Joel Fitzgibbon (Hunter, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture) Share this | Hansard source

Minister Joyce has led the way on Hansard corrections! I have learned a lot from him—not that I intend to pursue his guidance.

There was a $5 billion infrastructure fund for northern Australia. This would imply, of course, that many of these would be water projects. They could be road projects or others, but the government likes to put dams in brackets after everything just to let people know they are the builders of dams. But the questions are: who is eligible to borrow this money, who is going to borrow this money, what are the projects that this money is going to fund and what will be the interest rate? Given that we are living in a very low interest rate environment, what will be the differential between what, for example, a business can raise elsewhere or indeed debt finance from a bank and what is going to be offered? Here we are, all these months on from the release of the northern Australian white paper and we do not know the answer to these questions. In fact, on many of these matters we do not even seem to know which ministers are responsible. I know it gets shuffled around a bit, because Minister Joyce has a go at a few things, it does not work out all that well and then it gets flicked over to Minister Macfarlane to tidy up et cetera.

There are many out there who are asking these obvious questions. When are some of these announcements going to come to fruition? There might be a simple answer to that. It may be that they might come to fruition just in time to become part of an election campaign but not in time to be spent—just in time to make some announcements during an election campaign but not enough time to be spent prior to the election. In other words, by the time the election comes around, primary producers in this country will have had three years of receiving false hope from this government and lots of talk about a whole range of projects, many contained within a failed white paper which has disappeared without a trace overnight because it was so lacking in substance. But there is one plan here and it is a very obvious plan: 'We'll just string Australia's farming community out a little bit longer. We'll keep promising all these things. In particular we'll keep promising drought affected communities we're there to help them.' But the bad news for the government is that they are starting to work it out.

You cannot continue this facade and this pea-and-thimble trick for a whole three years. Eventually they find you out, and people are finding this government out in the agriculture sector. Expectations were raised and raised very substantially. We heard a lot about farm-gate profit. The only thing this Minister for Agriculture has been able to claim is the final signature on free trade agreements for which the Labor Party has more ownership than this government, and that is the truth of it. The sad news—

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