Thank you Peter, thanks everybody for being here. Thank you for welcoming me this morning, it's a real honour to be here in a packed house in a great regional university like Charles Sturt.
Can I just begin by speaking about a couple of issues that are of huge importance for the country and in particular for New South Wales.
Revelations from the Prime Minister yesterday, very serious revelations of overseas interference into our community, into our state, are incredibly troubling.
And I wanted to take this opportunity to say in an unambiguous way, that we in New South Wales will always fight racism, antisemitism, or anyone in Australia or foreign actor who is attempting to divide Australian against Australian, we can never, ever stand for it.
We'll also take every step available to us, whether it's legislative, whether it's community pressure to protect all members of our community.
Particularly the Jewish community of New South Wales, who have done absolutely nothing to deserve this kind of attack, this vicious, racist, violent attack on their community, they deserve so much better than that, and I want them to know that the vast majority of Australians right across this country stand in solidarity with them.
Second thing I just wanted to speak about is yesterday afternoon, I had an opportunity to speak to the Victorian Premier Allan about the terrible scenes in regional Victoria involving two police officers, and I'm sure I can say on behalf of everyone in our state, particularly those in the policing fraternity, we are so indebted to the men and women who serve in our police forces, and the fraternity of police officers is hurting today.
I was at a Goulburn attestation last Friday. Half the parade ground was under the age of 21 and it occurred to me that we ask our police officers to do an extraordinary thing every single shift.
And it's a huge burden for them to carry, and the least we can do is to thank them for their service and honour them when they've fallen in such a terrible, violent and horrible way.
We're with the people of Victoria and Victoria Police today.
I wanted to acknowledge the traditional owners, the Wiradjuri people, and thank and acknowledge my fellow speakers, the Prime Minister, Joe McGirr the Member for Wagga Wagga and many honoured dignitaries, including Barnaby Joyce and Adam and many others, appreciate the opportunity.
Can I also thank Ben English and The Daily Telegraph for having me back for my third Bush Summit as Premier. I think I was invited as leader of the opposition as well.
And it's a fantastic thing. It's become an institution for regional New South Wales, and it's been so successful that all of the other news limited papers have nicked this idea and implemented it in their state.
But it started right here in New South Wales.
And of course, it's an opportunity every year that you've got politicians flying in from the city like me, and we put on our shiny RM Williams boots and pretend that we're experts on the bush, and I've done just that today.
But I did want to point out at the very beginning that an issue that's affecting every regional community, and I think I understand it all too well, but it's not minor, and it shouldn't be dismissed, is the state of our roads.
In particular, potholes in regional communities.
And many people have asked me, What are you going to do to fix them?
We had a regional cabinet a couple of weeks ago in the Tweed and a very well meaning woman got up to ask a question about the Middle East, and she started her question by haranguing the rest of the audience about the number of questions on potholes, to which the rest of the community got stuck into her.
And I think that shows that this is a big issue and it shouldn't be dismissed.
It comes up again and again, and the reason it is because it's incredibly annoying. It's a grating experience. It chips away for some people at their will to live.
And whether you're driving on the same road every day, avoiding the same bump every day, and acknowledging that no one's bothered to getting around to fixing it, it's something that drives many people around the bend.
It's something that we take seriously and we don't dismiss.
And if you're living in a country town, the truth of the matter is you can't get the Metro to work.
If you want to live a normal life, if you want to take the kids to sport, or drop them off at training, you need a car and you need good, predictable roads to drive on.
It's not just frustrating or costly.
It's an active danger, particularly in regional communities, where a third of the population of NSW lives, but two thirds of road fatalities are on regional roads.
Last year at the Bush Summit in Orange, we released our plan to spend an extra $200 million upgrading some of the most dangerous regional roads in the state.
And in the same spirit I wanted to announce bringing forward an $155 million dollars for urgent road fixing and road repair particularly for potholes across regional communities.
That brings our total maintenance spend to $1.25 billion, but it's much needed.
The Daily Telegraph covered this issue few weeks ago, based on a report from the NRMA and it found that we've got significant work to do.
And that most of this work is in regional NSW and a big chunk is in Wagga.
Of course, there's a reason the problem is so bad.
