THE Victorian Farmers Federation will bring roads, telecommunications and council rates to the attention of the state’s newly elected government officials.
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President David Jochinke, of Murra Warra, said the federation would continue to lobby for the issues, which were among the federation’s Delivering for Agriculture - Growing Communities election wishlist.
“Our overall general view of the election is that in rural areas, the swing hasn’t been anywhere near as much as that in the metropolitan areas. I’d like to think in the country areas, people are more likely to follow the candidates’ pledges and are looking at the policies as more long-term,” he said.
He said most of his work in the near future would involve meeting with new metropolitan-based politicians.
“We’re now focusing on the first 100 days of government, and we’ll be very much focused on discussing not only who we are as the VFF, assuming that all candidates have a base level of who we are. We’ll also be going over what our key election policies were and what we do,” he said.
“For instance, in the north, water was a very hot topic, but it wasn’t all over the state so it wasn’t one of our key election priorities.”
Independent candidates are predicted to take the electorates of Mildura and Morwell, which are usually safe seats for the Nationals and Labor respectively.
The Victorian Electoral Commission provided an update on the seats on Thursday, with independent candidates leading in both electorates in the two candidate preferred vote.
Mr Jochinke said independent votes were often seen as “protest votes”.
“Some of the independents we have seen are focused on one or two major issues that are important to their electorates, which makes it sometimes difficult to have conversations that aren’t their core focus,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter who is in those electorates, we will be focused on our key policies for agriculture, and rural and regional communities. We want to make sure their voices are heard.
“In a lot of cases, those rural electorates understand those issues (so) it’s going to be the metro electorates where some work will need to be put in.”
The federation’s main focuses are lobbying for funding for rural roads, telecommunications, health and education.
“We are still seeing a disparity in infrastructure spending across the state. Rural areas need to get better access to that funding – especially for roads, as well as telecommunications and energy. Health and education are some of the other bigger items,” he said.
Rural pledges from Labor:
Rural pledges from Liberal-Nationals:
