Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Justice and Customs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am pleased to continue my remarks on this bill, which is not disputed in any way by the opposition; the Rural Adjustment Amendment Bill 2009 simply extends the terms of engagement that members of the National Rural Advisory Council may have on that council. Yesterday I thanked the members of the council for their engagement with rural communities and their willingness to listen. I also appreciate the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry extending the exceptional circumstances declaration in my electorate of Farrer for a few more months. Pretty well all of the declarations now run out in March 2010. We will be looking to the minister to make further extensions should the drought not lift.

As is always the case at this time of year, we see across rural areas of Australia a patchy result. There has been reasonable cropping in some areas and reasonable water allocations in others but pretty well all along the Murray River in New South Wales we are still struggling. It will have to rain much, much more in the catchment for that to translate to improved water allocations for general-security and high-security users. One of the successes that I believe the previous government had with NRAC was in being able to engender an understanding within that organisation that drought is not just a matter of climate and rainfall but also a matter of water allocation.

I have spoken before in this House about the level of confusion and bewilderment in my electorate on the approach that the government has taken to water generally and to buybacks in particular. More recently, in the central Murray forests of New South Wales the approach of the environment minister to the superb parrot and the ongoing logging operations has indeed horrified us.

I want to touch on the minister for the environment’s actions because we as a community are, as I said, bewildered and confused, but we are also angry and disgusted. Some weeks back the issue hit the newspapers with a statement that the federal minister was directing the end of logging activities in the central Murray forests. These activities are conducted in a sustainable way under the auspices and the environmental supervision of the New South Wales government. The requirements that foresters have to meet in terms of the environment are strong and appropriate and they should be allowed to remain in place. But our federal department decided to use the superb parrot, which is on the threatened species list but towards the lower end of the list, as an excuse to bring the force of the federal EPBC legislation onto this issue and therefore take it away from New South Wales.

I believe it was only because of the strong response in the media, the reaction of talkback radio and the reaction of colleagues in this House and in the New South Wales parliament that the minister and his department took a step back. When I asked him, in consideration in detail on environmental issues last week, whether he would admit that logging in the central Murray forests was in fact not illegal, he did admit that logging was not illegal, but he did not give us any comfort that he or his department would take any action to reassure us about our future and allow this perfectly sustainable logging activity to continue; he just mumbled something about ongoing negotiations with New South Wales.

If you drive through inner Sydney, through the suburbs of Marrickville and Redfern, you will see signs saying, ‘Save the river red gum.’ That is the audience that this minister and this government are playing to—not the people who really matter, whose jobs are threatened, but the inner-city groups. While I make no criticism of their views, I will say this: they are totally uninformed. They, like the minister, have never travelled into western New South Wales and looked at the river to understand its operation or the life of the communities that live along it. If they had, they would not have pushed this decision. The decision comes from a Victorian decision to lock up the forests on the Victorian side of the river. There is a determination by the National Parks Association and the Wilderness Society in New South Wales to do the same on the New South Wales side.

It shows a complete lack of understanding about many things but in particular about forestry. Remember that these forests were not here millennia ago; they have been in existence for maybe 130 years, and they have grown to a level of maturity that has seen the forest stagnate, if you like. In order to regenerate the trees and keep the forest alive, the logging practice has moved from selective individual harvesting of trees to another type of harvesting which involves—and the green movement extravagantly call it clear-felling—removing a patch of trees 50 to 80 metres wide to produce a pocket of light in the forest to allow the air and sunlight in and allow the forest to regenerate. What these forests need more than anything, of course, is a drink, and that will only come when it rains. Nobody is taking the water away from them. The forests need a drink. In the absence of a drink, they are going to struggle, and continuing careful logging, recognising their level of stress, is entirely appropriate.

But this type of patch-felling has infuriated our green lobbies and environmentalists and they have taken serious action—including, as I said, driving this minister and his department to take the extraordinary step of saying they were going to close down activities. The minister has back-pedalled from that, but I still have in my possession the letter that his department wrote to New South Wales forestry demanding four separate actions, with deadlines including 31 May—which has passed, thank goodness—and other actions, all about restricting these genuinely sustainable logging activities along the Murray.

These forests will regenerate either by harvesting or by having a good drink, which will happen in due course. They will not regenerate by fire—unlike the blue gum forests that we have seen burn in the Kosciuszko National Park—because they are not high-altitude forests, but they will burn nevertheless. If they are locked up, that is inevitably going to be the result. If you look at the way that the Indigenous people have managed forestry in these parts of Australia, fire has been a very strong part of that. But the agenda of the federal department of the environment is to lock up these forests, the Lachlan, the Murrumbidgee and the Lower Darling—in fact, all sustainably managed red gum forests in New South Wales. Shame on them. This minister should hang his head in shame for the stress and the worry that he is putting the communities that I represent through.

The other source of stress and worry is of course the water buyback. I have spoken about that before in this House, but the latest example that comes to mind is the purchase of Booligal Station at the end of the Lachlan River. The Parliamentary Secretary for Water talked big about the amount of wetlands that were going to be boosted, birds that were going to return and water that was going to go back into the environment, but he may not be aware that the Lachlan has only reached the Murray twice in white man’s history. Booligal Station is extraordinarily dry not because greedy irrigators are taking the water but because it rarely has a water flow through it, certainly not in these times of drought. But, again, we saw an extraordinary sum of taxpayers’ money allocated to buy this water and buy this land.

