Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2025-2026

Mr CHAFFEY (Parkes) (12:53): One in three Australians live outside a major city, but as far as the Albanese Labor government is concerned they are the forgotten Australians. Regional Australia is critically important to our nation—critically important. It is where the food is grown, it's where the fibre originates and it's where the minerals are harvested.

Beyond that, it is the home of hardworking, dedicated, pioneering, innovative and enterprising Australians. This government's track record in serving regional Australians is appalling. Not only primary producers but the whole supply chain is facing challenge after challenge, from crippling red tape to compliance costs and acute labour shortages.

I've seen firsthand the problems associated with a severe workforce shortage in our agricultural sector. Across the Parkes electorate, which covers half of New South Wales, primary producers and the entire supply chain desperately need workers. Multiply this to the rest of Australia and you have an acute picture of an industry struggling to bring food and fibre to the rest of our country.

In the lead-up to the Albanese government's Jobs and Skills Summit back in September 2022, our peak food industry bodies estimated the food supply chain was at least 172,000 workers short. In the three years since that celebrated summit, I ask what's changed. This government has scrapped the dedicated agricultural visa, relied solely on the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme for workers and has tried to make changes to the PALM scheme which makes it unworkable for our farmers.

The agriculture visa was the biggest structural reform to the agricultural workforce in our nation's history. Under the agriculture visa, workers would be recruited to fill vacancies across a range of agricultural sectors, including horticulture, dairy, wool, grains, fishery, forestry as well as support services and primary production. Under this government it's all gone.

Having scrapped the agricultural visa, Labor turned its attention to the PALM scheme and announced a new federal deed and guidelines that would include workers getting a minimum of 30 hours a week. We warned them it wouldn't work. Our farmers live and know the fluctuation of seasons and weather cycles and the impact this has on the availability of work on farms.

Labor backed down but now has instituted a 30-hour average requirement over four weeks that will come into effect on 31 March next year. It's more meddling and more uncertainty. Since April 2022, there has been a 16.8 per cent decline in the PALM workers in agriculture in our country.

The deconstructed PALM scheme no longer works for primary producers or for the countries under the PALM scheme. Another of the significant challenges facing our primary producers and the supply chain is the substandard road network they must use to get their products from the farm to the table, the port or, in some cases, just down the road into the local town.

Apart from the fact that many roads have been damaged in the past few years by natural disasters, regional-road funding as a whole has gone backwards. I look at the NRMA figure showing the road infrastructure backlog for the 20 councils in my electorate between 2017 and 2021—the last four years of the coalition government—averaged at $86 million. Recurrent road funding grants over the past seven years averaged $102 million.

The end result for those four years under the coalition was that the roads were being funded, and the dollars were there, ready for the works to be done. In contrast, for the last three years of the Labor government, the backlog figure has blown out to an average of $222 million. I'll repeat it again—according to the NRMA figures, we are now looking at an average backlog of $222 million in road infrastructure each year across my electorate.

That's an increase of more than 250 per cent in the Parkes electorate alone in the years of this Labor government. My councils have advised me that they're being knocked back millions and millions of dollars in disaster relief funding—in fact, it's $150 million in my electorate. What does it look like on the ground for our farmers, who rely on the road transport?

It looks like detours for many expensive kilometres. It looks like delays of many expensive hours. It looks like damage to vehicles that have been travelling on these roads that are getting worse and worse every single year.

My questions is: why has this government treated our farmers with such contempt? (Time expired)