Federal Budget 2022: Labor turns its back on regional Queensland

Regional Queensland may have given birth to the Labor Party, but the budget is a good hard kick in the stomach, writes Michael Madigan.

Regional Queensland may have given birth to the Australian Labor Party under a tree in Barcaldine, but in recent years it’s been gazing at its progeny with a baleful eye, wondering how a child could allow itself to stray so far from home.

Yesterday’s budget cuts for regional Queensland represented a good hard kick in the stomach to hundreds of thousands of families across this state.

Yet that kick was, if viewed in cynical political terms, fair enough.

The ALP is billions of light years removed from those striking shearers who gathered under the Tree of Knowledge in Barcaldine at the end of the 19th century and gave the ALP its creation story.

Labor may maintain a sentimental, romantic attachment to its Book of Genesis, but it is, in truth, a sophisticated, metropolitan party with an identity now firmly entrenched in a tertiary-educated middle class and a national vision largely removed from agriculture and mining, even if it will eagerly accept financial lifelines from both by way of increasing tax receipts.

And regional Queensland, with its strong focus still on agriculture and mining, has done few favours for the ALP in recent years.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese (right) congratulates Treasurer Jim Chalmers after he delivered his budget on Tuesday night. Picture: Martin Ollman/Getty Images

In the election before last, those mining seats scattered through central Queensland played a key role in keeping Bill Shorten out of power.

So, when spending cuts had to be found, when the chop had to come, why not strike at the softest target which can’t really threaten you with an electoral backlash?

What projects lose how much money is not yet entirely clear but the budget wording is pretty stark:

“(Cuts of) $22bn in spending reductions or reprioritisations, including $6.5bn in savings from reprofiling infrastructure projects to better align investments with industry and market conditions while maintaining the government’s overall funding commitment to the projects.’’

This funding cut, especially if it impacts on the $1.065bn Rockhampton Ring Road – which it probably will – may seem of small matter to a Brisbane resident, but it will represent a dramatic blow to the state’s economy if it comes to fruition. That ring road was going to help disentangle one of those crucial pinch points on the Bruce Highway between Cairns and Brisbane.

The Bruce Highway – widely regarded as one of the worst major highways in Australia – funnels an average of 2640 heavy vehicles a day through the city of Rockhampton, each truck facing around 19 sets of traffic lights.

That ring road would significantly improve freight efficiency along that 1677km economic arterial linking Cairns to Brisbane, improve the rapidly expanding region’s (incorporating the Capricorn Coast) tourism potential and better protect the flood-prone city of Rockhampton from isolation during wet seasons (even if we do note and applaud the extraordinarily effective flood mitigation work completed over the past decade on the city’s southern approach).

If the federal cuts impact on the Hughenden Irrigation Project, which the local council has been enthusiastically promoting in the fertile black soil surrounding the town, potentially billions of dollars of export dollars in primary production fly out the window along with hundreds of jobs, as well as the prospect of a significant slice of the state’s northwest leaping back into financial and cultural life after decades of decline.

The proposed cuts also put a question mark over new beef roads in the far north, which are rapidly becoming vital to the nation’s economic prospects as beef prices soar.

Then there is the matter of the long-mooted Urannah Dam behind Mackay, touted as the centrepiece of another northern agricultural hub which could would have drawn billions of dollars out of the fertile soil in that isolated stretch of country behind Mackay and Proserpine.

The Tree of Knowledge Memorial at Queensland’s Barcaldine, birthplace of the Labor Party

It is true that Urannah – along with the Hells Gate Dam proposal up in the Burdekin, which is also up for the chop – was going to be vigorously contested by the Greens, who would have had the Federal Environment Act on their side, and who would have quite possibly won the fight.

But proposals such as these provided a glimmer of hope for regional Queenslanders that those most ancient ways of making a living – farming and herding – are still appreciated by our federal governments for what they still are: crucial pillars of our economy.

Now, much like mining, we must accept they are regarded by the ALP as part of an old-fashioned 20th century economy, becoming increasingly irrelevant and even despised given the perceived threats they pose to the natural world.

Instead we are about to reduce our national livestock herd to cut back on methane gas emissions (while apparently ignoring the termites) and are clearly intent on sinking a fair portion of Australia’s financial foundations into the shifting sands of renewable energy.

Yet still we spend.

In what could only be viewed as a heroic vote of optimism in our financial future, this budget pours more than half a billion extra dollars into something as luxurious as our paid parental leave scheme.

The question that former prime minister John Howard used to occasionally mutter under his breath when he thought the cameras were off does spring to mind: “Who is going to pay for all of this?’’

Those shearers out at Barcaldine may have laid the foundations of a great Australian political party.

But it’s a party no longer representing the interests of people who created it and whom we once referred to as the salt-of-the-earth – the miners, the shearers, the field hands and the fettlers.

Instead it is a party of often highly educated and presumably intelligent urban progressives with increasingly fixed ideas on how to grow an economy.

We can only hope, and pray, that they know what they are doing.