Ms CHESTERS (Bendigo) (15:47): For all of the ranting and the raving of the minister with the very long title because they couldn't quite work out what to call the portfolio—he's finger-pointing at us on this side, but perhaps he needs to point the finger at his own government and his own management. Right now, whilst we stand here, his electorate is running out of water. Six years those opposite have been in government, and what's the result? Townships in the minister's electorate are running out of water. Councils are having to pay $10,000 a day to truck in clean water. Parents are washing their newborns in filtered water that they've bought from the supermarket, because the quality is so bad. People are being asked to wash every other day. Can you imagine the parliamentarians rocking up and saying: 'I didn't shower today. It wasn't my turn. I'm showering tomorrow'? We wouldn't want to sit next to each other! But in these towns in the minister's own electorate, when he's responsible for drought, they are running out of water. And we haven't seen a plan from them, just more rhetoric and more distraction. So before he lectures us and stands up here in the pompous way that he did, with his crocodile tears, perhaps he should confront his own electorate and fix those issues. The previous speaker spoke about the programs that they've rolled out. The feedback from a lot of regional communities is: it's slow, it's clunky, it's a catch-all for everything, particularly their Building Better Regions Fund. Every time a group, an organisation or a council asks for funding, this government just says, 'building better regions'. It's always oversubscribed. Nobody quite knows how you get from one list to the other. There are constant complaints. There are favourite projects that are picked. Councils don't get feedback. Groups don't get feedback about what they could do to improve the program. It's not being rolled out in a strategic and coordinated way with state governments and local governments. Labor established a fund called RDAF, the Regional Development Australia Fund. It was managed far more appropriately and worked with local governments and state governments to deliver projects. Let's talk about the failed Mobile Black Spot Program. How many towers haven't been switched on? There's no point allocating funding if the towers haven't been built and haven't been switched on. Look at council areas like my electorate in Bendigo. We've got a high bushfire risk and we've got hundreds of listed blackspots. Councils did that work in good faith. Six have been allocated funding by this government, but only two towers have been built and switched on. What a joke! This is how this government is letting down regional areas. The government have failed with the regional cities program—City Deals or regional deals—that they established. They made a glossy commitment and convinced every council area to put together their projects around regional development. The councils spent the money and did the research, but this government forgot to tell them that, regardless of who the minister was, there's no money in the bucket—there's no money to help them. We all meet with these councils. Councils come up here to lobby us. They've done the work and they've pulled together their program of work—sometimes it's about projects costing billions of dollars—but nobody told them the truth. This government led them down the path and set them up. The government have failed on education when it comes to the regions. After six years, they ran another review, the Napthine review, to tell us what we already know: that regional students are not going to university. It didn't offer any concrete ways to move forward. It didn't commit to uncap places in regional universities to allow our regional universities to grow. It didn't commit to increase funding to our high schools and primary schools in regional areas. There were no commitments there. Instead, it was just more distraction by the government and generalist comments about how they want to do better. But we shouldn't be surprised, really, that they are letting down regional Australia, even though they claim to be the government of regional Australia, when you look at what they discussed at the National Party conference on the weekend. They were focused and fixated on banning the words 'milk', 'sausages' and 'burgers' when people use plant based products—all about distraction, not about delivering. (Time expired)