Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2025-2026, Appropriation Bill (No. 2) 2025-2026, Appropriation (Parliamentary Departments) Bill (No. 1) 2025-2026

Mr BIRRELL (Nicholls) (18:27): I rise to speak about Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2025-2026, Appropriation Bill (No. 2) 2025-2026 and Appropriation (Parliamentary Departments) Bill (No. 1) 2025-2026 in relation to the budget. It gives me an opportunity to talk about the things that are important to my community and my electorate of Nicholls, which is, as many people in this place would know, in northern Victoria.

The northern border of it is the Murray River. The Goulburn Valley, which is obviously the Goulburn River, comes up through the middle of it and provides fantastic irrigation, water, fertile soils—some of the greatest agriculture in Australia—and the ability to grow, manufacture and process food that not only benefits Australia domestically but earns great export dollars.

However, I feel this is under threat from the policies of the Labor government in relation to energy, water, infrastructure and labour. I think that, if you want to see an example—not the only example but an example—of the entrepreneurial spirit that has built Australia, you can go up to the Goulburn Valley. See what waves of migration and that entrepreneurial spirit have done—arrive with nothing and build it into a terrific business based on the principles of liberalism and the free market.

In relation to energy, obviously there's a lot of talk in this place about net zero, which is an ambition. It's an ambition I support. It appears to be somewhat more of a slogan than a policy.

I said in my maiden speech that climate change is an important and serious problem facing Australia, but the transition is an incredibly nuanced and complex problem. If we get it wrong, all that will happen is that businesses will see that Australia is too expensive a place to do business, and they'll move the business, the economic opportunities and the jobs offshore, along with the emissions.

So in terms of reducing global emissions, which I think is the desire of many people, we will have achieved nothing. But we will have damaged our own economy and the future of our generation. I don't think the energy transition is going as well as the minister would have us believe.

I have serious doubts about thinking that you can do the energy transition limiting yourself to a very small number of technologies. I think we have to have a much more technology-agnostic approach to this area. I worry about legislating ourselves into a corner where we could seriously damage our economy in trying to reduce emissions, which—let's face it—given the percentage of our emissions compared to the rest of the world, wouldn't have an overwhelmingly significant impact on global climate change.

There's not only that. The rollout of wind turbines, solar factories and transmission lines is happening without social licence and without community consultation, causing great distress and great anger in the regions. That needs to be addressed.

We need to have an honest conversation and an honest answer from the government about what this is going to cost. It's very difficult to make assessments of what you should do without knowing what it's going to cost, and we don't know that. In relation to water, I was very vocal in the last term of parliament about incredibly regrettable changes to the Murray-Darling Basin Plan.

I thought they were unnecessary. I thought they were based on politics and not science. I've been following this, having been involved in irrigated agricultural agronomy before I came into this place.

As CEO of the Committee for Greater Shepparton, I was trying to futureproof the economic prosperity of the Goulburn Valley and the Greater Shepparton region up to the Murray Valley. It's based on irrigated agriculture; that's what we do. We grow 90 per cent of Australia's pears and over 50 per cent of Australia's apples, and we produce a significant proportion of Australia's dairy products, particularly those that get exported.

That all relies on access to reliable and cheap irrigation water. When governments come in and want to pull a whole heap of that water out of what we call the consumptive pool for irrigation and put it into environmental accounts that, in many cases, do not get used, it damages our economy. It damages Australia's ability to export food, and that's something that we do so well.

It's an area I'm very passionate about. There were a lot of compromises through many governments, from the Gillard government to the coalition governments, and with the states. There were many compromises that were made to reach an agreement that not everyone liked but everyone was able to live with.

The previous minister came in and said, 'I'm going to tear those agreements up. I'm going to tear up a socio-economic neutrality test.' That test, which protected basin communities, had been painstakingly arrived at by state premiers, many of them Labor state premiers. I want to pay particular tribute to the former water minister in the Andrews government, Lisa Neville, who was very constructive in this area.

That test was torn up and taken away, and we've ended up with regrettable and unnecessary water buybacks. Agriculture is really important to my region, and it's important to Australia from a cultural perspective, from an export perspective and an employment perspective. It's also important for our sovereign food capability.

I'm very proud to have been involved in the agricultural industries. I had a go at uni when I first left school and tried an arts degree. It didn't quite work out, mainly because of my immaturity, which some people might say still exists.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Dr Freelander ): Never! Mr BIRRELL: But, when I went back to university, I did agricultural science. What an incredible profession to be involved in—the growing of food, the technological advancements in growing food, trying to feed people and trying to make sure that South-East Asia, Asia and places further afield have the benefit of our sustainably produced agricultural produce.

I was disappointed with some of Labor's attitudes towards agriculture in the last term of government. It's just an area I don't think they get. The biosecurity tax was withdrawn eventually, but it was a bad idea.

