The UAP candidates pursuing victory in regional South Australia have both outlined policies specifically geared towards enhancing some of the state’s regional economies in interviews with Flow.
The candidate for eastern and southern SA, David Swiggs labels himself as a “born and bred local”, who grew up on a farm grazing sheep and cattle, and made no secret of his desire to see sections of regional Australia prosper again.
Swiggs wanted to see regions retaining a portion of their own revenue:
"Another policy we want to propose is our 25 per cent back to regions policy, which basically means that there's an enormous amount of wealth created in the regions - we want that recognised.”
"We want a minimum of 25 per cent of the revenue that's realised in the regional areas to actually stay in the regional areas, rather than be poured into the cities."
"In my travels, I've done quite a bit of campaigning and driving around Barker and certainly along the edge of Barker, Mayo and Spent, there's a real difference between what I'm seeing in infrastructure in those electorates closer to the city, than what we see in Barker."
"We think that the regions produce a lot of revenue and we think that they deserve to have a minimum of 25 per cent invested back in there."
Hear the full interview with David Swiggs on the Flow podcast player below:
Fellow candidate for SA's western and northern seat of Grey, paramedic Suzanne Waters, joined Swiggs in promoting the UAP's incentive for individuals to settle in regional and rural areas:
"We have the tyranny of distance and the added cost of freight et cetera out here, so to encourage more people out to the regions and decentralise the city, we'll offer 20 per cent less tax for those people for businesses and individuals living more than 200km from a capital - but in my region I'll push for that to be the entire electorate of Grey."
Waters explained that the benefit would be felt immediately in workers' wages, not through their tax return:
"If that money's come out when you pay wages and when your boss takes the money out, you'd get that extra money back ... reduce your tax down."
Swiggs adverted to the UAP's preference for smaller government as a motivation for the tax rebate policy:
"As Craig Kelly said, people know how to spend the money in their communities a lot better than the government does, so rather than the government handout, we want to incentivise people back to the regional communities."
"We also feel that it will bring investment back to regional communities and it will bring services back to regional communities."
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