Judi Moylan (Pearce, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Given that the Rural Adjustment Amendment Bill 2009 proposes to amend the maximum length of service for a member of the National Rural Advisory Council, it is a great opportunity for me to acknowledge from the outset the great contribution that farmers and their families make to the economy, both domestic and export, and their contribution to conservation and innovation in this country. I have seen some amazing examples in my electorate of farmers who have made a great contribution to conservation and to restoring some of the land in Western Australia that has been badly affected by salt and is no longer productive. In many cases, farmers have poured thousands of dollars of their own money into dealing with these problems successfully and ensuring that their land is more productive but also that the local ecology is better off for that contribution. In terms of innovation, I think we have some of the most innovative farmers in the world. We should certainly all acknowledge in this place the importance of farmers and their contribution to food production and food security.

I would like to acknowledge some of the very eloquent contributions of some of my colleagues today. It is notable that there have not been contributions from speakers on the other side. The member for Riverina mentioned comments coming from ministers on the other side about our National Party colleagues and particularly those of us who represent farming communities. I would have to say I agree. We are here to represent people out there who contribute to the building of this country, to its economy, to its communities and to its ecology. Some of these people have done it very hard. While the minister stands over there and makes trivial comments and asks trivial questions about anything other than issues to do with agriculture, there are people out in the rural communities of Australia who are genuinely hurting, genuinely making sacrifices and doing it tough. I think we could see a little bit more interest from the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry in looking after the farming sector, because that is his job, rather than trivialising those opportunities in this place to raise matters of serious import.

I will go back for a moment to just talk about the efficiency and innovation of farmers in Australia and particularly in my electorate of Pearce. Quite a large slab of my electorate is involved in productive agriculture. I have seen over the years that farmers were the first to suffer in this country but they were also the first to innovate and recover during the economic changes that we made in the early nineties. Not all of them recovered, but a good many of them learned to innovate and become very efficient as they faced fairly savage tariff reductions. I am not saying that these decisions were not right decisions at the time, but I sometimes feel that systems were not put in place to cushion some of the worst blows that were sustained by agriculture when we removed the tariff barriers and floated the Australian dollar. It did cause a lot of pain out in rural electorates.

Despite all of that, we have seen some of the most efficient farming practices in the world—without subsidies. There are very few subsidies provided to the farming communities today. They are very efficient. They have done this in the face of massive cost increases and cost pressures. As you would know, Deputy Speaker Washer, having an interest in horticulture, in these last few years farmers have faced increased cost pressures in the cost of petrol, which flows into the cost of chemicals and the cost of fertilisers. Of course, the rise in the value of the Australian dollar, although it helps many sectors of the community, does not actually help our farmers who are exporting. That is quite difficult at times for them to manage.

In a speech I gave to the House just a short while ago in May on the appropriation bills I commented that, in the face of the uncertainty:

… perhaps it is timely that we share with the government the lessons that have been learnt by farming communities over many lifetimes on how to deal with the climate of uncertainty. After all, the agricultural sector is the only one to record growth in recent times. In the September quarter national GDP went up one per cent, yet farm GDP went up 14.9per cent. Similarly in the December quarter, which was the country’s first quarter of negative growth in national GDP, national GDP went down by 0.5 per cent, and by contrast farm GDP increased by 10.8 per cent.

Primary producers have held their own under economic conditions that would literally floor most people. Drought, fire, flood, currency fluctuations, steeply rising costs of fuel, fertiliser and chemicals, and the global financial crisis have failed to dampen the enthusiasm and the determination of this—

the farming—

sector. They just work harder, smarter and longer to achieve results.

As I said in that speech:

As I move around the rural and regional areas of the electorate of Pearce, I am reminded of the most important lesson that we can learn from the farming community: they know to call a spade a spade; and they know to call the drought a drought and not a temporary reduction in localised precipitation.

It is an important thing that they do know that; otherwise, they would not be in business

To move on to the Rural Adjustment Amendment Bill 2009 that we are debating, currently the NRAC members can only be reappointed once so the maximum time they can serve is six years. This will change so that members may be reappointed twice and hence serve for a maximum of nine years. The significance of this change comes from the importance of the NRAC in the process of delivering assistance to farmers coping with crisis conditions—and there have been plenty of those, as I said. These are natural crises in this case. The NRAC has been operating for nearly 10 years as an advisory body to the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry. It has always been important that there is a strong link between the decisions made here in Canberra and what happens out there in rural Australia. The NRAC have been invaluable in this association, but they need to understand that realities of rural living in recent times, with farmers being placed under the very real pressure of an increasingly unforgiving and, may I say, malevolent environment.

Having grown up in the small country town of Narrogin, south-east of Perth, I know firsthand of every farmers perennial concern about the weather. Their livelihoods and the environment are inextricably linked for better or for worse. Now I represent the seat of Pearce into which Narrogin falls, and much of Pearce of course is agricultural land. I am again reminded of the ever present anxiety about the climate. But today’s farmers need to contend with not just the odd year of light rain but, as I said, with a malevolent climate which has left them year after year falling short. So it is important that we have an experienced team on the National Rural Advisory Council and that we are able to ensure that people can serve there perhaps for a little longer than they would under the current provisions.

