Mr IAN MACFARLANE (4:43 PM) —I rise this afternoon in this grievance debate to again highlight some of the issues, if not challenges, facing regional Australia. Regional Australia, as we all know, has seen a massive depopulation, particularly in rural areas. These changes are bringing about their own special problems and bringing into the minds of regional Australians question marks about their role in the future of this nation.

A lot of this depopulation has come about through massive changes in rural industry and in the way rural industry looks towards its local communities and townships for support. Because of mechanisation, one man or one woman can manage a property many times larger than they would have been able to manage a mere decade or so ago, and this has also caused massive depopulation. Looking at my own childhood, the property that my father and my neighbour owned was worked by up to six men—in those days it was men. When I was actively farming that country, it was looked after by one person and perhaps an occasional casual assistant. The effect of that is that people have moved out of the bush and out of the regions.

The tenuous existence that many people in regional communities faced was accentuated by the continuing decline in the value in real terms of rural commodities. Rural commodities such as grain, beef and wool have each gone through their own particular slumps and, from time to time, revivals, but the reality is that each time the price goes down it never really returns to the levels that we have seen.

Grain sorghum, for instance, has been quoted for December delivery for a price less than I received when I was farming in 1991. In fact, it is trading at a price less than it traded for a decade earlier—or, in fact, a decade earlier than that. That is to say that, in cash terms, grain sorghum, a major commodity in my region, is trading at values that we saw in the early to mid-1970s.

These sorts of declines in commodity prices have been reflected right across the board, and I think it would be unrealistic to expect that they are going to bounce back to a level where we will see rural industry being able to repopulate the bush and regional Australia. We have to find other ways to keep people in the regions, and we have to find other ways to offer people who seek to live in regional Australia the opportunity to fulfil that desire.

If we are going to have people in the regions, there are a few basic areas that we need to concentrate on. The thing that causes people to leave the regions is, of course, jobs, but it is also a lack of infrastructure and a lack of services and facilities. By services and facilities, I mean things like health, education and even entertainment. We need to promote opportunities in regional Australia which will see industries re-establish there—industries that need space, industries that need to escape the urban encroachment, and industries that are not disadvantaged by being 100, 200, 300 or even 1,000 kilometres from a capital city. Those sorts of industries exist now; the question is: how do we get them to come into regional Australia?

Obviously, the cornerstone of any redevelopment or repopulation of regional Australia will be the provision of adequate infrastructure. That infrastructure, particularly in the areas of communication, roads and railways, is fundamental for business expansion. We have seen the communication area in the last four to five years taken over, to a large extent, by commercial interests, and I for one have no fear about regional Australia having adequate telecommunications to ensure that businesses are competitive. It is almost weekly now—it used to be yearly—that a new option is put forward to allow people in regional Australia equal if not better access to communications and information. The advent of satellite mobile telephones and then of low earth orbiting satellite telephones, the introduction shortly of the CDMA network, and of course some great advancements in access to the Internet—via satellites but also through wireless communications, as is being promoted by Austar—will ensure that regional Australia has the telecommunications links that it needs to redevelop.

What regional Australia does not have—and I must admit I have grave concerns about it ever having—is an adequate transport system. We have seen a marked decline in real spending on roads, and we have seen absolutely no spending, of any great note, on railways. The freight task in Australia in the next 20 years will double, yet we do not have the basic infrastructure to ensure that regional Australia is going to share in the work, employment and ancillary industries that will come about as a result of that. Really, all that regional Australia can look forward to out of that is that its existing overtaxed roadways are going to be pounded into dust. It is therefore important that we take a very clear and close look at the way government is investing in roads and railway lines—or should I say is not investing, and I do not single out any government; I think all governments have been guilty of this over the last two or three decades. We need to make sure that we do not get spooked by the relatively high cost of building roads and railways.

I found interest in a paper presented recently by a visiting fellow to the Australian National University, Fred Argy, who raised some interesting positive comments about government investment in infrastructure. He talked about government's ability to enhance the competitive advantage of a region or a state and thereby attract new private industry into investment in that region. He also talked about the ability of an effective and efficient transport infrastructure to reduce the costs of businesses operating in the regions.

For the past decade or so, the Economic Planning Advisory Commission has conducted reviews right across Australia and has found evidence that underinvestment is costing us opportunities. It has warned that one of the big problems facing the regions is the mainte nance of the roads and railway system we have already got.

Government needs to take a businesslike approach to regional infrastructure and roads and to look at them both in terms of capital investment and recurring expenditure. Capital investment has the ability to repay the investment over time. Given the unique position in which government finds itself, in being able to tax those industries which establish themselves as a result of infrastructure investment, I think that we as a government really do need to re-appraise our assessment of investment in infrastructure such as roads and railways.

It goes without saying that excellent infrastructure will lower the cost of production and produce a better and more competitive and productive work force which will create a comparative advantage which will allow new industries to establish in the regions and of course allow a faster diffusion of technology through the infrastructure. As a whole, infrastructure investment creates employment. If we look at the regions, that employment will only come through industries not directly associated with agriculture. If we look to new industries—whether it be something as successful already as tourism or something yet to be established in the regions such as high technology—then I think the regions can take advantage, providing the basic infrastructure is there.

What we need to see is a commitment by government and by successive governments to repopulate the bush by making investments of a strategic nature in new roads and new railway lines to allow industries—which currently, almost out of habit, establish themselves in city centres—to move out to the regions of Australia to take advantage of the great resources that are there, including the population that exists there now, and participate in the transformation of regional Australia back to the once great part of Australia's economy it was.