I recall a similar exercise with the purchase of Yanga Station, near Balranald, which is also in my electorate. There were big promises from the New South Wales government at the time that thousands of visitors would come to Yanga Station—the small and relatively insignificant farming activities would be replaced by a boom in tourism not seen before, National Parks would be able to station new employees there and the local Indigenous people would be able to get involved. It ticked every box. Unfortunately, well over a year later—probably two years later—we had a rather low-profile opening of Yanga National Park. I do not know whether anyone has done a visitor count, but I know that it would be very small indeed. As for the jobs: of course they have never eventuated. The park is managed from the National Parks office in Hay. There is nothing wrong with that, but New South Wales do not have the resources to put people there to manage the park properly, to even begin to implement all of the promises that they talked about at the time. We are going to see the same thing with Booligal Station, and we are not going to see any real water returned to the environment as a result.

As we who live and work in the irrigation regions of Australia know, all that is being purchased with this silly exercise is air space in the dam. Water reform should be simple—in fact, it is not. I was in Wentworth on the weekend, which is where the Darling meets the Murray in western New South Wales. The town was celebrating its 150th year—looking back 150 years and looking forward 150 years. When I talked to people about what they thought might be different in 150 years time, they were sadly very doubtful that the community would be there in the same way that it is now. The most commonly expressed sentiment was regarding the federal government’s approach to water. Okay, we accept that water is going to be taken out of our districts; we have had that message hammered home. But what is going to happen in its place? And what are you going to do, Mr Rudd, about the dislocation and the rural communities in crisis as a result? What are your plans for our communities, for our future, given that you are removing so much of our water?

But of course no planning has actually happened. I was amazed to see that the Wakool Shire Council, along the Murray River, has done its own socioeconomic study. I should not be amazed, because if these studies are not going to be done by the appropriate bodies and agencies in government then I guess local communities will have to do them, in an attempt to try to make their case. The study that Wakool Shire Council commissioned, by RMCG Consulting, clearly shows that water leaving the district permanently will result in loss of people, reduced income and reduced business in service industries. It was a rigorous study in one district that has about 300,000 megalitres of water entitlement. What this study showed was the level of impact. For every 1,000 megalitres of water lost from the region—and, remember, there are 300,000 megalitres in just this one district—there would be $300,000 of agricultural production lost within this one shire; up to $900,000 lost from the regional economy; $3,500 in direct rate revenue lost, which of course is just the beginning—we know the flow-on effects from that; and the loss of agricultural and regional jobs. If you multiply the effect across a district you do in fact end up with ghost towns along the Murray. As somebody who represents these areas, I am quite frightened by what we have to do as a community to mitigate the effects of this—given, as I said, that the government are very keen to purchase the water. As soon as they can they spruik those purchases from the rooftops—meaningless though they are, as I said—and talk about what good things they have done, to satisfy, I am guessing, the inner-city voters in Sydney, Melbourne and other coastal areas of Australia. But what they have left us with is truly something horrible. I do not want to contemplate the future. So I use the opportunity of this debate on the Rural Adjustment Amendment Bill to again ask the government to please allocate some resources to helping the communities adjust to their future. We know it will be very different; it is already very different. Help us adjust.

One final thing I want to mention in the context of this bill relates to the stimulus funding. Much has been said about the poor targeting of the schools money. But what has particularly irritated me as I have looked around my communities is not necessarily that schools and facilities that are provided to our communities are not what we might really want—sometimes they are, but mostly they are not; they are basically what we are told we deserve—but that the actual mechanism for delivering, for example, portable school halls or other pieces of physical infrastructure is all done from afar. I have heard the most horrific figures about how much the New South Wales government is slicing off. In the case of one school project almost half of the funds, for a hall that half the town does not want, are not even going to leave Sydney; they are directly going from the federal government to the New South Wales government to prop up its ailing bureaucracy and infrastructure—because we all know the parlous state of New South Wales government finances. If these projects were managed locally, what a great job they would do.

A weekend ago I was at an opening of a new occasional childcare centre in South Albury. What was remarkable about this project was that the entire project management was done by the Rotary Club of Albury North. In Rotary you have people with expertise in a wide range of areas. They came together and found the carpenters, the architects, the designers, the builders, the carpet layers, the painters, the fittings and the fixtures, and they went with their networks in local communities, as only Rotary and other service clubs have, and they made all this happen, under time and under budget. It could not have been done by a government department in the same way. It was quite extraordinary. I got back to my office and I had a letter from the same Rotary club raising another matter. They know that carers’ accommodation is needed at the Albury Base Hospital. They and the Zonta Club have been working on a proposal examining how facilities in other regional areas work. They have conducted local-needs surveys, joined with the Bone Marrow Donor Institute and the Fight Cancer Foundation, formed a working group, surveyed similar facilities and they have something up and running. Now, quite reasonably, they are looking to either state or federal government to provide some funding for this. Imagine if we instigated a policy that focused on local service clubs doing project management where they can. Imagine how much local stimulus that would provide—and that appears to be what the government is desperately trying to do. It would not just be at times when we needed to inject money into communities; it could be at any time and it could be an ongoing process.

Every newspaper story about New South Wales that I pick up talks about the extraordinary amounts of money that anybody in New South Wales has to pay to get anything and the ridiculous procurement hoops they have to jump through even if it is for ice-creams, bandages or the smallest of things. They are not allowed to source goods for their hospitals, schools and local communities. We do have the networks there. We have community groups who know how to do this and who can do it better than anyone else. We should be calling on those groups.

In conclusion, I look forward to NRAC working closely with the communities in the electorate of Farrer. We all look forward to the day when they can be put on ice because the drought is no longer, but that day is some distance off. I commend the bill.

Tony Windsor (New England, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I listened very closely and with interest to the member for Farrer’s speech on the Rural Adjustment Amendment Bill 2009. She voiced some concerns about water, government buybacks et cetera which many people in the north of the state would share. I urge her to keep an eye on the Murray-Darling Basin Authority and the way in which its board views the mandatory content provisions when they are developing the Murray-Darling Basin plan. Those provisions—and I think there are five pages of them in the act—were put in place by the former government. They do provide a number of guidelines for the planning process. They are ‘mandatory content’ and are not to be varied. I ask all people on the Murray-Darling to keep a very close eye on that because a number of areas in that planning process could have quite dramatic impacts on the farm sector, particularly the irrigation sector, if they are not adhered to in the appropriate fashion. The government may attempt to change some of those provisions or suggest to the authority or to the board that they go lightly on some of the mandatory content and not so lightly on others. It is something we all need to bear in mind.

We are debating today essentially the rural adjustment program and the reappointment of the National Rural Advisory Council committee. That has been in place for some time. This bill allows those people who have served an initial term to serve up to two terms longer in that role. Obviously, I and other speakers are supportive of that, but it does give all of us the opportunity to talk about what is happening in drought funding and drought policy. NRAC was set up by the previous government and has carried on during this government’s term under the same guidelines. This is one of the first changes we have seen and it is a positive change in my view.

NRAC has had oversight of drought policy. Drought policy has really been driven over the last decade or longer now by what has been called ‘exceptional circumstances’—exceptional events in terms of climate and how they trigger certain assistance from the government. The member for Goldstein, who has just left the chamber, would well remember when he was with the National Farmers Federation back in the 1980s that, prior to exceptional circumstances, drought was considered under natural disaster auspices. Given that the government is reviewing drought policy generally, it should have a close look at the previous natural disaster policies because there may be something to be learnt from the past.

I have argued from time to time that exceptional drought—not just a dry spell—should be considered in a similar fashion to other natural disasters, such as the Darwin cyclone, the incident that occurred in North Queensland, the Newcastle earthquake, the Sydney hailstorm and the Wollongong mudslide, where there were all sorts of arguments with insurance companies. In those natural disasters governments of different persuasions have come in to assist people, as they should. What we have tended to do with drought policy is say that a one-in-25-year or a one-in-50-year drought is just a business risk that you have to accept and take on board.

I have raised from time to time a solution to that. A hailstorm is a natural disaster, and there was assistance for those people. Cyclones are no different to droughts in that they occur occasionally. There might only be one in 100 years, but people have not put aside money to make sure that they can replace the building they are in. The insurance companies create havoc and a whole range of other things happen at those times. We need to view natural disasters in a slightly different way and establish a national natural disaster fund. If all taxpayers set aside a sum of money, when a natural disaster did strike—whether it be in the city or the country, or whether it be a massive cyclone event or a mudslide at Coffs Harbour or Wollongong—we would have a fund that was depoliticised to the extent that it was triggered under certain circumstances.

An extreme drought—and in my view it would probably be more extreme than that which triggers exceptional circumstances—would trigger some assistance, as would an extreme hail event across Sydney that caused massive amounts of damage. A dollar a week from every Australian raises a billion dollars in a year. I am not suggesting that we are going to take a dollar a week from every child, but it highlights the capacity to raise a lot of money with very little coming from each individual. We could set aside $2 billion or have a fund for which the amount paid in was reduced when it reached a certain level—there is a word for that which I cannot think of.

If we carried out a survey of the insurance companies and looked at what natural disasters have cost the nation—bearing in mind that they cost the individuals who are impacted on much more significantly than they cost the nation, but anyone of us can be in a situation in which an unfortunate event occurs—we would find that there have been only two years since the early 1970s in which natural disasters have cost more than $1 billion. That is the information that I have been able to obtain. Most times, on average natural disasters cost the nation somewhere between $200 million and $300 million—20c to 30c a week from every Australian would cover such events through a depoliticised national natural disaster fund.

With climate change and a whole range of things, such as the tightening of the insurance markets and global economic markets, I suggest we look closely at how we are going to fund these events—not only in terms of droughts—into the future and how we are going to decouple them from the political process. There have been a number of circumstances in which an election has been around the corner, a disaster has occurred and government aid has gone in because it is a marginal seat, whereas for a similar disaster somewhere else people have been left to themselves to argue with the insurance companies. It is something we should have a close look at.

Within the electorate of New England, the drought has ebbed and flowed, as it has in most electorates. We have been relatively well off in recent years. I say that knowing full well that the areas around Bundarra and Dundee, which I am sure the press gallery—and it is good to see so many of them here—are well aware of, are still in my view suffering from the impacts of drought. I have been in contact with the minister and I appreciate what he has done. NRAC, the advisory council, has reviewed those circumstances and given a negative recommendation to the minister. But I put on record that there are areas within regions that are still subject to drought even though the majority of some of those regions are in a relatively good position.

That highlights one of the underlying problems with this. If an area applies for exceptional circumstances, for instance, and there are sub-areas within it that have had relatively good rainfall and pasture growth or cropping events, they can rule each other out. Occasionally, making applications for quite large areas has been to the detriment of the smaller areas within them which have been greatly impacted and are still in drought.

I give credit to Keith Perrett, who is not in my electorate but not far from it. I know Keith quite well. He has been the chairman of NRAC, which is not an easy job, but is one that he and his board have done within the guidelines that were set up by the previous government and carried on by the present government, given some of the blemishes in those guidelines and the criticisms from time to time that come from people within the various areas who believe they should still be accessing exceptional circumstances payments.

I also pay credit to an adviser of mine, a chap called Spot Cunningham, who is an expert on land use and drought, and an Indigenous associate of his, Terry Doolan. Terry is well versed in some of the Indigenous practices in land use that were carried on before white man arrived. I spent some time with Terry in the electorate of the member for Parkes.

Mark Coulton (Parkes, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Water Resources and Conservation) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Did you have a passport?

Tony Windsor (New England, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Do you have Louth? No, it is not in your electorate; it is on the Darling River. I spent time with Terry at Louth discussing many water issues and activities that occurred in that area in the Aboriginal community. Both those men are well versed in land use management from slightly different angles and have been of great assistance to me in terms of their advice. I was with Terry only last week and we were talking about the Murray-Darling system and the Menindee Lakes. For those who do not know, there are very high evaporation rates at those lakes. It is quite a ridiculous structure in a sense. I know that that would probably upset some of the people in the Broken Hill area, but the way in which water is stored in those very shallow systems and the evaporation rates that occur in those systems are quite extraordinary.

Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Hear, hear!

Tony Windsor (New England, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

If we are serious about adapting to climate change, we have to look at re-engineering structures like the Menindee Lakes and making them deeper and covering less surface area. In a sense, you can create water because you do not let us much water evaporate from the system. I appreciate the member for Kennedy, who is an expert on northern waters and other land use and social issues. He is well read on these issues and someone whose counsel I always consider when given.

Speaking of climate change, I have not supported the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme that is before the parliament at the moment. It is quite meaningless to have a five per cent target. It is pointless rearranging the economy to achieve a five per cent objective. I know that there are provisions in there such that if the rest of the globe comes on board we move out to 25 per cent.

I have a private member’s bill on a similar issue before the parliament which has higher requirements in carbon equivalent emissions reductions than the government’s bill. One of the things that is in my private member’s bill—and I have talked to some of the bureaucracies in the building from time to time about this—is that there be a calculation of the impact of climate change on run-off within the Murray-Darling system. We are constantly being told that climate change is going to impact on run-off and water within the system, and that is used as justification for the buyback of water within that system. I am told that the amount of run-off could be up to a 30 per cent reduction—obviously that percentage varies—on 1990 levels. That will have an extraordinary impact on the Murray-Darling system and the things that the member for Farrer spoke about will become much more amplified. Some suggest that climate change is just a myth and it is never going to happen. The question I would pose—and we are all very concerned about what is happening to agriculture in the Murray-Darling system—is: what if it happens and 30 per cent is the reduction in run-off? The significance of that for the irrigation industry, food production and the farm sector is just catastrophic. People who are suggesting that this should just be ignored and we should hope to God that it does not happen should be a little bit more considerate of the other side of the debate and consider what if it does happen.

One of the ‘what ifs’ that is there—and this is an assumption that the rest of the globe is not going to do anything about this issue—is that we who live in the Murray-Darling system are going to suffer the brunt of other people’s emissions and human induced effects. One of the things we should do is to calculate those effects. The climate scientists are saying—and I think the member for Kennedy would verify this—that some parts of Australia will get more rain because of the human induced carbon emissions atmospheric condition. Other parts will get less rain and the Murray-Darling system, particularly the southern end, is going to be one of those areas, which will be a human induced problem.

What is wrong with fixing both those problems by shifting some of the water in North Queensland into that part of the component that is driven by climate change within the Murray-Darling system? Theoretically, people would like to think that if we take control of our emissions we reduce the problem and everything will go back to nature. One of the things that I would like the government and the parliament to consider is, if that does not actually happen, how we repair the human induced damage to the Murray-Darling system. The only way I can see to do that is to bring water into it. The fairest way to do that would be to bring it from the source that is being created by the same human induced conditions, from the areas that are going to get more. Obviously, the ocean will be one of those sources. We are told we are going to have more water in the oceans because of the ice melt. I happen to believe that, others do not, but we will all be dead before we find out who was right. Some of those structural things need to be looked at; otherwise, we run the risk of destroying one of the great food bowls of this nation.

The member for Kennedy, who will give one of his brilliant speeches a bit later in this debate, will I am sure talk about the proportion of water in the north. I know he does not like praise, but praise is due to him from time to time, and I enjoy his speeches. He does make a very significant point about these massive amounts of water. People say Australia is a very dry nation, but the Fitzroy River in Western Australia, for instance, has the second highest inflow into an ocean of any river in the world. We are surrounded by water. Some people in Adelaide say they need someone from Tamworth to give up their water so that someone in Adelaide can have a drink. Adelaide is on the edge of water: they just have to take the salt out and drink it. There is plenty there and there is more coming apparently if climate change has anything to do with it in the future.

The other issue I raise is land use. Essentially, to manage drought we have to look at land use for the future. I am a member of the Standing Committee on Primary Industries and Resources. The committee will be going to Tamworth next week and we will be looking at some of the issues up there, particularly the innovative issues such as no-tool farming techniques, some of the pasture technologies out there now and GPS technologies, such as Tramtrac. The issue I raise with the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry is that when he is formulating drought policy for the future he will need to look at the things that are naturally drought-proofing some of our farmlands and try to promote those. I think the member for Parkes would agree that no-tool farming is one of those issues that actually creates additional moisture in cropping technologies. It should be promoted and there are other technologies that should be promoted as well. (Time expired)

Mark Coulton (Parkes, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Water Resources and Conservation) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Rural Adjustment Amendment Bill 2009. Essentially, this bill is to extend the period of tenure for the members of the NRAC board. I do not have any major concerns with that. I think the members of the NRAC board are quite competent, and its chair, Keith Perrett, has done a good job. I am a little concerned about why this is happening. As we look into the budget estimates, that there are no forward estimates beyond 2010 for drought assistance alarmed me a little. Hopefully, that is just like an optimistic weather forecast and that we will get out of it, but I am concerned. I am also concerned about the subtle changes in the way that drought is being referred to by this government and how the government perceives agriculture in general. In a report that came out last year, the word ‘dryness’ has replaced the word ‘drought’. Dryness then becomes a permanent state of affairs rather than a drought, which has a beginning, a middle and an end. I am concerned about that. I will speak about the issues of my electorate of Parkes in a minute.

The other issue that concerns me is that all of my electorate has come out of exceptional circumstances funding. I have had farmers trying to apply for the transitional funding and finding it very difficult. There is quite a large document and most need assistance with it. Not many of them have been successful. One of the criteria in this document is for a farmer to put his climate change strategy for his farm. I was a farmer for 35 years and I just find that a very vague thing to have to do. If they are successful after filling out the form and have a climate change strategy, they then have funding that enables them to undertake some sort of TAFE course or training to improve their management. I find that patronising to the farmers of Australia. What is being said in fact is: the reason that you are having financial difficulties is not because you are in drought; it is because we are now in a period of permanent dryness and, basically, you lack the education to handle these changes, so we are going to fund you to do a course to improve your management. I believe that teaching a farmer to adapt to climate change would be tantamount to teaching your grandmother to suck eggs.

We will not go into the debate of whether the climate is changing or whether climate change is man made; it is about incremental changes over a period of time. Farmers have dealt with changes in climate on a short-term basis—from periods of drought to flood to frost to high temperature—and they have adapted to that very well. What they have not been able to adapt to is where, in certain areas, they have had drought for seven, eight or nine years, which has been recorded as possibly the worst drought in 100 years.

There were reports of drought in the 1900s. My father talked about his father talking about the big drought in 1900 to 1910 where the Gwydir River, which runs through the area where I live, completely ceased to run and had a body of grass over it. So long-term, serious drought is not new to Australia. One of the things that probably changed the way we looked at our climate was the period of the fifties and sixties, which were exceptionally good years for agriculture, particularly in eastern Australia. Maybe that became the benchmark on which we judge things. I feel that there is a shift. I think this shows there is a clear lack of understanding of the level of expertise in the hands of farmers in rural Australia today.

The member for New England mentioned no-till farming and tram tracking—a whole range of things for moisture retention. Indeed, 30 years ago my brothers and I were some of the first people in Australia, in conjunction with the New South Wales department of agriculture and Monsanto, who did work on zero-till farming. It was quite revolutionary at the time. Following on from that, the University of Sydney, at the Livingston Farm at Moree, really bit the bullet and modified machinery. Indeed, the way that we farm now is entirely different. If farmers today farmed like their fathers or grandfathers did they would have serious problems.

We need to have a clear understanding that the problems farmers are having now with drought are not of their own making. I am speaking generally. Obviously there are cases where there is poor management, but in general it is not of their own making; it is because of a period of exceptional lack of rain for the many, many years. The tragedy of this is that quite often the people who tend to survive these long periods of drought are the older farmers, the more established ones, the ones who have not taken any risks and do not have a large amount of debt. Obviously some of the ones who cannot hang on have large amounts of debt and may be overextended. But the real tragedy is that quite often the most vulnerable are the young farmers. I have a stack of them in my electorate. More often than not they get a tertiary degree, work, gain a lot of managerial and agronomic experience and then come back and put that in place with the corporate knowledge of their family and do very well, but they have extended themselves. While someone who has a higher level of debt, because of buying a farm and purchasing machinery, can handle a couple of years, seven or eight years is nearly beyond them.

The real tragedy of this drought is that we are losing many of our young people. As the world starts to really think about where food comes from, I am really concerned about where our farmers of the future will come from. I firmly believe that the family farm is the most efficient unit of agriculture. I speak from personal experience. I have to say, it can be quite a stressful unit to work in, but on the whole it is the most efficient way. It is a game that you can learn from knee-high. The best farmers I know are the ones who have combined generations of experience with modern education and learning. I am concerned that we will lose those farmers.

Specifically, in my area I have places that have not been badly affected by the drought. The northern parts of my electorate and, indeed, my own area have been quite fortunate. You can see in the areas that have not been affected by drought, as you go around as a member of parliament, that the age of the community is much younger. But unfortunately that is not the same right across my electorate. At the moment the last regions that were taken out of drought funding, where farmers lost their EC payments, were in the southern part of my electorate. I am talking about Dubbo, Wellington and Mudgee. I am not going to be overly critical of NRAC because basically those areas have had a bit of rain and there is a green tinge. NRAC only makes a recommendation on seasonal conditions and, ultimately, it is up to the minister to decide whether there has been a sufficient level of recovery.

