Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you to the member for New England for proposing this very important matter of public importance for discussion here in the House today. Today’s MPI deals with effective rural policy now and into the future. I do not propose to be political. The member for New England has talked about what sickens farmers in these difficult times, and I think one of the things that really does sicken farmers is when opposing parties, relatively comfortable here in Canberra—we have close connections with our rural electorates but personally we are quite comfortably off—start attacking each other across this chamber or in our state legislatures. So I do not propose to do that today. I think it is important that we as a team, if I can say that, of rural and regional members highlight what this drought is doing to the people that we represent, the people that we care about.

So let me just paint a quick picture of the scene we are dealing with at the moment. This will very much be focused on my main area as the member for Farrer in southern New South Wales, an area that starts at the top of Mount Kosciuszko, runs along the Murray River and finishes at the South Australian border. The Snowy Mountains scheme—some 17 dams in the high country there, connected intricately with the Murray-Darling system—and water storages across the region are coping or trying to come to terms with a state of affairs that I do not believe the people who designed and built them ever envisaged. The country in my area looks like it does in the middle of January, and that is a pretty depressing sight. There are no or low water allocations to general security users on the Murray—that is, people who do not have a guaranteed allocation of water are facing zero allocation.

What really annoys me when I travel—as we all do, to events in cities or bigger regional centres—is when somebody says to me, as they invariably do: ‘Well, there you are. You’re growing cotton and rice where you have no business to be growing it in this record drought.’ The point I make here—and I never get tired of making it—is that we are growing precious little cotton and almost no rice in the Murray-Darling system, because the water allocation for those irrigators is zero. General security water allocation is zero.

For the first time ever, high security users have had their water allocation cut back too. If you thought you had 100 per cent of whatever amount of megalitres your allocation was, you were told within the last week by the New South Wales Department of Natural Resources that it has been cut back to 80 per cent. If you had planned carefully and you had some carryover water from last year, if you have used it all, great, but, if not, you have had that cut back to 80 per cent. So you have lost 20 per cent of your water allocation. That has never happened before that I am aware of.

You can imagine the effect that has on somebody’s business. I would like to mention a fellow in my electorate who grows tomatoes. He paid about $400,000 for 2,000 megalitres of water—guaranteed, you would think. He signed contracts with SPC on the basis of that. He is now facing this reduced allocation of 20 per cent less, but he has still got contracts where he is obliged to deliver a product, and he now cannot. That is just one small example. We have had calls in my electorate office, as I am sure the member for New England has, from transport companies, from small businesses in towns, from people who cart livestock, from all over, saying this is terrible.

We are facing—and it is rapidly becoming a bit of a cliche, unfortunately, because you cannot think of new ways to express the same thing—uncharted waters, new territory, somewhere we have never been before. There have been other droughts in Australia’s recorded history—the Federation drought was one, and who knows what happened before white settlement?—but this is pretty bad. Crops are failing and there are forced sales of livestock in record numbers.

As a government we have an obligation, and we are meeting that obligation, to look at the existing policies that we have, modify them where necessary and provide a whole-of-government response. It is not just within the Agriculture portfolio but across Family and Community Services and Centrelink. May I say that even the tax office is looking kindly on people who have trouble with their tax debt. I am sure that not many farmers have a large tax debt at the moment, but, if your quarterly statements are due and you are having trouble paying them, then the fact that you are experiencing a drought is something that the tax office looks at favourably, and I commend them for that.

We have announced changes to exceptional circumstances this week. Eighteen areas are being rolled over. One of the stresses of being in an EC area is: ‘I’m in the area, but am I eligible because of the type of activity that I’m involved in?’ Also, everyone who is in that EC area is now entitled to apply. Sometimes those declarations were done on an industry basis, and that is no longer the case. Not only that, but they have been rolled over for 18 months. That is extremely important, because another stress in exceptional circumstances is: ‘Okay, the declaration’s going to end. What happens next? Do we have to go through another assessment? Does the National Rural Advisory Council have to visit? What’s going to happen to me in my personal circumstances?’ That is taken off the table; there is an 18-month extension. That was announced this week.

I hasten to add that the government is continuing to look at ways in which we can help farmers. It is the topic of conversation this week in the Liberal and National party rooms and around the house generally. We are getting ready, I believe, to respond in a very meaningful way. In the same way that I think this has to be a whole-of-government approach, it has to be a whole-of-community response as well, because the thing about this drought—and there is the fact that urban Australia is experiencing its own problems in terms of its water resources—is that it is not just an issue for rural and regional Australia; it is not just the problem that they are having in the bush because, of course, the farmers need rain. All of a sudden it is something that is everyone’s problem. In every problem there is an opportunity, and I believe that there are opportunities in this for us to do better and get it right into the future.

We would prefer to be dealing with average seasonal conditions, but we are not. Some people are blaming the current circumstances on global warming, climate change induced by human activity and bringing in the Kyoto protocol—our green friends, of course, would never miss an opportunity to do that. This is not helpful to farmers. It is not helpful to farmers to imagine that they are part of some worldwide phenomenon that is accelerating them to a point where their farmlands will be devastated and they simply will not be able to grow anything because the latitudes have shifted 20 or 30 degrees south. It is not helpful. I would encourage those who want to have the climate change debate to have it but not to draw farmers into it as if somehow they are part of it, somehow they are responsible for it and somehow they are completely helpless in the face of it. It may be an inconvenient truth for some but farming and agriculture are here to stay. They are here to stay for the future and for the long haul. They are the best land use for much of Australia.

The member for New England accurately reflected on some comments, particularly in the Financial Review, about what we are really doing out here. It is all wishy-washy rubbish. We have had the Wentworth Group. In fact, in the last parliament, the member for New England and I both sat on a committee which did an inquiry into water resources. I have to say that we did take some shots at the Wentworth Group on that occasion. I understand that they have as their priority an environmentally healthy Australia—that is all right; that is a good thing—but for members of that group to make statements at the moment about the nonviability of farmers—

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