The decisions that the council makes are of course in relation to exceptional circumstances funding. Exceptional circumstances have been defined as ‘rare and severe events outside those a farmer could normally be expected to manage using responsible farm management strategies’. The result of these circumstances must be ‘a severe downturn in farm income’ for a protracted period—that is, for more than 12 months. When a declaration of exceptional circumstances has been made, farmers and small businesses dependent on agriculture will have access then to exceptional circumstances relief payments.

I want to make a comment about this whole process of exceptional circumstances relief payments. As a new member of this place and the then shadow minister for small business—which I think, in a sense, covered farming, because farming is sometimes big business but a lot of it is relatively small business—I did a trip through northern New South Wales, where all of the little towns such as Walcha, Coraki and Tenterfield had been in the grip of drought for four years at that time. And the government, I felt, was extremely slow to respond. That trip is etched deeply into my mind, my heart and my soul, because what I encountered on that trip, in the many meetings we had in those small communities, was incredible heartache and pain. Often people do not understand that, when the farmers go down, so does the supporting community around them. In those little towns, the loss of one family or perhaps the closure of the school or the loss of the schoolteachers and their families can be an absolute disaster for the rest of the town. The little store that provides a few groceries, the newsagent, the bank—suddenly they all begin to tumble and close because they cannot be supported any longer.

I saw tough men who for decades had provided for their families break down in tears in town hall meetings. And I know these kinds of people; they do not break down very easily; they are tough. What really gripped me was the fact that on many occasions people told me that they had to put down even their breeding herds. It had taken them years and years to build up their breeding herds, but they had to put them down because they simply had no feed to sustain them; they had been handfeeding for a long time. I remember in Casino, I think it was, if my memory serves me right, talking to the farm women there. They told me the women in the town had set up a scheme where the women on the farms could go once a week to take a shower and do the family washing, so difficult were those times. We met under trees, we met in town halls, and as long as I live I will never forget it.

As a new, green member of parliament I came back here so deeply moved by this that I started investigating how we might address this. Drought is a fact of life in Australia, just like floods and fires and frosts, and yet we treat it so differently. We are so slow to respond. And the EC system is cumbersome, it is complex, it is means tested, and you have really got to be almost at the end of the line before you can get help. We need to have some kind of drought relief system that allows farmers to continue to farm, to keep the breeding herds—not wait until there is nothing left before the drought relief kicks in.

You might remember, Mr Deputy Speaker Washer, as others would, when Ray Martin started up the Farmhand appeal. It was designed to get donations to help sustain these families and, I am sorry to say, it actually shamed the government into doing something; they were not going to do anything. It so engaged the Australian public that the government were forced to make drought relief available.

So I would like to see us re-examine how we deal with exceptional circumstances assistance, how we provide drought relief—understanding that, as some of the effects of climate change kick in, we are probably going to see these kinds of disasters more often than we would like. I think we need to have a dialogue about this and have a serious think about how we deliver better relief to farmers.

There has been a lot of talk in Western Australia about how we might better manage disasters, and one of the schemes that have often been talked about to me by some of my farmers is multiperil crop insurance. In fact, Derek Clauson, who is the grains section president of the WA Farmers Federation, has also spoken on this. He highlighted the fact that this would be high on the WAFarmers agenda in 2009, and a WAFarmers lobbying group was set up to intensify efforts to get this up after frost hit WA very hard last year in September. It decimated crops in the southern and south-eastern wheat belt after causing severe head and stem damage to the grain crops. So this has been much talked about over the years.

When you consider that the federal government chipped in $1.2 billion in drought related relief to farm households between July 2001 and June 2008, and another $1.8 billion was provided to farm businesses and rural small businesses—which was one of the changes that we made when we were in government, to make sure we included small farm businesses and rural businesses, like machinery dealerships and so on, to make sure that fabric was not lost—it would make sense perhaps to consider rolling this money into a multiperil crop insurance scheme. It has been discussed in this place before. In fact, my colleague the member for O’Connor has had quite a bit to say on it. He gave a presentation not so long ago, and I would like to acknowledge the work that he has done on this particular issue. In his presentation, he listed under ‘Basic principles’:

To create an insurance product to allow growers to insure their cost of production at the beginning of each season

This would be a very good step. He also said:

EC is a Government grant and as such is complex—

and I agree with him on that—

and means tested which frequently excludes growers simply on the basis of property value or off farm investments

As I said, it does not give farmers much real control. They are on the bones of their backside, on their knees, by the time they get the current assistance. The member for O’Connor said:

This product—

multiperil crop insurance—

would be available to all who choose to use it and the subsidy would not be means tested.

Those who did not purchase the product would be deemed to self-insure and therefore be ineligible for Government assistance.

I think mulitperil crop insurance is worthy of consideration. Indeed, many other countries, such as Canada, the United States and Italy, have mulitperil crop insurance. It is a process that would allow growers to better manage their own risk and give them better control over the future of their farms in exceptional circumstances.

I notice that there has been a Productivity Commission inquiry into government drought support, which was released last month. They have made several recommendations to extensively alter the operation of EC relief payments. Clearly, further investigations will need to be made but I hope that the minister makes sure that in any new design as to exceptional circumstances money the government will make sure that the rural communities are properly consulted with, because this is a very, very important matter. As I said, with growing risks of climate changes and adverse climate episodes, this is going to become a more frequent encounter and I think we have a duty in this parliament to make sure that we have a scheme in place that is workable and allows our national farmers to manage their own businesses. (Time expired)

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