CONSTITUENCY STATEMENTS

Mr FARLEY (Farrer) (09:30): Farrer spans 126,000 square kilometres, is home to 160,000 citizens and has14 shires and more than 200 suburbs, towns and rural localities. We are the people who grow the food and mine the minerals and move the freight that underwrite the national economy. The numbers are blunt.

The median personal income, net of tax, is $810 per week. House prices sit between $250,000 and $600,000. Meanwhile, the shires are forced to consider annual rate increases of between 50 and 85 per cent.

This is not from bureaucratic excess but because the costs of keeping the roads open, the towns functional and the halls standing have been inflated by forces originating not in the towns but in this parliament. A household earning $810 a week cannot absorb an 85 per cent rate increase. It's mathematically impossible.

Yet the alternative—letting the community assets rot—is unacceptable. Most of our inflationary pressures are manufactured within this parliament. Electricity, the clean energy policies—the costs pass straight through to ratepayers.

Wage inflation, insurance inflation, superannuation—they're nothing to do with our regional productivity. There are some structural wounds that we carry. The 2007 Water Act and its offspring, the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, have contracted regional commerce across the shires.

Irrigation-dependent towns have watched water be reallocated out of productive agriculture, leaving fewer jobs, shrinking the ratepayer base and hollowing out our main streets. The Basin Plan has exported the cost of its design onto the shoulders of the regional councils. The financial assistance grant program delivers over $3.6 billion annually across the nation, but it's running in reverse to inflation.

Its formulas and algorithms were built for a different Australia and do not reflect the true cost environment for our councils. Every year, the real value of the grant declines while the obligations grow. Post-World-War-II memorial pools are cracking.

Town halls and community halls are decaying. Roads and bridges are carrying freight they were never engineered for. Replacing regional swimming pools alone will cost millions.

Shires with a shrinking grant and an exhausted ratepayer base cannot meet these renewals alone. The financial assistance grant must be elevated to a position of critical. The algorithms and formulas are not current or effective for the operating environment in 2026 and beyond.

There's the cost of replacement of end-of life-infrastructure. Safe roads are the single largest unfunded liability facing regional councils. We're not asking for charity but fairness.

Reform of the federal assistance grant— (Time expired)