Dr WEBSTER (Mallee) (12:30): In July this year, the Minister for Social Services published a media release stating:

The Albanese Labor Government is boosting food relief and financial wellbeing support funding by 25 per cent to help ease cost-of-living pressures for half a million Australians.

The minister reported that funding specifically for food relief had been doubled. Two charities in my electorate of Mallee, the Horsham Christian Emergency Food Centre, or CEFC, and the Stawell Interchurch Council, have been providing emergency food relief for many, many years, supported by Department of Social Services funding. They have been in contact with me because they were shocked to discover that funding that sustains their essential charitable work will cease as of September.

The Horsham CEFC received $82,011, a DSS grant, in the 2024-25 financial year. They receive DSS funding to deliver essential services to people in dire need in the Wimmera, as they have done for many years. The Horsham CEFC have a fabulous record for their charitable service delivery. During the 2024-25 financial year, with the assistance of DSS funding, CEFC provided 3,078 client contacts and a total of $527,912 in client support. They are staffed almost entirely by 70 volunteers who work on a roster contributing almost 300 volunteer hours a week.

This long-serving, locally embedded community organisation has been providing essential emergency assistance to people in need for the past 27 years. They are a major provider of food relief and other support in the Wimmera region. I have been delighted to visit them on site many times in my terms of parliament. They are an incredible credit to their community.

Despite their laudable record, the Albanese government has ripped away $82,000 in emergency relief grant funding that this Christian food charity has relied on for many years. As if that wasn't enough for a small charity to navigate, funding to their partner organisation, Uniting Vic.Tas, has also been dramatically reduced by 80 per cent, which means reimbursement provided by them is likely to be cut, leaving the CEFC with a huge hole in its budget.

The Horsham Christian Emergency Food Centre has been kept in the dark about the Albanese government's decision-making process. Worse still, this volunteer-run charity has been left to chase up other organisations to try to find out where the money is flowing, if at all, and why they have been left out.

What the CEFC does know is that the Albanese government has funded five organisations in Victoria's north-west. And I must remind you that that is 87½ thousand square kilometres. It is a vast electorate. One Aboriginal organisation has been newly funded, and this will meet pressing need in the local Indigenous community in Horsham. None of the other organisations currently provide emergency food relief in Horsham directly. The reduction in funds provided to Uniting Vic Tas is also significant because of the broader flow-on effects.

The Albanese government's food charity cuts have resulted in the Stawell Interchurch Council, or SIC, being defunded altogether—a charity that has provided emergency food relief in Stawell and the surrounding region since 1970. Get your head around that: 55 years of service to their community. I note that the Interchurch Council are the only providers of non-perishable food in the local area.

The SIC has received DSS funding grants since 2001—indirectly via the Uniting Vic.Tas organisation since 2015. But Uniting Vic Tas has told them that their funds have been cut, as I said, by 80 per cent. Mary Rita, the secretary and public officer of the Stawell Interchurch Council, wrote to me. She says:

We are the sole providers of funded emergency food relief in Stawell and region and I find it inconceivable that DSS means—for those in need in our area—to be unable to access that help.

In the 2024-25 financial year, the SIC received a total of $48,500 indirectly from DSS, assisting 292 households and 661 individuals. Of these, 209 were living with a disability, 147 were 17 years old or younger, and 132 were Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander. Their total spend on groceries and food vouchers was $63,834—considerably larger than their government funding.

Once again, far from being rewarded for their charitable work, the Stawell Interchurch Council has been informed by Uniting Vic Tas that their sole source of funding will cease as of September—this month—due to Uniting's own funding constraints.

In her media release, Minister Plibersek said:

No one should be faced with a choice between putting food on the table or paying their bills.

It reminds me of the Prime Minister's mantra, 'Nobody held back, nobody left behind.'

Yet both of these local Mallee organisations report an increasing need for emergency food services over the last few years. We shouldn't be surprised by that. The CEFC has met record demand in the 2023-24 and 2024-25 financial years.

This is how the Albanese Labor government's cost-of-living crisis plays out in reality on the ground in the regions—with record numbers of people seeking emergency relief to feed their families and a government that callously pulls funding from local organisations scrambling to meet this need, despite having spruiked a doubling of funding at a national level.

People in the Wimmera Mallee struggling to make ends meet are now at even greater risk of not being able to put food on the table because funding has been mercilessly stripped from the Horsham Christian Emergency Food Centre and the Stawell Interchurch Council.

The questions remain. Has Labor stripped emergency food relief funding entirely from the north-west region of Victoria, or has it somehow been shifted to a larger organisation based in a regional city, a major city, or a combination of the two? The lack of transparency is hard to accept.

The Nationals have a strong belief in prioritising local organisations to deliver government funded programs. Local organisations have local relationships and history. They utilise and build local capacity. They provide local jobs and local opportunities for volunteering, all of which build local social capital. We want to foster local enterprise, innovation and community service. Government funding should always be offered to local organisations first, especially when they are already doing the work and have been for decades.

My concern is not just that this decision is about prioritising larger, centralised organisations over smaller, local ones, but also that Labor fails to see the needs of people in the regions—and, in my case, the north-west of Victoria.

This is a pattern of behaviour that continues to play out under the Albanese government—the neglect of rural, regional and remote populations, the failure to look outside of big cities and regional centres to see what is actually happening, and to act and respond accordingly. Essentially, it is a dismissal of regional people.

As I repeatedly say, Labor are raiding regions to buy votes in capital cities. Nowhere is this playing out more clearly than in the race to net zero and the federal and state Labor governments' reckless renewable rollout.

I won't stand for that, Mallee farmers won't stand for that, and, as they showed in Ballarat on Friday at the Bush Summit, the Nationals won't stand for that. I will continue to fight hard in this place for the needs of my Mallee constituents.

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