Nationals’ Leader David Littleproud has addressed the Federal Party’s conference in Canberra. This is what he said.
Thanks President Kay. Can I acknowledge you? Can I also acknowledge our former President, Helen Dickie, who is here and also the great Don McDonald. We should never forget those that have given so much to our party over so many years and made us what we are today. They have a legacy that we have a responsibility to protect and to build on. And to you for your efforts. Can I say thank you to my federal colleagues. Can I say thank you for your support, your energy and enthusiasm and the momentum that we are building as an Opposition towards a 2025 election.
To my state colleagues, can I say thank you for being here today in the support that you’ve provided to our great movement around this country, but to you, the members, can I say thank you for the courage of your conviction to be here because of your beliefs, not for financial reward, but your belief in our nation, your belief in regional Australia.
It’s your collective wisdom that we will draw on today, over a couple of days, in making sure that this party sets a pathway to ensure that we have a direction towards the next election. And while we might not always agree, the beauty and the culture of our great party is that we are always prepared to fight for one another when we need to. And you only have to look at what we’ve done in the last 12 months, nearly to the day. 12 months ago in Gascoyne in Western Australia, we stood united, every state, sending people to a by-election to make sure that Mem Beard won the seat of Gascoyne.
The Federal team was not only there on the ground, but we made sure that we volunteered the nights after Parliament, making phone calls into that seat, that ensured that not only did we win that seat, but we maintained the status of Opposition in Western Australia. Fast forward to November and what was a bittersweet victory for The Nationals. Our Victorian team won four new seats and transitioned a further one. Amazing.
So Walshey, Matt and the team, you’ve been an inspiration of what you’ve been able to do and achieve in Victoria. You showed that when there is an alternative, people are prepared to support you and to back you. Because we unseated three independents, three independents in regional Victoria.
And to our friends in New South Wales. What a herculean effort when the tide was going out to lose one seat and to lose it when we won. We won by the primary vote, but lost in a state where it’s optional preferential voting to a Labor candidate thanks to the Greens. That goes to show how tight their Coalition is and to Nichole Overall who is here today for your courage.
And so this great movement that we are in The Nationals is one that is forged by you and the privilege and honour that you have given to us in the State and Federal Parliament is one that we don’t take lightly. It provides us with the opportunity to unlock the potential of regional and rural Australia. Not just for the generations that are here now, but for generations to come, to ensure they have a future in regional and rural Australia. That we don’t see young people flooding out of regional Australia, heading to capital cities.
But we keep them at home and we bring them home because they have a voice, they have common sense being brought to Canberra to ensure that we get our fair share. And The National Party is the movement that represents regional and rural Australia and brings that common sense to Canberra.
And I’m proud of our federal team that has forged our identity over the last 12 months on issues that mean so much to regional Australia. Even in states where we don’t have representatives in Western Australia, we draw a line in the sand on live sheep exports, even with our Coalition partners. It was a line that could not be crossed. And if it’s ever crossed, we’re out. Make no mistake that if shut down the live sheep industry, then they’re coming to a state and industry near you.
And if we are not the last line of defence, then there will be none. And Australian agriculture and regional Australia will be the lesser for it. And so that is a principle that our great party room took with our Western Australian colleagues. But we were also there to support them on their Cultural Heritage Act that they had to defeat the insanity of a Labor government imposing on freehold land.
The need to have a cultural survey if you dug a hole greater than 50 centimetres or lifted more than 20 kilograms of dirt, a significant and sad overreach by a government that has shown their true colours. But our federal team will not only have to help fight in Western Australia, will have to fight federally. Because Tanya Plibersek has national cultural heritage laws in her top drawer that she’ll bring out after the Referendum and we will make sure as a National Party team that we bring common sense and make sure that you are protected, your lawful right to go and to produce Australia’s food and fibre.
One that should be protected at all costs and The Nationals will take a strong and principled stand on that. We also took a very principled position for our pharmacists, despite the commentary saying The Nationals are trying to get in the way of cheaper medicines.