Last year, we filled in over 184,000 regional potholes.
But these holes grow out of rain and wet weather.
And in the NRMA's words: we've just lived through 'an unprecedented wave of wet weather events over the past three years'.
So this money will really be focused on those roads that have been smashed by heavy rain in recent months.
The funding is ready to go and some of those projects will be starting in the next couple of weeks.
I want to mention some of those projects. Resurfacing major highways like the New England Highway and the Hume.
We're also going to restore the slopes along to the big roads like the Waterfall Way, the Oxley Highway and Victoria Pass, to stop loose rocks falling down onto passing cars.
For me, it comes down to basic expectations of the state government.
Small towns don't necessarily expect the same concentration of services and amenities as people do in the cities and the suburbs.
But they do expect the basics of a civilised life.
Reliable roads, safe streets, good schools and healthcare when you need it.
And I think we've focused our efforts more and more, particularly in recent budgets, on those basics of life.
When we won government, realised that some things needed to change if we wanted to have any hope of providing reliable services for regional communities.
We believed we had to get rid of a wages cap in NSW for frontline public sector workers in our regional communities.
We had a situation where more teachers were resigning than retiring, which was completely atypical for the New South Wales public education sector.
And more troubling, 55% of the shortages in our public school classrooms were in regional communities, not in Sydney communities.
In a single year, we lost over 12 per cent of our nursing workforce.
And we were seeing record numbers of police leaving the profession without enough new recruits coming through.
As a result, more and more crime was identified by civic leaders, mayors, local politicians and regular people as something that needed to be confronted by the government, and they were right to call it out.
We've made some big calls and we think that they were the right decisions.
We ended the wages cap.
We had a historic pay agreement with police and teachers in the state.
We doubled the incentive for regional health workers.
And we said to police officers, we'll pay you to train at the Goulburn Academy.
We also made a difficult decision, but I think the correct decision in relation to bail laws for young offenders, which attracted a lot of criticism, but again, faced with the situation as it was. We believe something needed to change.
The number of teacher vacancies in regional NSW, I'm pleased to say, have fallen by 60% in the last 20 months.
The regional health workforce has grown by 7%, I think that's about 3200 in terms of a head count.
And last week, and this is particularly important for regional communities, I attended a police graduation.
They call it an attestation. The first one I went to, there was 90 police on the parade ground.
Last Friday, there was 315. 315. And we need them.
Fantastic men and women joining the New South Wales Police Force. It's really overwhelming to see the parade ground filled with family and friends for a special achievement for so many people.
Now these are the essential services that regional towns need and must rely on.
The final point I wanted to make before questions is directly about farmers and primary producers and regional life, is that you wouldn't know this if you've come from Sydney, where the weather's been biblical of late, but currently huge parts of this state currently living under drought.
And I think that disconnect between historically bad and rainy weather in Sydney and drought conditions in the Bush, has meant that civic life in New South Wales doesn't understand the pressure of the primary producers and agricultural communities in big parts of New South Wales.
It hasn't got the same attention as other droughts that we've had in the state, but it's putting huge pressure on agricultural communities and farmers.
So today in partnership with the Commonwealth we're extending the Farm Business Resilience Program.
It's already helped more than 2,500 farms in the state.
And all our feedback is that it stacks up, it's a great program, we believe that it works, helping businesses both prepare for drought and to survive through hard times.
I want to thank the Commonwealth for their support here as well as the local councils, particularly Rick Firman and the country Mayors.
Country mayors is great organisation, and the Q and A's for country mayors is pretty hectic for people like me, but real good fun.
Rick is an energiser bunny, who's also volunteered to advise us on an ongoing basis as we establish our new rural and regional committee, who will meet directly with me and Rick's going to help us populate that committee, particularly with country mayors, so that we can understand first hand what's happening in regional communities, from those who are closest to the community - mayors of country towns.
Friends, thank you for having me today in this beautiful part of New South Wales.
It's an important part of me getting out of the city, speaking to regional communities, understanding what's going on in our own backyard.
And I genuinely believe that the Daily Telegraph's Bush Summit is a staple, an important part of civic life in New South Wales, long may it reign and I'm looking forward to attending future Bush Summits in the future.
Thanks so much.
