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

It is man-made drought? I see. That is an interesting intervention from the member for Riverina. The drought that our farmers are facing in Queensland and New South Wales is all man-made—and yet he is a climate change denier. We will return to that point later on maybe.

But this government had the audacity to say, 'We're handing out more than $700 million,' knowing that they are making money on the loans, that half of the loans are never go to be handed out and that, when they are handed out, the government are going to charge the state governments to hand them out. This is not providing much assistance to drought affected farmers.

Then, in the budget, knowing this, they decided that they probably should do a little bit more. There was one initiative in the budget which I support and I will give the government some credit for, and that was some further improvements to the Farm Management Deposits Scheme, because it does provide farmers with an incentive to put away in the good years for the bad. Pre the budget, the government had another good scheme, which provided a rebate for farmers who might want to invest in a new water infrastructure scheme—it might be to sink a new bore, for example. The problem was that the government put such a small amount of money into it that it was oversubscribed on about day two. Then Minister Joyce robbed some money from, I think, New South Wales to send some more to Queensland and made a complete botch of the whole thing. But on budget night they decided we should do more, so they did a couple of things. They introduced some accelerated depreciation initiatives around, for example, investment in fodder and other infrastructure projects to be depreciated over a much shorter period of time—in some cases fully in the first year. That is a hard policy to criticise, but the obvious springs to mind: first of all, you have got to have the money to invest, and, second, you have got to have a profit to offset the deduction from. If you been in drought for three years, you are not likely to have either. That is the truth of it. And on budget night we learnt that it was not going to come into force until 2017, something Minister Joyce was forced to correct—at our urging. But the fact remains that, without the profit and without the cash to invest in the first place, it is of limited benefit.

Then there was the $35 million project entitled Drought Communities Program, which we were told on budget night was going to allow all these local councils to spend money on shovel-ready projects in drought affected communities. This would stimulate the local economy. People would be buying fencing equipment, fence wire and all these things—maybe water infrastructure projects, maybe just a road in the local shire because the council does not have the money needed to do these projects. But there were a couple of problems with this. First of all, the money was much less than the money the government had cut from the same councils by removing the indexation on the financial assistance grants to local councils. They took a big bucket of money off them and gave them a much smaller bucket back. But here we are, four months on and not a project to be heard of—not a project nominated, let alone a sod turned or indeed a project completed. Four months on and we have heard nothing. This was an initiative to immediately stimulate local economies adversely affected by drought. Immediate stimulation and here we are, four months on and we have not even had a project approved, let alone started. What a farce that was.

That takes me to the national water infrastructure development fund. This was announced not in the budget but rather in the white paper. We were told in the white paper that this was going to be a great program to establish new water infrastructure projects around the country. There seemed to be an emphasis on north, which sounds like a reasonable thing to do. I indicated my support for the water infrastructure rebate. But where is the national water infrastructure development fund? We were told about it all those months ago in the white paper. We have not heard a word about it since. It was highly qualified; it indicated that projects would require the support of state governments and/or the private sector, and we all know how cash strapped state governments are, so we are not holding our breath for that to be forthcoming. But what projects are these? Where is the money coming from? How much is the Commonwealth going to contribute? Who is responsible for this fund? We do not seem even to know who is responsible for these projects. But it has been a long time coming, and we are waiting for the details.

On a related matter, I note that in the northern Australian white paper there was a $500 billion infrastructure fund. Five billion—did I say $5 billion? I meant to say a $5 billion. I hope I did not say $500 billion; I certainly meant to say $5 billion.

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