BILLS: Road Safety Remuneration Bill 2011
Road safety is of paramount importance right across Australia, particularly in regional areas where every highway, byway and single lane country road is regularly used by trucks and semitrailers. These heavy vehicles cargo fresh food from paddocks, grain from silos, fuel from refineries, livestock from saleyards and resources from mines.
MOTIONS: Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation
I was most impressed to see the passion shown by the Minister for Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities on this issue of cattle grazing in the Australian alps. I look forward to him showing exactly the same passion and commitment when he brings about a triple-bottom-line approach in the Murray-Darling Basin plan and ensures that we have social, economic and environmental outcomes considered in any water policy in this nation.
MINISTERIAL STATEMENTS – New South Wales Floods
The situation with the floods in the Riverina has not yet been averted. There are still communities on very grave flood watch alert in the Riverina and the situation is quite critical in those areas downstream where sandbagging has been done and people have been evacuated and now they are just waiting, watching, hoping and praying.
MATTERS OF PUBLIC IMPORTANCE – Budget Transparency
It is interesting to note that the government and the member for Fraser have put forward this topic for today’s matter of public importance debate. I agree: there is an ‘urgent need for market based reforms and for strict and transparent budgeting’. This is no more so than with the issue of water, especially in and around my electorate of Riverina.
Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2010-2011; Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2010-2011 – Second Reading
Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2010-2011 and Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2010-2011 are more proof of everything that is wrong with the Labor government’s ability to manage the economy. They include wasteful spending and poor management leading to structural deficits which will result in families being unfairly hit by higher costs of living.
Fairer Private Health Insurance Incentives Bill
Australia has one of the best health systems in the world, largely due to the balance which exists between the public and private health sectors. This Labor government is willing to put our health system at risk—grave risk.
MATTERS OF PUBLIC IMPORTANCE – Economy
There is an urgent need for the government to protect the jobs of Australian workers. Workers and the families they support across the nation are hurting. They are hurting because Labor does not grasp the everyday reality of just how hard it is for long-suffering families to make ends meet.
Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2011-2012 and Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2011-2012
May I at the outset take issue with the member for Cunningham, who talked of the assistance package for those in the live cattle export industry which is part of these appropriation bills. The assistance would not have been necessary had the Prime Minister not, in a knee-jerk reaction, shut down the industry in the first place.
Women for a Living Basin
A group of determined women from my Riverina electorate have banded
together and will descend upon Canberra this month to champion their fight for a sensible outcome in the water debate. It is now more than halfway through the consultation period for the Murray-Darling Basin draft.
National Broadband Network Committee Report
The National Broadband Network has been one of the most contentious issues debated in this, the 43rd Parliament. There is a good reason for that. The NBN is one of the largest, if not the largest—as opposed to greatest—investments ever made by a Commonwealth government.