LABOR CUTS REGIONAL MIGRATION BY MORE THAN HALF

Three weeks after Farrer voted, the federal Labor government cut regional migration by more than half.

In this year's Budget the regional skilled visa program was slashed from around 33,000 places to 14,110, a 57 per cent cut, while the employer sponsored visas that overwhelmingly land in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane went up 32 per cent to 58,040. The total intake stayed at exactly 185,000, so the same number of people are still coming into the country and they are simply being steered away from the regions and into the cities.

Farrer went to the polls on 9 May, the Budget landed on 12 May and the regional cut was published on 30 May. Country people can join those dots themselves.

Whether you are in citrus, meat, grains, dairy, retail or the hospital, this region runs on overseas workers. Around half the citrus farms in Australia rely on Pacific workers to get the fruit off the trees and up to half the people on the floor in our meat processing plants are here on a visa. Take them away and the oranges rot on the ground, the shifts at the works get cut and the shops on the main street lose the customers who keep the doors open.

This country has just gone past a trillion dollars in debt and is heading for $1.1 trillion. You do not pay that off by shrinking the industries that earn the export dollars, because every orange left on the tree and every shift lost at the works is productivity we no longer have and the debt keeps rising regardless.

I have said it for years. We need migration built on skills, people who come here to work, who fit into a community like ours, who take on Australian values and who go where the jobs are. That is the migration this region has always run on and it is the migration Labor just cut while the cities kept theirs.