“Because I have been around politics for some time; (I know) you should quietly crow when in luck. I’ve done some good things for the electorate,” Mr Joyce said.

His list included $661,000 for Inverell’s Macintyre High School Trades Skills Centre, $80 million for the Bolivia Hill realignment, Tingha’s new War Memorial, the Chaffey Dam upgrade and the dementia unit for Guyra, and his list continued. 

“I’m managing to deliver back to the electorate, but I am very aware that the Agricultural Ministry keeps me busy. 

“It keeps me on the road, vastly more than if you are a back-bencher, where you have all the time in the world and your job is in the electorate office,” he said.

While all the funding Mr Joyce mentioned was welcomed in the electorate, some items were the same amounts for the same projects announced by the previous Labor government. 

Two examples were the $661,000 for Inverell’s trade skills centre and the $80 million for the work at Bolivia Hill.

Former Member for New England Tony Windsor said the funding for Bolivia Hill was already in the Federal Budget.

“They (this government) were looking at ways of not doing that under the auspices of saving money. In brackets; anything that Tony Windsor did we’ll try to eradicate,” Mr Windsor said.

“But this concept that it was at risk and Barnaby has saved it is just nonsense, because A - it was in the budget and B – he’s saving it from himself.

“The logic is to try and capture the project, and that’s fair enough, everybody does that.”

If the objective was indeed to rename projects under the Coalition banner, then Mr Joyce provided a very different insight.

“What happens is, the promise of a previous government is precisely that, it’s just a promise,” Mr Joyce said.

“They tell you this as soon as you arrive in government. They say ‘do not expect that promises of the previous government are promises of us’ and when they looked into the budget they said ‘well we’ve got no money’. They wiped the slate. I had to go back to the bat for Bolivia Hill, it was gone. There were only about four projects across the nation that came back and Bolivia Hill was one of them.”

Mr Joyce said although there was a strong belief throughout the community that these things were going to happen, there was also an expectation within the community that the government would not ‘max out the credit card’. 

“They never told us the budget was like this. They never told us the budget was nearly $660 billion in debt,” he said.