We all want cheaper medicines, just who pays for it and how do we pay for it? Because regional Australians will be the victims if we don’t get this policy setting right. And proudly we have won, proudly, this week. We forced the Albanese Government to admit that they got it wrong and they have to go back to the negotiating table. They fundamentally changed the business model of pharmacists for over 70 years. We have had regulated prices on our medicines and that is a good thing that we don’t have blowouts in the cost.
But to make sure that regional communities, in particular regional community pharmacists were protected, there was a dispensing fee. And that is what underpinned their business. That’s what underpinned their ability to employ people, to go to the bank and to borrow money and to shift that fundamentally within a matter of months tore away the very confidence and the very essence of having confidence in your government.
The risk of government has just grown large. And we stood tall because the victims of this will be regional and remote Australia. There are over 400 pharmacies that rely on them as their last line of primary healthcare defence. And if they’re not viable then they leave. And unfortunately, it’s also these men and women who are prepared to stay when the AMA condemns them, our actual opposition to this when they’ve left.
We don’t have doctors when the men and women in the pharmacies across regional Australia are prepared to stay, prepared to support us and give us that last line of defence, to let them down and to say to them that their superannuation has gone. Because that is their business and who’s going to buy it. And so it’ll be a slow march, a slow death of regional health if we don’t stand tall.
And The Nationals stood tall every step of the way. And I’m proud of what we’re able to achieve. And so we’ll continue to work and make sure that The Pharmacy Guild is listened to. And that’s all we ask for. I’m also proud of our great party and the principled position we took 12 months ago on the Voice, the next five months, five weeks, we don’t want to go that much longer. The next five weeks is about respectful conversation with the Australian people.
The political leadership that our Members of Parliament in Canberra have shown in this debate has outshone every other political party in this country. We had a principle position. We made sure that we undertook a conversation, an intellectual conversation of our lived experience with the Australian people. I’m proud of the way that we’ve handled ourselves, the way that we set the tone and been prepared to call out when that hasn’t been respected by others.
I’m proud of the fact that the pamphlet that every Australian household will get was determined by The National Party. It was our Members and Senators that sat around the table and had control of that because we had the courage and conviction to support a great Australian in Jacinta Price. The lived experience that Jacinta brought to our party room was one that solidified a position that many of our Members and Senators have, because of the lived experience that we have in these rural and remote communities.
So I’m proud of the fact of the way that we’ve handled ourselves through this debate. And for the next five weeks we’ll continue to show that political leadership and beyond. And so the actions of our great party and your federal team over the last 12 months has laid foundations so that when we return here in 12 months we are on the cusp of a federal election that we bring forward and continue to bring forward these policies that are relevant to regional and rural Australia.
And Perin and I straight after the election made it clear that we needed to reengage with those that lost confidence in this. In the last election, while we held onto all our seats, there were clear signs that there were cohorts that left us. And we’ve got to be honest, they were women. And so Perin and I set out in reengaging, in rebuilding that trust and reigniting that enthusiasm for what The National Party has been able to provide for regional women across this country. And so what you’ll see as we go towards the next election is a real emphasis on what’s important to them about a greater investment in regional health.
Anne Webster has been piecing this together with local forums, with health professionals across regional Australia, to make sure that we have a tailored solution to regional Australia. That’s what’s at the hearts and minds of regional women. It’s also about our education system. And Darren Chester is leading this in making sure that we can give the young mums and dads of regional and rural Australia the knowledge that there is a pathway for them.
There’s a pathway for them to return to work with childcare. Our issue isn’t about childcare affordability in regional Australia. It’s about childcare accessibility. How can you fight a cost-of-living crisis and you can’t go back to work. And why don’t we want to continue to give the opportunity for our young people, to not have to go to large centres to go to university, but continue on the pathway, the policy that The National Party put in place and the regional university centres where kids can stay and do their tertiary studies in rural, regional and remote communities.
