Leader of The Nationals David Littleproud - The Nationals Federal Council Address
Thank you, Bridget. And to you, President Kay, can I say thank you, and honour your commitment to our great movement. Along with Larry Anthony, two titans of our great movement. A movement for regional Australia. The National Party is there for those that live outside of a capital city to make sure we get our fair share.
You have given back to a party that has given you so much. They've given you the honour to serve in Parliament here in Canberra, but post that, have remained loyal to the cause, to our movement and to our future. And that speaks volumes about our movement, but it speaks volumes about you.
Thank you for your contribution, the legacy that both of you have left our great movement, it will never be forgotten. That is what it is to be a National. That is what it is to be part of The Nationals family. To understand that it is the collective that actually builds and cherishes our future and protects our past. And you both have done an exemplary job in that. Thank you so much on behalf of The National Party.
To the Federal team, to Kevin Hogan, my Deputy, and to Bridget McKenzie, the Senate Leader. To particularly our new Members. David Batt, the new Member for Hinkler. And can I say, if you haven't listened to his first speech, you should. It's one of the most authentic speeches I've heard, of a man who was built from his own community, serves his community and is giving back to his community.
A humbling speech of a man that believes in the cause of his community and his country. We welcome you, David, and we know that you'll make a great contribution.
To Jamie Chaffey, a man that has built a family business, a man that's built a town, and one of the hardest working candidates I saw, to show respect and honour the man that he took over from in Mark Coulton, a man that we all honour in the Federal National Party. And Jamie continues to work as hard as what he did as a candidate.
To Alison Penfold, who I think is probably the most experienced Member of Parliament we've brought into our team in the corporate world and in Parliament House itself. Despite having a term as my chief of staff, she still endures. But it's great to have the three of you join us.
And please, while many of the commentariats say that The National Party can walk up to an election and we'll win our 15, 16 seats, make no mistake, it's a challenge for the likes of Capricornia and Flynn and Cowper, where we just heard nearly $2 million was spent against us. But it was the fact that we as a party went to the election with principles and values that represented the people that put us there, that ensured that we endured.
And so, please understand that it is a continual fight, a continual fight to ensure that our values, our principles are not just shown here in Canberra, but shown back to the people we represent. That's why we come here. I'm given the great honour to change the future of regional Australia. The next generation.
I got into politics because I was sick of seeing young people leave Western Queensland and go to Brisbane and never come back. My honour to being here is to ensure that we keep them home and we bring them home. That there's a future in regional Australia. That we get our fair share and that the opportunity that those that experience a capital city lifestyle can endure in regional Australia.
That's why The National Party exists.
That's what drives our members to come to Parliament and to fight for regional Australia. To our candidates, can I say thank you to Sam and Kimberly and can I honour also Andrew Lethlean.
And can I say to you, the Members, how much of a privilege and honour it is to have you here and to honour you for all that you've done for us.
The most humbling thing that you will ever experience is to put your name on a ballot paper on behalf of The National Party and on election night to understand that there are people that will go and hand out, that will work for you for a matter of weeks and months. Doing it for nothing. Not for financial gain, but because they believe in their community and they believe in their country, and they believe in you. That's the most humbling experience you will ever get in politics.
And it's not one that we take lightly or ever forget. We are proud. Despite a devastating loss at the election, we are proud of The National Party. We held onto all our House of Representatives seats and came within a whisker of pulling off a miracle in Bendigo. A safe Labor seat having a double-digit swing.
Can I thank the Victorian team for all that they did in making sure that we gave it everything.
But inside of that is that Andrew was a local champion. A local publican giving back to his community, being part of his community, prepared to fight for his community. He lived the values and the principles of what it is to be a national. A small businessman who's prepared to put his own sweat and his courage and his wallet on the line to employ local people and be part of his community. That's what it is to be a National. And that's what our candidates should exemplify when we put them up year after year.
Can I say to Lincoln Folo, who I believe ran a fantastic campaign on behalf of The Nationals. The Nationals ran a faultless campaign and Lincoln, to you, can I say thank you. Some might not know this, but when I first came to Parliament in 2016, Lincoln was the state Director in Queensland, and we had somewhat of a love hate relationship. Mostly hate. I didn't think some bloke from Brisbane would know how to run a campaign in western Queensland and thought he was giving too much gratuitous advice. But Lincoln, I could not trust anyone more than you and your professional manner in running our campaign.
We should be proud of the way that The Nationals ran our campaign. The result reflects the way that we ran our campaign. And understand this. That in every state that we ran under The Nationals brand, our primary vote went up. That speaks volumes about what Lincoln has done here as the Federal Director. The Nationals brand is strong because it has currency. Because we believe and we have sent people who believe in those values. It personifies that here in Canberra. And I thank you Lincoln, for all that you did.
Obviously, there were some big decisions to be made after the election, and they were tough decisions, and they were not made in any malice. But can I say thank you particularly to Kevin Hogan and Bridget McKenzie. They were some of the most trying times anyone would ever go through in a professional life, let alone a political life. Understanding the scrutiny of the national media about the decisions we were about to make. But those two stood strong and tall next to me every day during that, making sure that we worked as a team on the collective wisdom of our room.
And our collective wisdom of the room ultimately always decides The National Party's future. And we made the right decision. We made the right decision to protect the legacy of that. Not just those that we had fought for before the election the last term, but for those that had come before us, that had believed in making sure that supermarkets didn't use their power over farmers, and now over you as consumers.
