesses, I might add, which are going out backwards at a rate of a thousand per day. That's an alarming figure. In four years we've actually seen 40,000 of them go bankrupt—not just close their doors but indeed go belly up. Labor come in here with talking points about how they're securing the prosperity of small businesses. Well, they are not. Labor members—most of them—have never seen a small business that they wouldn't like to run a picket line out the front of.”
“But it gives small businesses the assurance that they can invest, knowing that this is something they are going to be able to bank on in the future. What they can't bank on at the moment is this government. What the 2.7 million small businesses of Australia can't bank on is reliability from this government. We ask ourselves, 'What is the definition of a small business?' Well, it was probably a medium sized business when we were in government. Deputy Speaker, as the member for the fine city of Gladstone in the fine electorate of Flynn, you would know full well the benefit of small business. You would also know full well—I'm not trying to badger you—the fact that small businesses are at the moment encountering a 32.2 per cent rise in electricity costs just in the last 12 months. How do they cope?”
“I'm in furious agreement with member for Adelaide when he says that we need to do all we can to help small businesses. Indeed, he is right. He talked about the instant asset write-off, but what the member for Adelaide didn't tell the chamber was how much the instant asset write-off is worth. I can tell you: it's $20,000. What was it worth under the coalition? It was unlimited. Admittedly, that was a COVID stimulus, but before that it was a lot higher than $20,000. They say it's a promise and that they've written it into the next budget. This is something that our small businesses look to to provide the investment that they need in their businesses, but Labor just trots it out each year. Why not just put it in as a permanent rate and make it unlimited? Yes, it's a cost to the economy. Yes, it's a cost to the government.”
“I will be making sure that I keep in a folder all of the contributions that Labor members make to quote back at them in the future, because I welcome what is being proposed here. I know that my predecessor, the former member for Riverina Kay Hull, who has great respect in this place and is a former president of the Nationals political party—the immediate past president—actually crossed the floor over the sale of Telstra. I know that, when you cross the floor in this place, you get sent to Coventry for a while. You do. Labor members cross the floor and get expelled from their party; we just get a bit of—”
“A good mate of mine, Tony Keremelevski, who hails from Goobarragandra, battled for years and felt joy when, finally, the mobile phone tower was opened. I remember being with Mark Coulton, the former member for Parkes, in his ministerial capacity at the time when we made a call. It was the first call available via that tower on the day. It was such a sense of relief not just for Mr Keremelevski but indeed for the people who visit that area, particularly recreational fishers, caravaners and the likes going on adventurous excursions. The difficulty is that, when you go to one of those areas in the beautiful Snowy Mountains—in the foothills at Tumut et cetera—you face the prospect of not having coverage or having very limited coverage. I hear Labor members talking about coverage in 99 per cent of where people live, and I look forward to that.”
“He will go to the Milano Cortina Paralympic Winter Games in Italy. Just four years after the freak accident involving a header saw him lose his left leg, he was selected in the men's banked slalom and snowboard cross in the SB-LL1 class for snowboarders with moderately affected movement in the knees or legs or the absence of one leg above the knee or two legs below the knee. He's 31, so he's still a very young man. He's got a young family and he's a brave fellow, but it could have ended much worse because of the limited reception that he had where he lived. I hear Labor members saying that mobile coverage is—and they're using the present tense—in 99 per cent of where people live. It's not where Aaron lived and it's not where so many others live.”
“Luckily, he had his phone in his pocket when the accident occurred, but he had limited reception. Aaron lived in the shadow of The Rock. Mr McCarthy said: I saw that it had at the top, emergency calls only, so I rung triple-0. We have terrible service so I think I yelled at them four times who I was, where I was and what had happened. Aaron was quick to place a tourniquet on his leg with his shirt. Emergency services then called his wife, Tahnee. Ms McCarthy said: I was in the house and got a phone call and as soon as I left the house my emergency services call dropped out. The last thing I heard a lady say was 'he might not respond, he's in a bad way'. Indeed, he was in a bad way. But Aaron turned adversity into opportunity. He will attend the winter Paralympics. Well done to him. That's an incredibly brave story.”
“Labor's pretty fond of going to our electorates and cutting ribbons, yet they haven't got much to show in the infrastructure space or in the regional development space for their nearly four years of government. This legislation provides that opportunity. It provides that opportunity because the ALP members are coming in, whether they're from Western Australia, as we heard before, or from the Blue Mountains, in New South Wales, to talk about the importance of mobile phone connectivity. I agree with just about every word that's been said. Certainly, when it comes to fires, floods and natural disasters, you need to be able to make a triple zero call, because it is a matter of life and death. I want to refer to a particular hero of mine and indeed of the Riverina: Aaron McCarthy. In a harvest accident in December 2021, Aaron lost a leg.”
“I dare say that Labor will still be in office, because they're going to be in office for at least another two years. That will be time enough. I know they're very fond of looking back and regurgitating history. They've been in there for nearly four years now. By the time the next election comes around, they'll have been in there for six years. That gives them time to put their money where their mouths are. That gives them time to build the infrastructure that they are so critical about. We built infrastructure, whether it was mobile phone towers, roads, bridges, highways or byways—even in the member for Nicholls's electorate; I know I went there often. We got it done. We delivered.”
