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

I thank the member for Paterson. They do not know either. This is one of the important points we will make in the understandable committee process in the Senate. What bill of this nature does not go to a Senate committee? The mob over the other side know every bill like this goes to a Senate committee. To suggest that we are delaying is just ridiculous. This is one of the questions we will be asking Treasury: is there a sweet spot; is there a point at which Australia can restore its international competitiveness, notwithstanding having a backpacker tax? It will be an interesting exercise. We know that in, for example, New Zealand it is 10.5 per cent. There is the folly: 'The wage rate is higher here, so we can be competitive.' Do not tell us that, because your own modelling says it is not going to leave us competitive. That is the Treasury modelling. What they are doing on the other side is introducing a tax on backpackers, even though they know it is going to damage the agriculture and tourism sectors. Do I have to repeat that? Can you believe that? I have been here 20 years. I do not believe I have ever seen a government impose a tax on a sector knowing that it is going to further damage those sectors. In the case of the tourism sector, it is a double whammy: a tax on backpackers and an increase in the passenger movement charge. Again: what sort of genius does it take to come up with that proposal?

Fifteen minutes is nowhere near long enough. I could go through all the impacts, but I will say this. The National Farmers Federation, in a very good report only a year ago, talked about where we want Australian agriculture to be in 2030. It was a very good publication. It talked about a whole range of things we needed to do, from productivity to market access, et cetera. What that tells me, having looked back at it, is that we are doing nothing to pursue the ideas in that report—the ideas that ensure that we fully capitalise on the opportunities in agriculture for us. But it also said this: by 2030 we can have a horticulture sector more than twice the size, in value, of what we have today. But this is not how you get there. We are as one on one point in this place: that is, that the horticulture sector, in particular, is absolutely dependent on backpackers. In Tasmania, as we speak, people are concerned about fruit rotting on trees. I heard Minister Joyce saying that there are towns in his electorate where the population can be nowhere near what they need for the workforce.

I will finish with this: who owns this backpackers tax? Who was its greatest supporter? The answer is Minister Joyce. In Senate estimates—and I will table the transcript—officials told us that Barnaby Joyce wanted this money, the backpacker tax revenue, to pay for some of his more interesting white paper initiatives—failed white paper initiatives, I say—let me be in no doubt about that. In addition to that, Barnaby Joyce told Leigh Sales that he found it a bit insidious:

It does seem a little bit incongruous that someone can work four months, five months, six months and get a tax-free threshold because that actually puts them at a strategic advantage on two levels to their other Australian workers.

Wrong! Australian workers get a tax-free threshold. But it shows what was in Barnaby Joyce's mind at that point. He loves the backpacker tax. It is his backpacker tax, and here is introducing it notwithstanding the fact that it is going to hurt the agricultural sector. (Time expired)

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