In the last two or three months I have dealt with a considerable amount of correspondence and phone calls. And I acknowledge the staff from Minister Burke who are here today taking note of this debate. It is notable that they are here and I know that they are aware of correspondence that has come through me because I handed it on. I know that all governments battle with the problem of the lines on a map. I have had a conversation with the minister about that and the problem of people in isolated pockets. The member for New England alluded to it being a problem in his area as well.

But this is no consolation for people who find themselves now with no foreseeable income. They have sold everything they can to get through the drought. It is extremely frustrating for them. Lambs are now at record value but, because of the drought, they have had poor joining percentages and they have not had enough feed for long enough to finish their livestock, whether lambs or cattle. So they have been severely hampered financially.

To top it off, wheat growers in the area were severely disadvantaged last harvest because of the shemozzle caused by the removal of the single desk. There was not even a price for grain after harvest. They were extremely stressed financially and did not have the ability to store their grain and market it throughout the year—as is the way now with grain marketing. They did not have the ability to purchase infrastructure to store that grain, nor did they have the ability to hang onto it. They had to sell it to the first person who would give them a price. I was somewhat disturbed by one of the minister’s last contributions in this place with regard to this when he claimed that there had been an advantage in dollar terms because of the deregulation of the wheat market. Plainly, out on the ground, that is not the case.

I believe that the minister—and I have contacted the minister—needs to engage with the farmers. It is one thing to be the one to deliver good news, but I also think that leadership and ministerial responsibility means that you have to deliver the bad news and you have to explain the reason behind that. As the minister and the government work out where we are going with this drought funding, I think it would be very beneficial for him to speak now to the farmers who have come off EC so that they can explain to him exactly what this means. In a lot of cases it means selling out. It means leaving. While there is an ability to obtain household support, what has been keeping these people going is the interest subsidy and the removal of that interest subsidy pretty well means that they are going to have to move on.

Maybe some farmers in the Coonamble, the Coonabarabran or the North West Slopes areas, who got an extension last year for seasonal conditions, will be able to organise finance, because there is light at the end of the tunnel for them. But I think the ones who missed out last year and the ones who are in a fairly dry period this time will have trouble in obtaining carry-on finance.

So I would ask the minister to take seriously his responsibility to his constituents. The agriculture sector, despite the years of drought, was responsible for the positive balance of trade figures in the first quarter of this year. The agriculture sector has the ability to carry its weight as a viable part of the Australian community but it needs help to get through this period of time. There are indications that the season is changing and that we might be looking for a crop this year, but we need to nurture these farmers.

We need to put money into research so that we know where the next best thing is. In farming I firmly believe that, if you think you know how agriculture works, you should get out of it because it is an ever-changing feast. How I operated my property, on the knowledge I had, was entirely different from the way my father operated, and I have to say that in the couple of years I have been out of the industry things have moved on. My brothers now have tractors that are completely satellite guided and the precision they have and the savings they make are quite spectacular.

I would ask the minister to come out and engage with the people on the ground. He is very quick to get on his feet and play politics in this place. He is very quick to poke fun at the Nationals and ‘cockies corner’, as it is referred to—that name might be a badge of pride up this way—but the people in regional Australia want him to be out there and want him to engage. They want him to speak with them and explain to them why he thinks they no longer need support to get through this drought. He might be able to explain how they are going to carry on with their farms. He might be able to explain who is going to produce the food for this country—and it is not 20 million people we feed; it is 70 million. If Australia stops carrying its share of the load in food production, it will not be Australians who go hungry but someone in a Third World country that relies on our exports.

While I do not have any problem with change in the terms of ENRAC, I do have a serious problem with the way this government is dealing with our farmers in this particular situation. I ask that this government—and the minister in particular—give some serious consideration away from the politics. I would gladly allow him to spend as much time as he likes. Rural Australians are very polite and respectful people and they would treat him well, but I think he needs to stop concentrating on point scoring in here and engage with his constituents.

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

On so many occasions since its election, the Rudd government has made it absolutely clear that it is not willing to support our farmers into the future. Whilst I welcome the government’s decision to continue with drought support for this financial year, I am at a loss as to the decision for it to cease in 2010. This year’s budget papers clearly show that all drought support, including all exceptional circumstance programs, will cease by mid-2010. Page 60 of the Portfolio Budget Statement 2009-10 in the Agricultural, Fisheries and Forestry portfolio unequivocally states:

The reduction in expenses between 2009-10 and 2010-11 is due to the cessation of drought programs.

I have raised this with the minister in the Main Committee when given the opportunity and the minister has given me a commitment that should our farmers still be in drought at that time—and I can pretty much guarantee my farmers will be—then they most certainly will look at funding. I am very concerned as to where the funding will come from in a very economically restricted budget, particularly the budget of next year when we are going to see higher unemployment and the repayment of debt having to take place. The Productivity Commission’s inquiry into government drought support report confirmed the information in the budget that the government has chosen to abandon support for our drought-stricken farmers.

Recommendations made by the Productivity Commission include: terminating the Drought Exceptional Circumstances (EC) Interest Rate Subsidies and Income Support by 2010 irrespective of seasonal conditions and terminating the EC declaration process—with no new areas, full or interim to be declared—and with current declarations ceasing by 30 June 2010. The Productivity Commission also slams support to small business in drought EC regions, stating that it too should be terminated.