It showed disrespect for people who run agricultural businesses in Australia to think that you could introduce a levy that said, 'We're going to allow people to bring food products into the country to compete with you.' Okay, we're a trading nation. We've got to accept that. But to then say to those Australian businesses, 'And you're going to pay their biosecurity costs so they can bring the food in and compete with you'—it was a nonsense.

Someone eventually saw sense, and it was withdrawn, but the fact it was put out there shows a bit of an anti-agriculture flavour to the government which I wasn't incredibly impressed by, and neither were the people in my electorate. Then we come to the live exports. It's not an issue that I was hugely involved in.

It was very much a Western Australian issue. I visited Western Australia as part of a backbench committee with the member for Durack, and she help me to understand the importance of these industries to her constituents. Again, it's an issue I don't think Labor got.

They had an ideological fixation that we're going to ban live export. There were problems, many years ago, in the industry. The industry worked incredibly hard and was given an ultimatum by the previous coalition government to improve animal safety standards.

They did so in a very impressive way. What's going to happen now that we've banned it? The countries that still have markets for live sheep imports into their own countries are going to get it from places like those in Africa that don't have the animal standards, so it actually decreases animal welfare in that industry globally.

There are things that people might not like doing, but, if we stop doing them in a way that's sustainable and responsible, other countries are going to take up the slack in a way that's not sustainable and not responsible. That's what's going to happen with live export. I also think that, in terms of labour, we had a really good plan that a lot of people were keen on in my electorate, before I came into parliament, called the ag visa, which was going to put people into agricultural jobs on a pathway to permanency, but, regrettably, that hasn't been followed through by the Albanese government.

Infrastructure is really important to the regions. Part of the reason I ran for parliament and part of the reason I ran for parliament in the National Party—I'm not a born and bred Nat; I came to it a bit later. I had a great admiration for earlier Labor governments of the eighties and nineties who got business, but I saw the coalition, driven by the National Party, take infrastructure in the regions very seriously.

We saw both the infrastructure that enabled productivity for farm businesses and manufacturing and the infrastructure that gets people to move to regional places in the first place. For example, the Echuca-Moama Bridge over the Murray River, which has linked that Victorian town with the New South Wales town over the river, has seen significant improvements in transport movement across the Murray River.

It was driven by a Victorian coalition government, and it was acted on by a federal coalition government. I saw the coalition come in, take it seriously and try and get things done. I hope, one day, I'm part of a coalition government that will do that, because we've got another bridge that needs to be built across the Murray River—the Yarrawonga-Mulwala bridge.

I am not blaming the federal Labor government for that at this point, because the Victorian Labor government are holding that up. The New South Wales government has decided which route it will take, and I'm hoping it can drive the project. Victoria don't even know it exists.

When it comes time to fund that project, I really encourage federal Labor to do that, unless we're in power and we do it. There are some other cultural areas where it's not as apparent how important this is to regional communities as a bridge, but it is important. The Shepparton Art Museum is a great example.

It was funded by the coalition government and driven by the knowledge that we've got to move people to regional areas, particularly professional people, and, more particularly, health professionals. If we build cultural institutions, like the incredible Shepparton Art Museum, then we help to achieve that. There are a number of other infrastructure projects that deserve funding, and it disappoints me that the cupboard is bare when it comes to regional funding at the moment.

The Growing Regions Program has not had any new money put into it. We try to explain to this parliament, in the best possible way, how important this is for regional communities. The link roads in Kilmore; the safety upgrades to High Street in Broadford—there's a bridge being built over what will be the inland rail route, but there needs to be some traffic safety features; the Shepparton sports and events stadium; the Seymour RSL club; and the completion of the Welsford link road are all important things to regional communities.

Shepparton is my home town and I love it. It's not as obvious a place for tourists to go as the Gold Coast or Noosa, but people go there for what's called 'the visitor economy'. There's always an event on in Shepparton, whether it be BMX or beach volleyball.

If we could build the Shepparton sports and events stadium, we would get so much extra leverage in economic activity because of it. In the minute I've got left, I also encourage the government to focus on and look at the successes of the coalition government in the health workforce. The most important one of these is the Murray-Darling medical school, which has moved medical degrees outside the big cities to places like Bathurst and Shepparton.

At the end of 2025, we are going to have 30 young people graduate with a degree in medicine. They have been living in Shepparton, Bathurst or wherever else for a long period—four years—and are more likely to stay there and practise because they've put down roots in those communities. We need more of that.

In terms of education, I'm very honoured to be the shadow minister for regional education. I'm the beneficiary of a degree in agricultural science from Dookie, a university campus outside Melbourne, and an MBA from a university campus in Shepparton. These are some of the things that we need to talk about in this term of parliament.