Joel Fitzgibbon (Hunter, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture) Share this | Hansard source

I hear the interjection 'years'. That is, in effect, true, but the severity of the drought has grown worse week on week in recent months, and it is past time the government acted.

This brings me back to climate change. There is still a lot of debate around this country about climate change and appropriate government responses to it. I recall very vividly being out with Bruce Tyrrell in his vineyard, in June last year, I think. Bruce Tyrrell pointed me in the direction of his vines and he said to me, 'You see those leaves on those vines?' I said that I did. He said: 'They shouldn't be there. They shouldn't be there at this time of the year. That's climate change.' He was quick—I am sure he would not mind me sharing this story—to make the point that he did not necessarily believe that climate change was the result of human activity, but he was very certain in his view that the climate is changing in Australia. The climate is changing in Australia. We can have our arguments about what is causing it—whether it is cyclical or whether it has been going on for hundreds of years—but whatever the case might be, the climate is changing. Droughts are becoming more regular and more severe, and that trend, unfortunately, is likely to continue. It is time we all acknowledged that collectively. We can still have our debates about what to do about it, but one thing is certain: we will not fulfil our ambitions in our quest to take our share of that massive growth and demand in food in the coming decades that I spoke about earlier if we do not more efficiently manage our natural resources, the resources that allow us to produce food in such a plentiful way in this country. As a parliament, we need to recognise that and get more serious about that.

And that takes me to the third point I made—that is, the failure of the government in this coming white paper to include in the terms of reference resource sustainability. I would have thought that resource sustainability would be right at the top of that white paper and its ambitions, because we cannot produce a lot more food in this country with the same or depleting land, water and even human resources in many senses—workforce issues are a huge challenge for agriculture in Australia. It is very disappointing that regional sustainability is not in the terms of reference, and I suspect, sadly, it is because we have not gone that step further and collectively announced that we all believe the climate is changing and that this is posing a big challenge for those on the land, because that might be an admission that the current government is wrong to be taking such a 19th-century approach to the issue of climate change.

It is a shame, because they have consistently said—and in doing so in a sense recognised the size of the challenge—that they have committed themselves to the same greenhouse gas emissions targets as has the now opposition. What remains unclear to us is how they expect and hope to meet those targets. We hear a lot about Direct Action but at the same time we hear a lot about what might be the future of the renewable energy target, and, of course, we have not seen any detail of where the money is going to be coming from or where it is going to be spent. Is it going to be a big tax on all of us and distributed to rent seekers? We do not know. After six months in the life of this government, we simply do not know what Direct Action is really going to look like.

We support this bill, but we would like to see more debate in this place about these massive challenges facing not only those on the land in rural and regional Australia but those who work on the land and those who work in small businesses and other pursuits who rely so heavily on the health of our agricultural sector. We cannot allow a policy vacuum to exist for another 12 months while Minister Joyce develops his white paper—or, should I say, while the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet develops the white paper, which is my understanding of the process. Why the white paper is being written by PM&C, I do not know. I do not know that it is something which would give a lot of encouragement to those in this place who hold hopes of a positive white paper, a white paper that is active and useful and that really does something for those who work on the land. They may prove me wrong, but again it is a great shame that they have been given inadequate terms of reference from which to work.

So the derivative is important but so too are all these issues. I made a point about the white paper in a recent article I wrote for the Farm Institute. I listed a number of research papers that have been done on agriculture in recent times. This is just some of them: Greener Pastures, Farming Smarter Not Harder, the NFF Blueprint, Feeding the Future, Infrastructure and Australia’s Food Industry, the National Food Plan, the Rural Research and Development Statement, and many Farm Institute papers, to name a few. I put it to the House that there is a wealth of information and research out there. I think we know what the questions are. I think a range of reports, including those I have mentioned, have answered the questions. I believe we know what needs to be done in agriculture to make it more productive, more profitable and—I underline—more sustainable.

I do not know whether we can afford to wait another year for the white paper to determine what those responses should be. I suppose we have to, because that is the government's intention. The opposition will do its best to participate in that white paper process in any way it can and in a positive way, but I think it is a great shame that the government has decided to put everything on ice and create such a policy vacuum and so much inertia in agriculture policy while we are waiting for that white paper process to be completed. I believe the member for Perth will second my second reading amendment.

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