Damian Drum (Nicholls, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is an absolute joke that we have the Labor Party talking about failures in agriculture. It is just an absolute joke. I said yesterday in this House in relation to agriculture that you have to be very careful when you listen to the Labor Party talk because they say one thing but they had actioned themselves to do, if they were elected on 18 May, something totally different. Now we have the member for Bendigo raising the issue of illegal workers throughout the agricultural workforce. It's a great fear of mine that she's 100 per cent right. But what the two parties are going to do about this is totally different.

We have to understand that there could be thousands of people who have come out here on a legal visa and are currently fulfilling a crucial part of our workforce. A crucial part of our work is being done by people who have possibly stayed too long. We don't know the extent of this problem, but what are we going to do about it? What the Victorian Labor Party is going to do about it is smash them overnight by introducing legislation to fine people $500,000. What we actually have to do is put some thought into how we fix this problem of labour without smashing our agricultural industries. You can't do one without the other, unless you're the Labor Party, who have no idea and don't care about the consequences of these types of labour force amendments.

What we have to acknowledge is that the picture of agriculture is actually reasonably rosy, if you have water. Right around my patch—around northern Victoria and the Goulburn Valley—everyone wants to talk about the drought at the moment. To help people understand what's going on, we've had 11 weeks of good rain, but that's not going to fix the drought in our area because the price of water is still $600 a megalitre and the price of grain is over $500 a tonne, so all the pressure points that are associated with the drought are still in place. But we just need another good 10 weeks of rain and we'll be through the rough part of it. Many of the dairy farmers throughout the Goulburn Valley—which represents far more dairy farmers in any one patch than anywhere else in Australia—will get through this if we can support them, and that's what we've been doing. With the farm household allowance, we've been there to support them. With the low-interest concessional loans, we've been there to support them. We've been there to help the grain growers through this.

This side of the parliament is working hand in glove with our farmers on a whole raft of actions, and then there are a whole range of policies and actions on the side of Labor who want to take more water out of active and productive agriculture. They want to take more water away from our farmers. It's in their policies. Two weeks before the election, they produced one of the most damning policy papers that you could ever read. The member for Bendigo actually had to come across to the Goulburn Valley and try and defend it, and she was totally unable to defend the document in a debate with the Minister for Agriculture. She had no idea about the water policies that the member for Watson had put in place for the Labor Party. To take more water out of agriculture and force the price of water even higher, to put out there a policy paper that is all about the health of fish within the Murray-Darling Basin, but being totally—

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