Federation Chamber (part 1 of 2)
18 August 2026
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Federation Chamber Australian Parliament
10:06 - 11:33
Speaker 10
Thank you. Farrer spans 126,000 square kilometres, is home to 160,000 citizens, 14 shires and more than 200 suburbs, towns and rural localities. We are the people who grow the food and mine the minerals and move the freight that underwrites the national economy. The numbers are blunt. The median personal income net of tax is $810 per week.
House house prices sit between 250 and 600,000. Meanwhile, the shires are forced to consider annual rate increases between 50 and 85%. This is not from bureaucratic excess, but because the cost of keeping open the roads, the towns functional, the halls standing have been inflated by forces originating not in the towns, but in this parliament. A household earning $810 a week cannot absorb 85% price rate increases. It's mathematically impossible.
Yet the alternative, letting the community assets rot, is unacceptable. Most of our inflationary pressures is manufactured not within the is manufactured within this parliament. Electricity, the clean energy policies, the costs passed straight through to ratepayers, wage inflation, insurance inflation, superannuation. They've nothing to do with our regional productivity.
11:29 - 12:10
Speaker 11
There is some structural and there is some structural wounds that we carry. The 2007 Water Act and its offspring, the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, have contracted have contracted regional commerce across the shires. Irrigation-dependent towns have watched water reallocated out of productive agriculture, leaving few jobs, shrinking the ratepayer base and hollowed out our main streets. The basin has exported the cost the basin plan has exported the cost of its design into the shoulders of the regional councils. The Financial Assistance Grant delivers over 3.6 billion annually to across the nation, but it's running in reverse to inflation.
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