With less than a week until the state Budget is released, opposition leader Deb Frecklington has called upon the Palaszczuk government to prioritise support for the bush.
Ms Frecklington said the agricultural industry was hugely important for the state of Queensland and that the Labor government needed to acknowledge that.
“One of the first Budget papers I look at is the ag Budget paper because I know under a Labor government, they just don't get the bush, they never prioritise agriculture, and all they're interested in is taking a few shiny photographs with some farmers in hats, but it’s more than that,” she said.
“We need to understand first and foremost that the agricultural industry is one of the key economic drivers of this state, so I will be looking at that paper first up in the Budget and making sure that there is more for agriculture because it is more that just drought subsidies, we need actual support in research and development as well.”
Visiting CRT FarmFest at Toowoomba on Tuesday, Ms Frecklington unveiled key parts of the LNP’s plan to bring down electricity prices in Queensland.
“All we see and hear out of Annastacia Palaszczuk and the Labor government is something that will only, if at all, benefit the south east corner,” she said.
“The LNP's two-part plan that we’ve announced today is all around restructuring the government-owned generators from two to three.
“We believe that will increase competition, which will drive down prices, but we also mandate the investment by those government-owned companies in renewable energy because we want to make sure that Queensland gets the best out of the National Energy Guarantee rather than going down the path of what the Labor government are doing.”
Ms Frecklington she didn’t mind if the Premier took her idea and ran with it because she knew it would reduce electricity prices in the long term.
“My question is, what's the government doing immediately because I don't think our producers should have to wait until after 2020 when LNP will hopefully be back in government.”
ICPA wishlist
Acknowledgment of the financial pain of ongoing drought is one of the issues the Isolated Children's Parents' Association state council hopes will be addressed in next week's Budget.
According to president, Kim Hughes, they would like to see the 2015 initiative that gave $1540 to geographically isolated students in drought declared shires, or whose parents have an Individually Droughted Property declaration, extended to become a permanent fixture.
It was a $3.2m outlay for the government.
“It was a one-off thing that really helped people out at the time,” she said. “Considering there are still 22 droughted shires, it’s really needed – there are a lot of communities and families really struggling.”
ICPA hopes its extended lobbying for money for more allied health positions for small schools, and more staff for multi-age classrooms and schools with a teaching principal, to reduce teacher student ratios from 1:25 to 1:20 will also be heeded.
“The demands on small school teachers and teaching principals is huge – they’ve got to adapt the curriculum and modify it for learning styles,” Ms Hughes said. “We’ve been lobbying on this for many years and the response we get is that it will cost a lot of money.”
The issue is set to be debated the day following the Budget at the state ICPA conference in Winton, and Ms Hughes said state council had a lot of feedback from families on the impact that not enough teachers was having in small schools.
“The teachers are doing everything they possibly can.
“There’s a lot of pressure on them to get through the curriculum demands and sometimes extra-curricular things get missed out.
“The children are the ones missing out then.”
The number of allied health professionals is another issue that ICPA has been lobbying on for years as well, in order to increase the number of face to face visits students receive from speech therapists and occupational therapists.
“Some in small communities are only seeing someone once or twice a year,” said Ms Hughes.
“Coupled with a lack of private providers in these towns, the gap is widening.
“What it means is that if families can’t get the service they want, they’ll consider leaving, so this is really contributing to population decline.
“We really need some real money to increase the amount of positions.”
Ms Hughes said state councillors had brought all these issues up when Parliamentary delegations took place in March, and had had a couple of meetings with Education Minister, Grace Grace on the topic of the drought payment.
“We really hope the government comes through with these,” she said.