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

It would pay the minister to listen to this. He's a southerner. He is in the southern faction, and he might not understand this: our cattle herd is now the lowest it has been for 30 years. And, of course, our cattle make a very substantial contribution to our greenhouse gas emissions.

So here's our Prime Minister taking the first opportunity in six years to claim a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, as small as the fall was, but what he's celebrating is not his capacity to get them down in the energy sector or the transport sector; he's celebrating the fact our agricultural sector is in crisis. He is putting it up on the mantle like a trophy. It's that he's allowed the agriculture sector to fall into such a bad state. If there were any farmers listening to question time yesterday, they must have been well and truly shaking their head at the fact the Prime Minister was celebrating the challenges they are facing in their own farming communities and in their own farm businesses.

The bill is okay. It further improves the farm household allowance. Each bill has, actually. But you wouldn't want to have been a farmer in 2014-15, trying to secure farm household allowance or trying to survive on farm household allowance, because, on this 13th occasion, you can see what the improvements have built. If you were there before these improvements, you were in trouble.

This bill is another admission that since 2014 this government has been getting farm household allowance wrong. Again, I suspect we'll be back some time in the new year doing another amendment. Income support is just one piece of the jigsaw puzzle. Income support is important. By the way, I think the government has spent $375 million, or thereabouts, allocating farm household allowance to a total of 12½ thousand farmers over time. Again, $375 million sounds like a lot of money, and it is in anybody's language, as I said earlier, of the $100 million, but if you said to an elector in Blacktown, 'Does $375 million for our farmers sound like a lot?' they would say: 'What? Didn't the Prime Minister promise the Americans $150 million to send a man from the moon to Mars?' That's what they would say. They would say, 'That doesn't sound like a lot of money to me.'

The government can't have it both ways. They can't say, 'We're spending $7 billion' one day, when we know that to be untrue, and then make out that farmers everywhere are benefitting from the farm household allowance when, in aggregate, the total spend has been $375 million. I think that figure alone gives people who aren't close to this subject a pretty good indication of the investment the government is making in our farmers who are facing drought.

I want to return to the supplementary payment because there's been a lot of spin from the other side about this. The government decided to cut the farmers off again—probably a thousand farming families have already been cut off, and many more will be cut off into the new year—and then, when they realised they were in trouble, they decided to give them what was described not by them but by the media, rightly, as an 'exit payment', a payment on the way out. What is the policy rationale for cutting people off and then giving them an upfront six-month payment? There is none. Again, that's not very helpful to those who didn't qualify for that, because that bill had not yet passed this parliament. No, the rationale here is to set up an arrangement where the government can defer expenditure to chase that trophy budget surplus again. This is all smoke and mirrors so that the Prime Minister can grab that trophy surplus.

Then, of course, when this gained momentum and the government realised they were in trouble, they said: 'Oh, there's a ministerial rule. We can give them another bonus payment six months after that.' But there is no guarantee. They made that announcement only because they were in trouble politically. Farmers have no way of developing a budget, because they have no way of knowing whether or not the government will make good on that promise. They're on the never-never there. They don't know what is next. Why can't the government simply say, 'We won't take any more people off farm household allowance while this severe drought is ongoing'?

Some on the other side will say, 'Well, everyone agreed back in 2012 that farm household allowance should be time limited.' Yes, they did. It seemed a reasonable proposition. You were given three years and, during that period, you either remodelled your farm business, grew your farm business, or thought about getting out and doing something else. But no-one could have conceived in 2012 that we would have a drought so long and so severe as this, and, when the facts change, you change your mind. We on this side certainly have had a very significant change of mind. We've supported in a bipartisan way every proposition the government has put forward, and I say again: 'Put the proposition forward to just leave people on farm household allowance while this drought is ongoing, and we will support it. You do not have to have concerns about opposition resistance to that change; in fact, you will have our very, very strong support.'

In closing, I offer bipartisan support on another matter. Our dairy industry is in crisis. We heard last week that, in Queensland, we're losing a dairy farmer a week. When does it end? When will the Prime Minister finally recognise we have a very significant problem here? When will he realise that we are at real risk now of losing our dairy industry and being almost entirely import dependent for our dairy products, including our drinking milk? That's how bad it is, and there are plenty of people out there on the lawns who agree with this proposition today.

We gave the government the opportunity in the Senate this week to support a bill to put in place a minimum farmgate price. I know it's not strictly in the economic textbook, but we have a real problem here and it will get fixed only through significant structural intervention. The refusal by those on the other side to join us on this matter is, quite frankly, a disgrace and has dairy farmers everywhere shaking their heads.

A code of conduct is great. We've supported that for four years, at least. The ACCC recommended a mandatory code of conduct 20 months ago now, but do we have one? No, we still don't, because, again, those on the other side are fighting about what it should look like. But, even if we do finally get a mandatory code of conduct, it will not be enough. It won't address the market failure that Senator Susan McDonald spoke about last week in the other place. We need something more than that. We need intervention, and we need to ensure that our dairy farmers know that for the next 12 months and the 12 months after that they will get a payment for their milk somewhere above their cost of production. Their costs continue to rise, exacerbated by drought, but the price they receive for their milk remains very stubbornly flat, and it's about time we did something about that, and it's about time those on the other side, particularly those from the National Party, joined us in doing something about it.

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