What a contrast with the culture of those opposite! Until now there have been only men lecturing to the women on this side about how little we must know about our regions. That'd be the regions that we live in—the regions that we've spent our lives in, have raised our kids in and are still raising our kids in. There is this absolute arrogance that, for some reason, only someone who's part of a national party or a liberal national party or, goodness knows for what reason, the Liberals, would have any idea, or would have a better idea than us.

Can we just accept that every region is different? I'm going to talk about how my region is different. I know my region. I know what we miss out on. I know what this government is failing to deliver. One of the things it's failing to deliver is respect for the women who represent these regions. My region is one that sits on the edge of Sydney. We can be confused sometimes with a city electorate. We can be confused sometimes with a remote electorate. Most of the time we sit in this area of being periurban. We are the key producer in New South Wales of perishable vegetables. The floods gave that a real hit. You only need to go to Flemington markets to see how the produce availability has been affected by that. We're the key producer of turf in the country. We're an area that has orchards. We have beef. We have not much dairy, but we still do have a bit of dairy. Unfortunately, while some areas are worrying about different threats to agriculture, mine is worrying about encroachment from houses that are taking over rich land. That's a failure of government policy—a failure to protect areas that have been, in our history, absolutely vital. It was the Hawkesbury that kept the settlement of Sydney alive when the colonists were here. When they first started and they couldn't grow stuff, the Hawkesbury could grow it. We are steeped in agricultural history. The threats are horrific, I have to say. In terms of the dairies that we've lost to housing, people will look back and ask: how could a country have given up land that was such a rich source of agricultural production?

So, in terms of the things that have struck us in the last 18 months or so, yes, there was the drought. Areas on the edge of Sydney don't always get noticed as being drought affected, but that has really hurt our wine-growing parts. It has hurt anyone with pasture. Then, of course, we had bushfires, and the bushfires wiped out apple orchards. They wiped out beautiful parts of the country, including orchards that have never been affected by bushfires before. That tells you something about how every region is being affected in different ways by the changes in the climate. We are seeing things that we've never seen before. Then we had our first flood. Then we had COVID. Then we had the biggest flood that the Hawkesbury River has experienced in about 30 years—a flood that wiped out vegetable crops, wiped out turf, left silt everywhere and ate into the riverbank.

Here's where this government's real failure is. It is great at announcing support for bushfires and announcing support for floods, but that support never lands on the ground. I can count on one hand the support that my orchards have had. There have been a couple of really good bits and pieces, but that's all it is. In terms of flood, there are great big horseshoe-shaped holes in the side of the Hawkesbury River, and the state and federal governments have not worked out what arrangements are going to be put in place for stabilisation, let alone any kind of remediation of those, and that affects every producer in my region. So don't sit across there and tell us that we don't know our regions—the places that we live in, the places that we spend every minute in once we escape Canberra, the places where people tell us what they need and where we listen to the people that we represent.