Many of the statements and assertions made in the report have shocked me greatly. For example, it is simply unbelievable to read, on page 25 of the overview:

… during 2007-08, nearly half of Australia’s dairy and broadacre farms in drought-declared areas did manage without EC assistance. Over the six years to 2007-08, on average nearly 70 per cent of these farms managed without EC assistance

What an absurd statement! The commissioner’s choice of language is disgusting and disgraceful. It offends me enormously. The fact is that these farms did not manage without assistance—they simply were not eligible. Many of them were on their hands and knees trying to make ends meet, calling out for some assistance and to be included. They were altering their farming and business practices in so many ways just so they could get groceries on the table. In my electorate, Rotary clubs, Lions clubs and many other clubs came into my electorate with pantry packs. We would take bags out to the halls and they would be distributed to proud families who were reduced to accepting food packs.

We call these farmers ‘managing’? I find that extraordinary and the inference that these farmers did not need assistance could not be any further from the truth, because they needed assistance but they just simply did not get it. They have been battling for so long. I might add—because I have to be fair about this—that was under the rules of the past government as well. It could always have been changed. It could have been changed in the last two years. When the rules were put in place nobody would have expected that this unrelenting drought could go on for so long for these people.

I feel that if we had a sympathetic government, I know we would have changed those rules—recognising those amazing challenges that these people were confronting. I cannot understand how the Productivity Commission did not find evidence that farmers’ access to capital differed from other businesses during periods of drought. I do not understand why there is no acknowledgement or recognition out there of how many farmers are simply on the breadline, how many farmers are just surviving on a day-to-day basis and how many of them cannot get access to further finance from the banks and are now being told that they really should consider leaving their properties.

Most definitely, I was even told that by companies who were underpinning finances for my grain growers. They said that they were going to come through my electorate and advise farmers that they would not be affording the company’s facilities to them anymore and that they had to make the decision to get off the land. That is a tragic case for people who, under normal circumstances, are easily able not only to make a living for themselves and their communities but also to contribute to the GDP of this nation and to provide food for the world and Australia.

It is just an incredible experience to have been in this position for so long. We see farmers who have adopted best practice management over the years, who have implemented climate change initiatives and who have provided variability practices getting absolutely no recognition for the movement and the advances that they have made. In my irrigation areas they have modernised their systems and not once does the minister, Penny Wong, recognise all of the hard yards, work and gains that have been made. It is always ground zero—as if we have raped and pillaged the land, flood irrigated forever and never put in an infrastructure improvement. That is so not true. That is unfair for the people to be judged in that manner. The farmers that we represent are leading the world in their research and development. They are adopting advances in agriculture faster than most other farmers in the developed world. And yet they feel constantly as though they are being victimised by a government that is now beginning to look as though it does not value the importance of food security and farmers.

I say that quite confidently now because I am everyday becoming more and more offended in question time and when ministerial statements are being made and there are smart points to be made against the Nationals by referring to us as ‘cockies corner’. The people whom I represent are offended by this because they believe it is an absolutely demeaning remark for all of those farmers and producers across this nation who work their hands to the bone in order to produce. They get relegated to being represented by us Nationals here in cockies corner. How demeaning. And I am surprised that even people of the calibre that make the ministerial front bench, including the Prime Minister today, refer to cockies corner. I think it is an absolute insult to each and every one of us here and to each of the people that I represent in my rural and regional area.

That is what is being inferred here—the member for Parkes summed it up really well: that our growers are somehow, in some way, so inferior, so idiotic and so stupid that they have to be taught how to put in place things that they lead the world in. It is an embarrassment and an absolute indictment. That is why I have now come to realise exactly how those people whom I represent are viewed by the government. Increasingly there is the walk to the dispatch box, calling this ‘cockies corner’, and knowing it is intended to insult us and every person that we represent in the farming fraternity. I object to that. Thankfully, there are so many things that one could talk about here in this House. The food and fibre producers are the only sector that experienced four quarters of positive growth last year. That seems to dispel the fact that they are all so stupid and idiotic.

The current drought is like no other we have ever experienced. The majority of my electorate of Riverina has now been drought declared for seven years running. It is not a one in 25-year drought; it is now a one in 100-year drought. Not even the best farmers could have prepared for this. I am extremely worried about the farmers that I represent but also about the communities that are reliant on agriculture. Apart from the city of Wagga Wagga, which is underpinned by the RAAF base, Kapooka Army base and Charles Sturt University, every single community that I represent, even that great metropolitan and cosmopolitan community of Griffith, is reliant on agriculture. Every single farm, every single producer and every single business that is providing employment into every other town except for Wagga Wagga is reliant on agriculture.

The Riverina has historically been home to a diverse range of agricultural products and they have been enjoyed right across Australia and exported throughout the world with the most amazing success. The sheer diversity of the Riverina has allowed for a wide range of agricultural pursuits. Today is a typical example of the resilience of these communities. Today heralds the one-year anniversary of the demolition of the single desk for the wheat growers that I represent across my region. Today we had around 60 of our growers come here outside Parliament House to decry the demolition of the single desk. They came into this parliament today to try to understand how they can make themselves relevant again—relevant into the future.