To make sure that we change the culture to protect, to make sure there was fairness when there isn't fairness in the market, when there's market imbalance. That's common sense. We weren’t prepared after the many that had come before us had fought for that for over decades and we had succeeded in achieving putting it in the Coalition. We didn’t walk away from that.
We weren't prepared to walk away from telecommunications reform, to ensure that those mobile phone towers that you built with taxpayers’ money actually work in our hour of need. To ensure that there is a regulatory requirement on Telstra and others to make sure those towers work. We've already seen the tragic events in the last couple of months where four lives were lost because triple zero didn't work. Well in Regional Australia, that's a daily risk for us. We're one tower towns. When they go down, we have no ability to ring 000. All we're asking for is some common sense.
And the $270 million that's given to Telstra every year to be able to keep maintaining landlines and payphones could, lo and behold, be diverted to the infrastructure of the 21st century. The mobile phone towers that you built. That's common sense. That's what we should achieve.
We also fought very hard for what we believe is a legacy item for future generations, a legislated Regional Australia Future Fund. There's over $350 billion worth of exports that come out of Regional Australia every year. Treasury always under budgets the commodity price of those commodities on the bottom line. And so, what we said is, we just wanted a small part of that to build a $20 billion fund that would be there for perpetuity, that would be invested and give a dividend of $1 billion a year back to Regional Australia. Above and beyond what we are already getting, to ensure that we could have childcare accessibility.
In Regional Australia, it's not about childcare affordability, it's accessibility. Young families are unable to go back, to go to work or to have a career in Regional Australia because we don't have childcare places. There's market failure. So why wouldn't we invest, invest in the next generation of young people in Regional Australia, in keeping them home, in making sure they understand they have a career in Regional Australia, they can bring a family up in Regional Australia, just like you can do in Brisbane, Sydney or Melbourne.
Why shouldn't we have that right? Why shouldn't we have the right of health care? We were going to invest over $250 million of that into Commonwealth supported places of actually investing in the education of young people into medicine, into allied health, to ensure we trained our own young people to look after us in Regional Australia. That's the common sense, the investment that goes to the challenges that Regional Australia faces, that this government has ignored. It's a legacy item that we could leave.
It's about $500 billion that was going into ensuring that councils could actually fill in some potholes to make sure that we give them the money they needed to maintain our roads above and beyond what they already get. This was common sense policy, a legacy that we will maintain, and we will legislate and regional Australia will get when we are returned to government. That is our commitment as a party room because we took that step after the election to make sure that there were boundaries within the Coalition that our party room would not leave.
And the most important one was one that this room has long sought for around nuclear energy. It is one that I passionately believe in. It is one that we need to understand. While the rest of the world continues to go down this path, Australia cannot put its head in the sand. You are experiencing already this reckless race to an all-renewables approach in regional Australia. We are feeling that not just through our power bills, but through our communities being torn apart.
I sat with an 85-year-old man in Molong. His one son was getting wind turbines; the other son was getting the transmission lines. His biggest fear to me as I sat with him was that he would not see his two sons reconcile before he died because it had put a chasm between them. They would not even speak.
And this is what we say to people in metropolitan Australia. We believe in reducing emissions, but not at any cost. And not at Regional Australia's cost, not at our people's cost. We want to be fair and equitable about how we achieve that. But this reckless race is destroying livelihoods, it's destroying communities. There's a better way; there's a fairer way. When we have sovereignty of all our resources and why wouldn't we use them all? That's common sense.
That's the common sense that we want to initiate as a debate moving forward. And today you'll debate that. You'll debate a resolution, an eminently sensible resolution, around making sure we have a commonsense solution to our energy, to our climate. We believe in maintaining and protecting our climate and our environment. There are practical ways.
There's not just one way, there's alternative ways. And we should consider those in a calm, considered way. And your deliberations we will consider. And as I announced today, tomorrow morning our party room will meet to consider your deliberations today. And also, the work that Ross Cadell and Matt Canavan have put together with the Page Research Institute to look at the challenges of our energy and climate policy.
We're not walking away from reducing emissions, but we can do it a better, fairer, cheaper way. We can align ourselves with the world as the world pivots from an arbitrary target to using common sense, making sure that they don't destroy their economies. We can do that, calm and considered, and we work with our coalition partners.
And I've made it clear with Sussan Ley that while we respect the sovereignty of their room, we've asked her to respect the sovereignty of our room. And we've come together in a considered way to work together. And that is the endeavour that we will start tomorrow morning at 9am.
But I want to make it clear that this is about respecting also, the divisions that have powered many of these resolutions through, that the primacy of our membership is to never be ignored by our party room, because it is your values, your principles that drive us and bring us into place.
And so, while the rest of the world considers their position, we should consider ours. We shouldn't streak ahead, but we should peg ourselves to what the rest of the world is doing. As they pivot, we should pivot. Also, we should be agile because we have the ability to do that, and we should look at those solutions in a calm, considered way. And that's what our room will do.
So, this meeting today is important to us. It's been a culmination of many of your state divisions coming together with the values and principles and the ideas to address the challenges and the aspirations of regional Australians.
It's what guides us here. And so, I thank you for all that you have done for our great movement. We should be proud of our achievements over the last three years. We should look forward to the future and understand that the fact that we have stood together for the last three years has made us stronger and will make us stronger if we continue to stick together. Because when The National Party is strong, regional Australia is strong, and Australia is strong.
Thanks for having me.
