The Prime Minister has been met with laughter and derision from regional Australians while defending his record in the bush during a summit in Dubbo.
It was an incredibly tough panel for the Prime Minister who was asked a range of questions about renewable energy projects, farming and foreign land ownership on Thursday.
News Corp’s Gemma Jones told Mr Albanese about a Dubbo business owner, Robyn Hicks, whose property will be “sandwiched on three sides by a solar farm”.
The Prime Minister was told there were foreign-owned projects being built mostly by foreign workers that operated on work camps, which had led to a downturn in people coming to Dubbo to spend money.
Asked what message he had for people whose “lives and livelihoods are being upended and don’t understand why”, the Prime Minister said, “I get it”.
Mr Albanese’s response was met by laughter before he continued his response.
“We need to do better than that,” Mr Albanese said.
“You need social license in order to operate, there needs to be much better community consultation and engagement on all of those issues.”
Jones told the audience that their participation was appreciated, but defended the Prime Minister for attending the summit to address them directly.
“We appreciate the audience’s involvement too, but when you have the Prime Minister here to talk to you I think it’s best to let him speak,” she said.
Later in the discussion, Mr Albanese was asked if it bothered him that farmers saw the Albanese government as “the enemy”.
“What worries me is overregulation,” the Prime Minister said.
A second round of raucous laughter erupted.
Mr Albanese told the panel that Labor needed to “do something about it, and we are” through the abolishment of a thousand tariffs, which was creating “a part of bureaucracy”.
“One of the things at the economic summit that Jim Chalmers convened last year was about how do we get rid of excess regulation,” Mr Albanese said.
“A lot of that is state, we have three levels of government, that can create a problem as well.
“If we were starting Australia again, you wouldn’t have three levels of government.”
Read related topics:Anthony Albanese