LABOR ABANDONS THE RIVERLAND

Member for Barker Tony Pasin MP says Labor has left the Riverland behind in this week’s Federal Budget.

Mr Pasin has been advocating to the Federal Labor Minister Murray Watt and State Minister Clare Scriven for over two years about the crisis facing Riverland wine grape growers.

In March this year Mr Pasin moved a motion in the House of Representatives calling on the Government to urgently support Australian wine grape growers with a targeted financial support package for eligible vineyard owners to adapt to changing market conditions.

Mr Pasin said it was a kick in the guts to all Riverland wine grape growers to learn that the Federal Government has refused to support them.

“Growers in the Riverland are rightfully angry. They’ve been continuously ignored by the Albanese Labor Government while Labor’s third Budget includes funding for an astonishing 36,000 additional bureaucrats in Canberra,” Mr Pasin said.

“The stark reality is that in two years under this Labor Government, the people, families, communities, and industries in regional Australia are doing it really tough. Our regional communities are being starved of funding while Labor remain focused on their ideological pursuits,” Mr Pasin said.

“For the entire two years of this Labor Government, Albanese and his Ministers have been focused on campaigning for the Voice, forcing renewable energy projects onto prime agricultural land, removing water from the productive pool of the Murray Darling Basin and banning a world class live sheep export industry,” Mr Pasin said.

“At no point have they been focused on supporting our primary industries or the regions they sustain.”

“To add salt to the wound, Labor is still hiding how much funding it has allocated to water recovery in the Murray Darling Basin. These are the water buybacks which will drive up the cost of food and pour more fuel on the cost-of-living crisis and they list the cost of buybacks in the Budget papers as ‘not for publication’. It’s simply insulting to our river communities,” Mr Pasin said.

“Regional communities like those in the Riverland are being held back and left behind,” Mr Pasin said.