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

Only wild catch. It is something I would ask the minister to reflect on. There might be some improvements capable of being made there. That reminds me that many in the fishing industry have been impacted by the fires too and some are still employed but not being paid. It's an area that the minister might want to reflect on and have a look at as well.

Obviously, the forestry industry has also been impacted by the fires in a very, very significant way. We already had a product supply problem in this country. We've all talked for too long about growing a billion trees. We now need to grow, I think, two billion if we are to make up for the shortfall due to the loss from the fires. I'm very pleased to see Premier Daniel Andrews in Victoria now reflecting on his decision to phase out the hardwood forest industry. That decision was, I thought, a poor one originally and it is a particularly poor one now in light of the resource which has been lost through the fires.

Forestry and fisheries, for some very strange reason, were left out and excluded from the government's 2015 white paper—that now discredited 2015 white paper, which I may return to. It is fair to say that, despite all the significant issues I've raised, the government, after more than six years now in office, has no overarching strategic plan for the agriculture sector. I spoke to a leader of one of the farm groups recently—I won't mention the group or the name. I challenged him to name one significant thing, one big policy area, where the government has provided some advantage for his industry, and, unsurprisingly, he could not. The white paper was much anticipated. According to the member for New England, it was going to change the very face of the agriculture sector. Expectations rose and rose and rose, because it took forever—from the 2013 election through to sometime in 2015—for the white paper to finally arrive, only to leave everyone deflated. It was not what the sector had been promised, and there was widespread disappointment within the sector.

The NFF has a thing called the 2030 Roadmap. In fact, there are two of them—I didn't realise that until today—which basically seem to say the same thing. I'll work that out some time soon. It's a fine document. It's a high-level document, stating, largely, the obvious. The NFF have rightly set themselves some aspirations out to 2030. They have an ambition to grow the industry to $100 billion in value by 2030. That's something that we've all supported. In fact, I was with the minister and made a contribution to the document, in the foreword, when it was released.

We all think it's a wonderful idea to grow the value of the industry to $100 billion. But, having signed up to the prospect, the government needs to demonstrate how it intends to get the sector there—remembering that, after all the calamities we've recently faced, we are going backwards. The starting point was, I think, $60 billion, and we're not going to $100 billion; we're going backwards. That's not all the government's fault—as I said, this was the result of recent natural disaster events—but the government does need to demonstrate that it has a strategic plan to reach $100 billion. It just can't keep saying, every time it talks about agriculture, that it's backing the National Farmers Federation plan.

That's not a policy; that's a cop-out. That's laziness. That's a government too interested in populism and grants here and there to win votes in National Party electorates but not interested in the hard work of policy—taking on the challenges in the land sector, working out what we're going to do about our changing climate, what we're going to do about natural resource allocation, how we're going to lift productivity, how we're going to lift profitability and how we're going to make sure the farm sector participates more in the carbon economy. These are the hard things that take work. How are we going to make them more resilient in the face of drought. The minister will say, 'We've got our Future Drought Fund of $100 million a year.' It won't be enough. While I have great confidence in Brent Finlay, who's giving guidance to the government on how that money might be spent, I do have concerns that in the end it will be divvied up, pretty evenly and proportionately amongst the states to keep everyone happy. That won't, in the end, keep everyone happy, because it won't deliver the outcomes the sector so desperately needs.

We do have to reflect hard on the extent to which we can continue to meet our aspirations on export markets. Both major political parties in this place can claim credit for free trade agreements. They're not full replacements for multilateral arrangements, but we find ourselves in a global environment in which they are the best we can achieve. We, on both sides of this House, have an equal commitment to making sure our growers, producers, fishers and others have fair access in some of these enormous Asian markets in particular.

From time to time we should ask ourselves whether we can just continue to increase the volumes we produce, given all the challenges I've talked about, particularly relating to climate and natural resources. We currently grow enough food to feed twice as many people as we have here in Australia; so we're exporting two-thirds of everything we produce. But how long can we keep growing that? It is alright to open the markets, which, by the way, aren't necessarily opening because of ongoing restrictions in non-tariff barriers—some of which are in part addressed in this bill today—but can we produce the goods? Can we continue to grow our product? Are we sufficiently embracing innovation to give us the capacity to grow and produce more? Are we sufficiently talking about innovation around GMOs, for example? That's an important area in which we're still having an ongoing debate in this country and where there are significant differences in this country. Without fully embracing plant breeding techniques, we will not be able to increase our volumes. We will not be able to fill those opportunities we've found for ourselves on export markets.

Again, we have to increase volumes in the face of diminishing natural resources and a more challenging climate. These are big challenges, but where is the discussion about these in the cabinet? I don't hear about them. I don't read about them in the newspaper. It's not good enough to say, 'We're backing the National Farmers Federation document,' and, 'We have secured free trade agreements.' That doesn't make for profitability in the agriculture sector. If you accept that our capacity to increase volumes is limited, then we have to make sure those natural resources are chasing value—that is, niche, premium products. These things are happening, of course, in our economy, but are not widespread, and government is not providing the sort of strategic guidance to encourage people to do so, nor is government encouraging the foreign investment we will require to build the infrastructure we need to take up these opportunities.

I have said it in here too many times before, I suppose, but the current minister for climate change was the key author in a document, backed by the ANZ Bank, which said that to grow to our aspirations by 2050 we needed something like $600 billion of capital investment. As a country of 25 million and therefore 25 million savers, axiomatically we are going to have to have, and continue to have, a heavy reliance on foreign investment. That foreign investment will need to grow, not decline.

The only way we take the Australian people with us on that question—because we all know in this place that there are sensitivities in our community about foreign investment, particularly investment coming from Asia; it seemed it was okay when it was coming from the UK, Canada, the United States and New Zealand, but people are concerned about an over-reliance on Asian foreign investment—and the only way we will be successful in reassuring people that they need not have concerns about that is if we say it together. I appeal to people in this place—and we're not all from One Nation—to stop attempting to build political capital at the expense of those in our agriculture sector who will need significant foreign investment if they are going to make their ventures as successful as they would like them to be.

Guidance is important. When you're talking about foreign investment, investors want to know that the government in the country they are considering is stable—and we haven't had much of that of late. They want to know that the government is focused on making us look like a country where sovereign risk is very low. We need a government that is not lowering thresholds as a signal to our investors that we're not open for business but indeed sending the right messages—that we are open for business, that we need their investment, that we welcome their investment and that the door is well and truly open for them.

But that's not happening. It is not happening in this parliament, it didn't happen in the last parliament and it didn't happen in the parliament before that. Indeed, for much of that time we had a minister, in the member for New England, who was far more interested in using the portfolio to further the aspirations of the National Party than he was in furthering the aspirations of the nation. The white paper I spoke about is exhibit A—a grab bag of initiatives that press every political button out there in rural Australia. But none of those buttons were effective. Most of them no longer exist, because they failed. Multi-peril crop insurance is a perfect example. Every second farmer thinks that the whole world would be just fine if he had multi-peril crop insurance or some form of risk based protection.

But it's a difficult issue. It's a complex issue. The white paper included rebates to farmers to help them secure the consultancies they needed to measure their base risk on their farms. That failed. There were grants for cooperatives. It's good to see the member for Kennedy here. He'd be a fan of cooperatives—as are we all are, as a matter of principle.

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