Even the little town of Dirranbandi has one, a young lady there who used to travel over 400 kilometres each day to do year 11 and 12 in St George. She finished; she was flipping burgers at the local servo. She didn’t want to leave Dirranbandi; she didn’t want to go to Toowoomba or Brisbane. We opened up a regional university hub in Dirranbandi. She’s now studying nursing in Dirranbandi and working at the Dirranbandi Hospital. That’s about bringing them home and that’s about keeping them home. That’s what The National Party has done and that’s what we’ll continue.
The biggest issue on everyone’s mind is the cost-of-living crisis. It’s a crisis that hasn’t been made in Moscow, it has been made in Canberra, it has been made by the Prime Minister. That’s been predicated on ideology, not practical reality. It’s about making sure that we pull the levers of policy rather than flooding money and billions of dollars into the economy, that only fuel further inflation. It’s using common sense, whether that be with industrial relations, empowering the sweat and courage of business owners to have the conviction to go out and to run a business and to employ people, whether it be about reinstating the Ag Visa.
But it’s understanding that is what is driving inflation at the moment. And if you look at what is driving inflation and while inflation has dropped, it has dropped with discretionary spend, it hasn’t dropped with fixed spending, the fixed cost continued amount.
And that can be addressed with common sense, particularly on energy policy, particularly about understanding that this reckless race to 82 per cent renewables by 2030 is having an impact on your electricity bill. Stripping away the confidence, the investment confidence in gas in particular, and coal, about knowing that we need firming energy. Understanding that there is a pathway to ensure that we can reduce our emissions and living up to our emissions reduction targets, but not by the pathway in which this Labor government is set by 2030.
They have accelerated the pain. And that’s not the model that we signed up to under the Morrison and Coalition government. We didn’t sign up to that. We signed up to support renewables, but also protecting the traditional industries with things like carbon capture storage. That’s $1.2 billion to invest in carbon capture storage technology to reduce emissions. And so the model and the pain that this government is putting on is one that they have created that is in stark difference to the one in which we signed up to in 2021.
And if we hadn’t signed up to that, make it clear, we need to make it clear it wasn’t about driving interest rates down. It was the fact that if we hadn’t signed up the cost of capital that’s provided, each one of you, Treasury was telling us, was going to be about one and a half to three per cent higher. And the commodity prices that we enjoyed would’ve had a tariff placed on them and a report of control mechanism.
That meant our farmers got less, our miners would’ve got less. And so when you’re in a cost-of-living crisis, it’s important to understand that mortgage holders out there couldn’t handle an extra one and a half per cent. Farmers couldn’t afford another one and a half percent. They couldn’t afford to see their commodity prices go down. And so we have to understand that pure ideology sometimes doesn’t mix with the practical political reality of what we face.
But there is a pathway under a Dutton, Littleproud Coalition-led government, we’re going to continue the pathway of accelerating the conversation around nuclear energy, the nuclear technology, that’s zero emissions.
And the only reason this is happening is because The National Party has had the courage of conviction to stand up and say this is a pathway to reduce our emissions, to give us the reliable, affordable energy that others around the world enjoy. And to the credit of Peter Dutton, his courage and conviction to turn his party around, to take our hand and to lead, it gives me confidence that the next Coalition Government will be one that will deliver with common sense and practical outcomes. That is what it is to lead a nation.
That is what Peter Dutton has the courage to do. But what The National Party has stood for, I’m proud to lead our party. What it is as we stand is the opportunity to build the momentum. It now comes back to what is our desire to do it. This is about what we are prepared to put to the wheel to make sure that in over 12 months’ time, there will be a change of government. The momentum and the shift is there, but it is up to us and our belief. And are we willing to fight for one another? Are we willing to go to the trenches as we have for the last 12 months?
Because if regional Australia wins, Australia wins and The National Party stands committed to deliver that. Thanks for having me.
