I think the last statement that the minister made highlights exactly what the problem is with the Building Better Regions Fund—or the 'building better rorts fund', as it is better known—and that is the comparison with the Stronger Communities Program. The point about Stronger Communities is that it is equal and fair. Every single MP is given an equal amount to share between the groups within their electorate. I hope every MP does what I do, and shares it as evenly across the electorate as possible. That's the whole point: there's an equity there. But these guys don't understand what it means to be fair.
The list of rorts that has occurred under this government almost leaves me speechless. But I'm not going to be speechless for the next four minutes! I'm not going to miss that opportunity. Essentially, what were seeing under these funds—so many of them—is that they're used for personal pork barrelling. They're using taxpayer funds to personally pork barrel within electorates. You would have thought that the most marginal seat in the country, perhaps, would be deserving of some of the largess. Sadly, no—$3 million has come to the seat of Macquarie.
Let's compare a tale of two regions. There is the seat of Macquarie, which is peri-urban and, interestingly, sitting right next to the seat of Calare. My seat is a mix of regional and quite remote areas, and then you've got Calare, with three big cities in it, including Lithgow—a real centre. Here is the comparison. The Blue Mountains and the Hawkesbury received $3 million. In fact, all of that went to just one small part of the electorate. Calare received $44.5 million. So two seats side by side, one with a National MP and one with a Labor MP—and, gee, doesn't that make you ask: how fair is this government being?
There is another example of where this government showed absolute preference for a National seat, and that was with a decision around a mobile blackspot tower. The tower was allocated to Mount Tomah, in my electorate, the heart of where the Gospers Mountain's fire went through. It is an area where there is no mobile reception and an area where many people pass through. It is an area very, very much in need of an improved mobile signal. Under the blackspot program a tower was allocated to Mount Tomah, but then something happened that no-one was told about and suddenly that tower was taken away from Mount Tomah and allocated to a National's electorate further west. There was no reason or anything given to the community to say, 'Hey, guys, we've found somewhere better to put this, and it's several hundred kilometres away from you.' That's the sort of behaviour of this government that is clearly designed to carry political favour, rather than do what is right and do what is needed.
I thought it was worth looking at my electorate and comparing it with other peri-urban sorts of electorates, and I looked at the electorate of Pearce in WA. Pearce is described as an outer-metropolitan electorate, and it received $19.6 million in funding. In contrast, Macquarie is considered provincial. So we are provincial, outside a capital city with the larger populations living in provincial towns. Outer-metropolitan is defined as an area situated in a capital city and containing large areas of recent suburban expansion. So there you go—a fund designed for regional Australia and more of it, $19.6 billion, went to Pearce, an outer-metropolitan seat—described as that in the government's own descriptions of seats—compared to a seat like mine, called a provincial seat, completely outside a capital city.
The way the allocations are happening is wrong. These people sit on what is largely a secret panel. All we know is that it's a ministerial panel. When you look at what ministers have been granted, you see: the agriculture minister, $52 million; the Leader of the Nationals $22.5 million; and the former Leader of the Nationals, $22.4 million. It has just got pork-barrelling written all over it! This is a group of people who rule for themselves, not for the country.
