Dr STONE (Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Finance and Administration) (1:04 PM) —I have just come from the House of Representatives chamber, where we are farewelling the Hon. John Anderson as Deputy Prime Minister and Leader of the National Party. Of course he continues as the member for Gwydir. I want to pay my respects to him as a very great man in this place and to put on the record that John has been a great champion of rural and regional people. It is not just in the way that he has helped develop policies, although I should mention those. One of course is the National Water Initiative. Not since the time of Alfred Deakin have we seriously taken into account property ownership rights and access to water—and Alfred Deakin was operating in the 1880s in Victoria. There was a real problem in Australia, with different jurisdictions treating water in different ways, not just through pricing but through its allocation, and there were different ways of understanding the ownership of and access to water. John Anderson has been a champion in trying to develop national consistency not only in understanding the resource and the need to sustain it but also in the treatment of water so that it delivers the highest value and is used most efficiently.

There are also the infrastructure issues. The Roads to Recovery program is probably the most popularly supported system of grants that have come to any part of rural or regional Australia. For the first time, local councils got access to Commonwealth funds directly for roads. The roads could be minor; they could be dirt or gravel roads that had never seen a lick of bitumen in the many, many years—sometimes hundreds—that they had been there. With the Roads to Recovery funding, we have seen significant improvements in access for country communities, not only in taking product to market but also in delivering basic needs such as getting children to schools and enabling small communities to go about their daily business.

AusLink is of course an extraordinary program, one that will usher in a new relationship between the states, the Commonwealth and the private sector, when it comes to addressing not only ageing infrastructure but also the critical business of expanded road, rail, sea and air networks. These networks are essential in maximising the export earnings of our country and in ensuring that the domestic economy can grow and that our social infrastructure can be linked by decent access.

I also want to talk about John Anderson’s contribution as the member for Gwydir, a large rural seat. Representing a rural seat is not like representing a geographically small suburban place, where the issues might be fairly limited in terms of a set of commuters in residences that have a fair homogeneity about them. When you represent a rural region, like many of us do, there is a whole battery of issues which are life and death issues for the populations that live there. They include everything from health and education to issues about ageing, labour shortages and skills shortages. They also include issues about the very identity of people who come from a rural and regional area, when they face the day-to-day onslaught of television, radio and even daily newspapers which have come from a very different perspective—a metropolitan or capital city type perspective.

When you represent a seat that is as demanding as a rural and regional seat, as John Anderson has done, and you also have the enormous job of being Deputy Prime Minister and Leader of the National Party, you deserve to be commended, and we have to commend John Anderson for the extraordinary tasks that he has performed. Of course, it has been difficult for his family—for Julia and their four children. There has been sadness in his family, with the loss of a child during this time. We understand only too well that, while the parliament will lose a leader, Julia and her children will regain a husband and a father in terms of his ability to give them his time—the most precious part of any parenting. I commend the extraordinary contribution of John Anderson, and I wish him well in whatever he does in the future.