Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Where is a single member of the government? There is nobody. I am sorry; one is there. Where are they? I would be hiding too. I would not like to have to come in here and show my face after I had made a cold-blooded promise before the election.

It was made in my electorate. It was made after a meeting in Mareeba. God bless the rural action mob up there and Scotty Dixon, Joe Moro and those people. God bless Noel Hall, who travelled all the way down to Townsville to see the Deputy Prime Minister. I will not say, ‘God bless all those people who went to the National Party rally in Innisfail to show their support for the National Party,’ but I will remind them about this when I see them in the street. And they will hang their heads like mongrel dogs, because that is truly what they are. You made a promise to these people, and you have treated the promise with absolute contempt.

Let me be very specific. There are a number of issues that need to be dealt with here. I constantly get complaints that people send product into the market and get a rejection slip. They send down perfect fruit—and I know a lot of these growers; they have an excellent reputation and they would not send down substandard fruit—and the market slips or there is a glut, and the retailers will just return it. There is a glut in the market and they cannot sell it, for whatever reason, and they will return it.

Let me give you one specific case. Do not quote me on the figures, but the figures will be relatively correct. A very big grower who grows lychees sent product down to Brisbane. The agent rang him up and said, ‘Mate, you’ve got $36,000 from that product you sent down to me,’ and the grower said, ‘Whoopee!’ He was getting $28 a box. That is a good price. He had made a lot of money. He was a very happy man. That was on a Thursday afternoon. On the following Tuesday, the agent rang him back and said, ‘Sorry mate, they have rejected all of that product.’ The farmer said: ‘They cannot reject it; it has been sold. It is a done deal; it is a gone transaction.’ The agent said, ‘They have returned it; it is sitting here in my market in front of me.’ The grower said, ‘They can’t do that,’ and the agent said, ‘They just have.’ He also said, ‘Of course, the market has slipped from $28 a box down to $12 a box, so they returned it all and then went and bought the same product for $12 a box.’ This bloke had lost a week of shelf life.

You need to involve people who are at the coalface. The code talks about a produce assessor a year later—this is a matter of days. You have only got days. Your shelf life, as often as not, is two weeks at the outside. You have a day of picking and packing, and then you have a day or two to get it to market and sell it. By then, often your shelf life is down to a fortnight. If it is returned, of course, your shelf life is gone. So that grower received something like $6,000, which hardly covered the cost of his boxes. This sort of case has happened again and again.

Let me say that the minister has included ‘in a contract’—but it is only a contract; it is not enforceable. We asked for a mandatory code. We asked for the government to pass laws so that if you act in this manner you act illegally. An agreement has to be enforced by us. How can a little grower—‘Joe average grower’ up in Mareeba—sue Woolworths and Coles? Of course he can’t take them on; and with an agreement that legal action is all you are left with. If these people act as agents, you have not even got the right to demand an agreement—if they are still agents.

At least I suppose the minister has put in the code that they have to have a contractual arrangement, and the contractual arrangement has to make them declare whether they are a merchant or an agent. So I think there has been movement forward in the code, and we thank the government for that very narrow little piece.

Having said that, there is nothing in the code that says he has to disclose who he has sold the product to. There is no way of ensuring that the same games that were being played before are not going to be played now. There is no onus upon anyone to disclose. The argument that there is no bill of sale was one of the things that we most needed—that there is no proof of sale—is the heart of the problem. It says here that you do not have to include who the product was sold to. You do not have to include that. If I am wrong, I would like the minister to put me right. I do not have a battery of lawyers to help me interpret the law. But, on my reading of the law here, I cannot find any clause that says that, in the bill of sale, you have got to put the name of the person it was sold to. That was the main thing that people like Scotty Dixon in Mareeba wanted. He was to some degree orchestrating the requests throughout Australia, and most certainly precipitated, along with Noel Hall, the agreement out of the then Deputy Prime Minister. They did it with all sincerity; they were not trying to set him up or anything. The main thing they wanted was that bill of sale. But the bill of sale does not include who you sold it to. It is not much use having a bill of sale that has not got the name of the person that you sold it to. If we are wrong, Minister, we would ask you to point it out to us. I cannot see how having recourse only through the common law leaves us in a much different position from where we are at present.

But I would like to talk specifically about some issues. I mentioned the horticulture produce assessors and the issue of mediation. A lot of this centres around rejection of product, and there are cases where products should be rejected—but not from normal, serious operating farmers in the marketplace. It would be very rare that they would send diseased product to market, because no-one would ever buy from them again. They just do not do that. They take all the actions that need to be taken to send down a good product to market, and that is why they are still in the industry. But the fact is that these diseases do not show up for a couple of weeks. You know yourself, Mr Deputy Speaker, that if you buy a mango or a banana, it might be two or three weeks before blemishes start to occur. It becomes a very grey area as to whether the product is diseased. You could argue that bacteria naturally occurs in the degeneration of any plant life.

The people who have done the work for me have said that the agreement must state ‘within two weeks’. If a person working on this knew anything about the industries he was dealing with, he would know that that is not going to be in the agreement. It says you have got to put that down in the agreement, but an agent is not going to put in there that he is going to be responsible for who he sells it to. That is not going to be in the agreement. It never has been before, and it never will be in the future.

With respect to the cost of bringing in the produce assessor, the mediator and all these things, I think that Mr Dixon makes a very good point. He says you are talking about growers who—in my case, anyway, in Far North Queensland—are 2,000 kilometres away from the marketplace. They need to get an aeroplane to take them from Cairns down to Brisbane—or, worse still, Melbourne and Sydney, where the vast bulk of their product will be sold. So if they want to go to any of these produce assessor mediations, they are up for a huge amount of money. This is just not practical. If the minister could appoint somebody, and he would be the arbiter and there would be a tribunal that could hear this, we would have something that we could use.

In conclusion, we would emphasise again that there has been some advance made. We appreciate the minister having made an effort for us, and we want that to go on the record. Having said that, to bring out this code and to have 90 per cent of the industry—that is, Woolworths and Coles—the processors, and the exporters left out of the code of conduct really makes a mockery of it. And it insults all of those people who believed in this code—as I did. At the time, I thanked the government, even though it was during an election campaign. I congratulated them and said, ‘We look forward very much to the introduction of the code.’ You can rest assured about what I will be saying this time around. So we want to say that, and we want to say that what we have not got is a mandatory code of conduct. What we have got is a contractual agreement, and that is all. (Time expired)

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