“As the member for Riverina and, indeed, as the Deputy Prime Minister at the time, I can recall how many of the member for Indi's constituents benefited from the Mobile Black Spot Program that we put in place, because we did it with fairness. We did it with equity. We did it based on need. But not Labor—oh no. Yet they've come in here this afternoon talking about, as the member for Macquarie just said—I'm not quite sure she actually meant it. She said that this legislation sends a 'strong signal'. I don't know whether it was a clever play on words. Let's go with that. There will be people out there who are waiting for a very strong signal on one of their devices when this legislation is implemented and has had a chance to bed down. That time will come.”
“I reckon that, by the time it actually occurred and by the time we actually got to dig down into the detail, it was every one of them, but let's go with 25 out of 26. That's pretty shameful. I know Labor said: 'This is an election commitment round. This is what we promised at the election.' But what we did, as Liberals and Nationals, was look at where mobile coverage was most needed and filled the gaps. It was a continuous program. It was ongoing. Yet what Labor did when they came to office was provide almost all, if not all, of the mobile towers to Labor electorates. Labor often go on about colour coded spreadsheets. There's just one thing wrong with Labor's colour coded spreadsheets, and that is that they're just one colour. They're all red.”
“But people out in regional Australia have been waiting for far longer than 12 months. No doubt Labor will say, 'Well, you were there for nine years. What did you do about it?' I'll tell you what we did about it. We provided fairness and equity when it came to rolling out mobile phone towers, not like Labor. I refer to a media release that I put out on 17 February 2023. In that particular statement, I was very critical, and still am, of Labor's Mobile Black Spot Program. Under the 'improving mobile coverage round' of the program, not long after being elected in 2022, Labor's Minister for Communications directed her department to provide 25 of the 26 available grants to Labor electorates.”
“This legislation is being referred to as the UOMO legislation. It could also be called the FOMO legislation. I appreciate that UOMO means universal outdoor mobile obligation. FOMO, of course, means 'fear of missing out', and there'll be a lot of people across Australia who will have FOMO when they hear what some of the Labor members, and the crossbench too, are suggesting, saying and asserting about this particular bill, the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Universal Outdoor Mobile Obligation) Bill 2025. Here's the rub too. The bill's title says 2025; it's now 2026. Note to those Labor members: this bill, this piece of legislation, was supposed to be brought to the parliament last year. It was an election promise. Indeed, the Labor Party committed to implementing UOMO on 25 February 2025. That's more than 12 months ago.”
“My question is to the Prime Minister. In the building today are several members of the Wagga Wagga Yazidi community, who have come to Canberra to share their trauma that they received at the hands of ISIS, or Daesh, before they fled to Australia. How can the government assure the inconsistent messaging regarding ISIS sympathisers returning to Australia won't destroy the lives these beautiful Yazidi people are rebuilding in our country?”
“It's going to cover the countryside of the Yass Valley and the Upper Lachlan shire, when they're already paying the most when it comes to green energy projects. It has to stop. This government has to stop the reckless rollout of renewable projects, because it's hurting regional Australia, particularly my electorate of Riverina.”
“The government said they were going to address the cost-of-living crisis but spent the first 18 months putting in place a $450 million referendum on the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, dividing Australians and, certainly, getting nothing from that. When you get the minister responsible for hoping to bring down energy costs, all he can do is quote Taylor Swift—nothing against Taylor Swift, but he needs to get absolutely serious about the energy costs of this country. In the Upper Lachlan shire, where they actually support 53 per cent of New South Wales's green energy projects, they're getting blackouts all the time. Then they're expected to put in more towers—towers as high as 260 metres.”
“We heard—earlier, in question time—about families having to choose one sport over another for their kids. This Labor government is just rushing policy through this place in haste. They're not considering the average, ordinary, everyday Australian when they make these policy decisions on the run. We heard the member for Nicholls talking about renewables. He's right—there's nothing wrong with renewables, but it has to be in balance. Indeed, one in four homes had rooftop solar under the former coalition government. It was the highest in the world. I know the Labor government crow about it and say, 'Oh, we're fantastic in that regard,' but we were getting to work on reducing power costs. Those opposite are only hurting people with higher energy prices, and it has to stop. The buck has to stop somewhere; it stops with this government.”
“I appreciate there are probably some members over there who have areas where food and fibre are grown. I just saw the member for Durack turn around; she's got the biggest electorate in the world. But it takes energy to produce food, and energy is getting more and more expensive. Whether it's the Sunraysia or the Riverina—or wherever it is—it is just costing our farmers so much more. Every step of the way, they are being stymied by this Labor government. They're having to pay more for water, for inputs and for power. But the cost is also being borne by everybody, every time they go to a supermarket. They get to the register and see that they've got less in their trolley, but it's costing them more. They can't afford it. They're having to make expensive decisions, and it costs their families; it does.”
“They hurt, especially, every time they get their energy bills because their energy bills are going up and up and up. Indeed, there's been a 38 per cent increase in power costs for the average householder, and this is hurting. Couple that with the cost-of-living crisis, and you can understand why people out there, outside this building, think that the minister has lost touch. And he has; it's sad. We know that energy is the economy. We know, certainly, that food production costs are increasing. The poor old farmers are price takers, not price makers, and their bottom lines are reducing appreciably. I'm surrounded by my Nats colleagues. We've got the members for Page, Parkes, Lyne, Hinkler and Nicholls—all great food-growing areas, along with the Riverina.”