It is hard to keep up with attack after attack from Labor to shut down our regional economies, the latest being yet another regulatory limit on Victorian grain growers from 1 December, slashing permissible workplace exposure standards for phosphine, the key fumigant used to protect stored grain from insect damage.  The proposed limit would reduce the allowable workplace exposure level from 0.3 parts per million to 0.05 parts per million, a sixfold reduction, unprecedented in the Western grain-growing economies we compete with.  Indeed, there are no tools readily available to even monitor exposure at the levels Labor intends to enforce from December.

This is the latest in a clear, broader pattern of Labor attacks on regional Australia and our primary industries that keep our economies and local businesses going.  Labor’s plans to turn Mallee into an industrial wasteland of turbines, panels and transmission lines are now infamous.  Their pursuit of net zero at our cost – not those in the cities – continues Labor’s attempts to be a ‘world leader’ on limiting our economies, trying to win the red-and-green-tape beauty pageant no competent government really wants to win.

Labor are buying back irrigation water from our communities in northern Victoria, even though they already have plenty of water for the environment and arguably applying it in a way that is hurting, not helping, the river environment.

And let’s not forget Labor’s highly embarrassing plan to cut our speed limits, instead of fixing our roads.  I - with The Nationals – proudly to lead the fight against this blanket change where, yet again, Labor tries to get a pat on the back with a swish of a pen from a Melbourne ivory tower, rather than fill the potholes, and address the black spots – and dangerous near-miss grey spots – on our roads.

We face huge challenges in the Wimmera from the weather, farm gate prices, competing land uses and abysmal investment in health and aged care.  The last thing we need is Labor adding to our misery to drive us to despair and economic ruin.