Mr Birrell said regional Australian communities had been abandoned by Labor since the May 2022 election, with hundreds of millions of dollars going unspent.
“The budgeted, but unspent, money is a massive lost opportunity for the regions and, sadly, there’s no indication Labor will make it up in the May budget,” he said.
Mr Birrell would like to see the Albanese Government commit funds to the Shepparton Bypass, redevelopment of the Shepparton Sports Stadium, a GV clinical health school and roads across his electorate.
“The projects are still very important for this region and we don’t even have any funding buckets to apply to to get them up and get a sod turned on them,” he said.
“So I’m really disappointed with the Albanese Government’s approach to regional funding.
“Since the Albanese Government have come in, they’ve scrapped all of the regional funding programs that the Coalition had, including Building Better Regions Fund and community development grants, and replaced them with nothing. So we’ve basically had 12 months of no funding for regional investment.”
Mr Birrell said a comparison of budget figures showed programs $795 million which should have been spent in regional areas, had “disappeared into a black hole”.
Federal Infrastructure Minister Catherine King has said she was reviewing hundreds of projects the former Coalition Government had flagged, suggesting that under the Liberals and Nationals the number of infrastructure projects announced grew from almost 150 to 800, but claimed many were inadequately funded or resourced, or not even started.
The Coalition also faced damning auditor-general reports and accusations of allocating money for electoral purposes rather than to meet need over the so-called ‘sports rorts’ and ‘car park rorts’ programs, but Mr Birrell, who was not in parliament during that term, said Nicholls had done well under the Liberals and Nationals during their nine years of government.
“The Coalition had a very good record prior to 2022 of delivering regional funding for places like Nicholls and we’ve seen that, we’ve seen the Shepparton Art Museum, we’ve seen stage three of the Shepparton rail corridor, and there are heaps of other examples, the Museum of Vehicle Evolution, to name just one,” he said.
