CONSTITUENCY STATEMENTS

Mr VENNING (Grey) (10:28): Sport is the heartbeat of regional South Australia. Labor has cut the sporting grants budget from $331 million to $150 million by 2029-30. Sporting Schools, Play Well, Local Sporting Champions and Local Para Championships are now one-year terminating measures.

Nearly two million children rely on those programs. My office lodges applications for those grants every year to kids in Port Lincoln, Whyalla and Ceduna who already travel further and incur more costs. While Labor cuts these programs, look at where the money went.

Independent analysis from the Centre for Public Integrity found that for the local community infrastructure program, 88 per cent of the $560 million went to an invite-only fund to Labor held seats. Less than 20 per cent went to coalition seats. Forty-five electorates were not allowed to apply.

Now, the Centre for Public Integrity found no link between where that money went and the community need or household income. A golf club in the Prime Minister's own electorate received six million bucks while clubs and communities across 45 electorates were never invited to apply—including in my electorate of Grey, which has 30 local government areas and spans a landmass bigger than the state of New South Wales.

That is not funding communities; that is a gross misuse of public funds. The Albanese Labor government could not be more clear in its disrespect for regional South Australia. In Whyalla, the steelworks remain in administration.

The blast furnace is now off. Two bidders remain and $1.9 billion of taxpayer money sits on the table. The Premier says both bidders will build an electric arc furnace—a furnace that will need 500 megawatts of electricity around the clock.

Unfortunately, South Australia cannot promise that. We have built a grid that works part time: cheap when the wind blows; catastrophic when it does not. On more than four occasions this year, wholesale prices hit more than $20,000 a megawatt hour—twice in one evening!—because the wind stopped blowing.

For those watching at home, that's $4.50 to boil a kettle of water. When the price spikes, the mines stop processing and the steelworks stop rolling. These power prices quite literally stop the nation.

And we have seen where this ends: $3.1 billion for Whyalla; $2.5 billion for Tomago; $600 million for Glencore. Bailouts cannot go on forever. (Time expired)