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

the vegetation is largely gone. What then happens, as the heat returns you have nothing to hold the soil moisture together. When you add the fact that—from what I understand from the first musters up there that took place last month and that are concluding know—basically the entire calf population is gone, you have very similar impacts to the ones that we talk about with drought, but they do not satisfy the EC test. Yet, on the face of it, if you took the words ‘exceptional circumstances’ for what they say, by any definition flood is exceptional and is a situation for which people would want us to find a way of providing greater levels of assistance than the current policy settings allow. Those talks with the member for Kennedy are ongoing. I cannot report a landing point yet, but the concerns that the member for Kennedy raises match exactly with what I have seen firsthand on the ground in his electorate.

They are a number of the challenges that we want to work through. I appreciate the genuine nature of the debate that has gone on across the House in this discussion. There will always be times when there is a whole series of issues such that the partisan nature of this chamber takes over, and that is part of it. We are not going to pretend to take the politics out of the parliament. But all people involved in primary industries ought to be able to use this debate as a reference point to understand the very high level of goodwill and desire to get policy right in their interests that exists on every side and in every corner of this chamber.

I should finally refer to what the legislation that we are about to vote on actually does. The National Rural Advisory Council only allows people to serve two terms. There are challenges and there are times when the National Rural Advisory Council gets it wrong. There were some very strong examples of this that were put forward earlier in the debate by the member for Hume. One of the challenges that I have tried to deal with within the current policy settings is to make sure that, where there is an allegation that the National Rural Advisory Council has got something wrong, they go back in there as soon as possible and reassess. We have been doing that constantly.

If an area is largely in recovery, I urge the state ministers to let us know beforehand what the revised boundaries should be so that we can do the check under revised boundaries, instead of having the situation we have at the moment, which is where the National Rural Advisory Council makes a majority ruling on a region and you end up with a whole lot of people who are not out of drought at all being told that they have no benefits and then having to wait for the reassessment under new boundaries so that they can be told, ‘Oh, no; now we’ll look after you.’

A similar challenge was raised very early after I got the portfolio by a number of members from each side of the House. There are challenges which occur due to the NRAC decisions coming down too late and too close to the concluding day. An argument has been put many times by David Crombie, which is that, if farmers are going to stay, they should be able to stay with dignity and, if they are going to leave, they should be able to leave with dignity. People are not treated well by getting a couple of weeks notice of benefits ending. The current system lends itself to that. We have now started to try to conclude the process earlier. But that of course means that we do not end up with the benefit of the latest data. That is a balance that we are trying to work through.

This bill allows us to appoint the members of the National Rural Advisory Council for a further term. They have a great level of expertise. They deal at the absolute coalface. Even though there will be times when members say they have made a mistake or the majority decision was not just, I have to say they are extraordinarily decent people. Originally all of them came to me as appointees of the previous government and I would like the opportunity to be able to ask each and every one of them to stay on. They do their job in an extraordinarily honourable and professional way. This bill, if it is carried, would provide that opportunity.

I urge the Senate in the time that it has remaining before we rise to deal with this bill hopefully more quickly than we did. I do not want to be in a situation from 1 July where we do not actually have a fully functioning NRAC to make those decisions. There is a strong case to maintain the expertise of the current serving members on NRAC. If the legislation does not get progressed in the winter sitting, the remaining members of NRAC could be required to take on additional responsibility and new members would need to be chosen to replace the retiring members, even though those members ultimately would not have needed to retire. I hope we can avoid that situation. Certainly it would be regarded as unsatisfactory by the farmers who rely on those decisions.

I commend the bill to the House. I thank the opposition and the crossbench for the constructive way that they have dealt with the debate. I certainly hope that at some time in the near future I am able to report on a proposal for a new drought policy that is able to retain the sort of bipartisan approach which has characterised this debate for so many years.

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