John Cobb (Calare, National Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

The bill before the House that we are now debating amends section 7 of the Rural Adjustment Act 1992 to allow for the appointment of members to the National Rural Advisory Council, which is termed NRAC, for three terms. The proposed amendment will remove the current provision that a person might be reappointed as a member on one occasion only. The Rural Adjustment Act 1992 specifies that NRAC’s main role is to provide advice on rural adjustment and regional issues, including whether areas should be assessed as being in drought exceptional circumstances. This bill will ensure that current or previous members who have served two terms will, in the future, be able to serve an additional term.

The work of NRAC is difficult, it is harrowing. The decision on whether or not to extend drought EC can be the difference between survival and ruin for a lot of farmers. I acknowledge Mr Keith Perrett, who has been the NRAC chair for some time now, and I thank him and his fellow NRAC members. It is not a happy job. I have done a couple of tours with them in a previous life as a representative of farmers. It is hard work and you are well aware that the decisions that you will recommend—not make, but recommend—to the federal minister can have long-term consequences.

My electorate of Calare has, over the past eight years, probably been the most drought affected electorate in Australia. I think Bourke was the first area to become EC declared in this current drought. That was in June 2002, and the drought had obviously been in force for some time before that. In later years the Riverina, Farrer, Mallee and Hume—even though it is a bit further east—have all been in the thick of it and still are in a lot of those areas, particularly in the Mallee, in the west of my electorate and in the south of New South Wales. South-west Queensland has also had an awful flogging. In the past three or four years in particular we have seen something that we have not seen before: irrigation water has failed in a lot of those areas. At one stage—I think it was in early 2007—the then Howard government included all forms of agriculture so that irrigation did not have to be specifically included in drought. I will speak about that again a little later.

I am not suggesting for one second that ours was a perfect system, but everybody has got used to it and they know what it is. I will go back to my electorate and use it as an example to explain one of the big problems with handling drought. Recently a lot of areas—16 around Australia, but particularly a lot of areas in my electorate—lost exceptional circumstances assistance for two reasons: one reason being that the rules changed. The rules that used to exist meant that farmers had a breathing space between better seasons coming and losing EC. That was because, as the Deputy Speaker would be well aware, rain does not mean water. Sorry, I was referring to Deputy Speaker Schultz, who was previously in the chair.

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