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

I was here during the speech of the member for Maranoa, which I think was a really good example of somebody recollecting, when talking through the policy, the very deep hardship they have seen in their own electorate. As soon as he reminded me of the time that we shared a platform in his electorate, I recalled being told the moment the plane landed that in the previous few days there had been yet another suicide in that community. Those sorts of stories are far too commonplace for members of parliament, including in the electorate of the member for Mallee, who is here. It is difficult to see an area that is doing it tougher than Mildura. Drought is always hard, and an irrigation drought is something nobody thought to plan for. I also acknowledge the member for Calare, the shadow minister, and the very real hardship in many parts of his electorate. Some parts have good news again, but there have been some good farmers who were unable to stay in business while they waited for the good news to come.

There is one argument that has been put in a number of speeches. I continue to refute it and I will refute it again. I once again want to caution members about this particular fear campaign. The government has continued to say that any changes from a crisis management approach to a risk management approach with our drought policy—which we are still working through—are about trying to help people better prepare for the next drought. All our discussions with industry have worked on the basis that the rules will not change from under people who are still going through the current drought.

I know that each year when the budget comes out there is a level of alarm about EC payments not appearing in the forward estimates. I have here—and there is no point tabling them, because they are already public—pages from the previous government’s final budget. In the out years, nothing is there. That was not because they were planning to abolish EC. It is the strange way that these issues always appear in the forward estimates. Every budget, the same argument will be able to be run. This time, you had the added complication of some issues appearing in the Treasury papers which used to appear in the Agriculture papers. But of all the different political campaigns to run back and forth, I plead with every member of parliament to try to avoid running a fear campaign that puts people who are already very much living on the edge in a fear which they do not need to have.

The guarantee has been given many times by me and the Prime Minister. I hope that, when we hit next year’s budget, this will not be an issue. Whatever the new drought policy is, I do not know that we do much for the people who are still working under the old transition system, who have drought declarations and EC declarations appearing in the same form, by participating in a fear campaign when we know that this is the way that the budget has always been presented since this issue was first brought in.

There are other challenges with the current drought system that were part of the broad canvassing of debate. I do not know whether we will be able to fix all of them with the new drought policy. We are having very constructive talks with industry. But the issue of lines on maps remains a grave injustice. To have two adjacent properties that have an identical level of hardship, sharing a fence but not sharing an EC boundary, not getting the same assistance—one getting it and the other not—is an unjust feature of the current system. When I first made the ministerial statement referring to what we wanted to do with drought policy, the Leader of the Nationals, to his credit, raised lines on maps as being a problem and also said that the previous government had on many occasions tried to find a way around it and found that it is really hard to do. And it is. We are still wrestling with that and working our way through it with industry.

The other issue which has been raised, and it was raised just now by the member for Kennedy, is that drought is not the only form of hardship that farmers face. To the extent that we get drought policy right—and that is only to a limited extent, but there is certainly a lot of good done through the current drought policy—we do not take adequate account of other forms of hardship. The stories that the member for Kennedy tells are all too true. We have a very unusual situation in his seat. I was warned about it when I travelled with him to Cloncurry and Normanton. I was warned then by the pastoralists that, even though what I was looking at was a mass of water and a flood, if I were to come back a few months later exactly what the member for Kennedy has just reported on would be what I would see—a landscape that looked like a drought. That is for the very simple reason that, if you have a flood and it lasts a few days, a week or even a week and a half, when it goes the land will largely bounce back. When you have vegetation covered for something in the order of six weeks—and I think that is right—

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