Kay Hull (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is addressed to the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Transport and Regional Services. Would the Deputy Prime Minister update the House on the importance of irrigated agriculture to employment and investment in regional Australia and, in particular, my electorate of Riverina? Is the Deputy Prime Minister aware of any threats to our regional economies and the rice and cotton industry?

Mark Vaile (Lyne, National Party, Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Riverina for her question and recognise her great support of those irrigation industries in her area, particularly the value-adding that takes place in the rice industry. The irrigation sector of agriculture in Australia employs around 171,000 people. It is not just the farmers and their families on those farms in those irrigation areas; it is also the farm labourers and, just as importantly, the workers in the processing plants in those industries that are value-adding industries in regional Australia. They include the jobs of the workers in the cotton gins, in the rice mills and in the sugar mills—also irrigated agriculture—across Australia. We think that those people working in those industries do a fantastic job, and they are of great value not just to the Australian economy but particularly to regional economies across Australia.

But it has become clear that there are other people in the community who do not value those jobs, and we do not think those 171,000 workers throughout those industries are valued by the Australian Workers Union or by the National Secretary of the Australian Workers Union, or indeed the Australian Labor Party, as well as the union movement. We saw comments this morning from the endorsed candidate for Maribyrnong, who is also the Victorian Labor Party President and the National Secretary of the AWU, who actually represents many of those workers who work in the rice mills, in the sugar mills and in the cotton gins. He was quoted in the paper this morning as follows:

Union leader and Labor recruit Bill Shorten called yesterday for cotton and rice growers to be forced out of business and their water-intensive crops replaced by less thirsty options such as hemp.

You would think that the head of the AWU, and someone aspiring to be a minister in this place, would take an interest in the sustainability of jobs in those mills. He certainly does not, and he has shown that he does not care for those workers. I point out, because he is talking about the scarcity of water and water-intensive crops, that the rice industry has reduced its use of water by 30 per cent in the last 10 years. It has improved its efficient use of water by 30 per cent, while at the same time increasing production by 60 per cent over that period. The cotton industry has reduced its dependence on water by 18 per cent. Those are the sorts of things that you do—such as our government’s national water plan—to sustain an industry, rather than adopt harebrained ideas like that from Mr Shorten, which will put not only thousands of people out of work but thousands of his union’s members out of work. In an article in the Australian, Mr Shorten said:

The world wouldn’t end if, instead of growing cotton, we started growing hemp.

Mr Speaker, the world might not end, but the world might end for the workers in the rice mills, for the workers in the cotton gins and for the workers in the coalmines—just like the workers in the forestry industry if Labor had been elected at the last election. The one piece of advice we can give to the workers in those industries is: do not get between the Labor Party and Green preferences, because you will lose your job.