Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Minchin said:

In the meantime, the government will have the opportunity to further consider its position with respect to the joint venture matter. But certainly at this stage, it is the position of Liberal senators that we concur with the remarks of Senator Sherry on that matter.

So, to try to get the special deal for AWB, amendments were put forward, and so determined were each of the coalition parties to make sure they could delay the legislation that we saw the National Party on Thursday night vote for the total deregulation of the wheat industry.

As it happens, they made a mess of their own amendment that they put forward for the total deregulation of the wheat industry. I will start a step back from that. The objections and the barriers to individuals exporting their own wheat directly occurred in two places: one, in the principal bill, the Wheat Export Marketing Bill 2008 and, secondly, under the Wheat Export Marketing (Repeal and Consequential Amendments) Bill 2008, which had an amendment to some of the regulations contained under the Customs Act. The Senate amended the first bill but never read the second bill. So the House is in a situation now where, because there are no amendments to the second bill, it is impossible and not open to us to send those bills back to be corrected because one of them has now been approved in identical forms by both houses. That option is not open to the parliament now.

The amendments were done in a lazy fashion by the opposition when they went for total deregulation. The attempts by both coalition parties to completely deregulate the wheat industry have fallen over, thankfully, because the one thing standing between protecting growers from total deregulation and it happening was competence from coalition senators in the other place. That did not happen and therefore we have the protection. There was not competence; we have the protection that the bill before us now cannot provide for individuals to export their own wheat because the second amendment to the other bill was never carried.

These decisions and recommendations from the government have to be made on one question, and one question only—not on the basis of what tactical games the opposition tried to play, not on the basis of how bizarre it was to see National Party senators voting for total deregulation, but on the basis of: does the legislation before the House match government policy? And the answer to that is yes. What we have before us is legislation which ends the AWB monopoly on exports. It includes amendment to the objects clause, the review date and to transport systems which are acceptable to the government. What it has actually done in a legal sense with respect to individuals is take away any barrier to individuals exporting their own wheat in the principal legislation but left a regulation in place, which could conceivably be changed by a minister in the years to come, should a minister choose to make that change—I certainly will not be choosing to—to allow individuals to export their own wheat directly, by removing a customs prohibition.

With that in mind, the legislation which we have before the House accords with the policies of the government. The government is not interested in providing a special deal on a commercial matter to a particular company exporting wheat. With that in mind, I commend the motion to the House, which is that the amendments be agreed to. That takes us into a new era of wheat export marketing.

An incident having occurred in the gallery—

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