The people who made up the majority of the farming families who came in here today were young. There were little children in strollers and prams, and young mums. They were not the 80- or 90-year-old broken down old cockies that we seem to get referred to as. They were young aspirational farmers who have had their dreams and aspirations damaged beyond repair because they are grain growers. They have had a shocking season under the new rules.

Under the rules, these growers have been totally demolished. They have had port delays. They have had 16-hour delays with their trucks. Traders do not pay for those 16-hour delays. I can table articles that will attest to what I am saying here about the trials that my growers from the Riverina have been facing. I raise these issues time and time again in this House and in every other place that I can in defence of the growers and how these rules will impact on them in such an extraordinary and most disproportionate way. The growers here today told of their losses as a result of there being no pool, no storage, inadequate arrangements for a functioning port system, transport costs and the long waiting times at the port. As I have said, in many cases they are waiting for over 16 hours, and it is all at their cost.

The minister has said that they can store their grain on-farm. They can store their grain until somebody magically comes along and offers them a price after all of the tenders are full. I ask: what are they supposed to live on in the meantime? Also, they will have to try and work out how they are going to store the grain, because we do not have grain storage facilities. Further, the minister must be aware by now of all the problems associated with fungal and insect damage to grain in storage circumstances. I stood in this House saying, ‘There is not enough storage on this land to provide a convincing way for growers to get out of the situation that they have been left in’—and that is the demolition of the single desk and no pooling. I would not be holding my breath while I store my grain and wait for some trader to come along and give me a price that I am entitled to. No. My growers will be trod on and screwed into the ground as a result of this sheer act of bastardry against them. I feel very, very strongly about this.

Today, I heard the member for Moreton calling across the chamber, alluding to the fact that we are not a united team, that we are all over the place and that some of my colleagues had crossed the floor on a bill while others had abstained. I ask Labor members: ‘Where are you on issues that affect your electorates?’ You will never see a Labor member cross over and be a part of the issues or vote against issues that affect the people that they represent because, if they did, they know that they would be disendorsed. They have not the courage to do it. I am saying this because I find it a cowardly attack by the member to continually call across the chamber when some of us have had the courage to stand up and have gone through the gut-wrenching experience of being counted on issues for the people that we represent.

Where are the Labor members on the job losses with the CPRS? I note that the member for Flynn is in the chamber. Where is the modelling? Where is the member for Flynn on the question of job losses or the modelling for the scheme? Does he even ask, ‘Can we have modelling to see how this scheme will impact on the people who make up the electorate of Flynn?’ You never hear a word. But you do hear the catcalling all the time coming from across the chamber about how the Nationals are in such disarray and how we cannot get our act together. Do you know what? Our act is together. My act is together. My act is about standing here and taking responsibility, whether I am in a government seat or in an opposition seat. It is about making choices and taking the pathway that represents the people that I am supposed to represent in here. So do not play those sanctimonious games across the chamber with me anymore. Hang your heads in shame. I am tired of this catcalling across this chamber about the way in which the Nationals represent their constituencies. I am proud to be a National and proud to represent the issues that come before this place whether I am in government or in opposition.

I also want to speak about the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. The fact is that there are issues about the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme that concern many members of the opposition. I just cannot understand why we are not hearing about them in the public domain. We most certainly hear about them in the private domain. But I cannot understand why we are not hearing about them from government members who know that their electorates will be affected by the scheme and who know that they are going to lose jobs because of it. Why are they not screaming: ‘How are we going to ameliorate and prevent this? What action can we take to ensure that people living in rural and regional Australia are not disproportionately affected by the CPRS that the Labor Party currently have before the House?’ Indeed, there is an issue for each and every one of us to confront, and I am very pleased that the government has actually moved to delay this scheme for 15 months, because maybe that will give people some time to get up some courage to ask the tough questions and to represent their constituents on the tough issues.

Moving back to the issue at hand, the NRAC, I am hopeful that when we see the changes made in the make-up of NRAC we will also see some thought, concern and care about the wellbeing of people who choose to live and work in rural and regional Australia. Mr Deputy Speaker, there is no-one more worthy of support from the parliament than the people in these areas because of the enormous benefits that they provide with their produce to the people of Australia. I could go on for a significant amount of time raising—(Time expired)

Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Rural Adjustment Amendment Bill 2009. This bill provides for members of the National Rural Advisory Council—or NRAC as it is commonly called—to be reappointed twice after the expiry of their initial term. This will permit a member of NRAC to serve a maximum term of nine years. It will ensure that National Rural Advisory Council members  who have acquired expertise—for example, in undertaking exceptional circumstances assessments for drought ravaged areas—can continue to make a sound contribution to NRAC. The National Rural Advisory Council was established under the former coalition government in 1999, replacing the Rural Adjustment Scheme Advisory Council, and it was then given a wider brief. The members of NRAC are supposed to be chosen for their independence and knowledge of rural issues. They are supposed to use their skills to provide advice to the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry on rural issues, including the determination of areas to receive drought support or to have that support rolled over.

There has never been such a time of need for strong and independent advice for any government than now, because this Rudd Labor government has turned its back on agriculture and rural communities in Australia. It is hard to work out quite why—whether it is due to ignorance, because members of the Labor Party typically have no experience beyond metropolitan Australia, or because they are aware that most of the political allegiance in rural and regional communities is with the coalition and therefore Labor is disinterested in any behaviour, activities or resource allocation that is going to support those who vote elsewhere. We have seen the extraordinary business in recent times where, unless you are a gift-giver to the Prime Minister, for example, you cannot expect to capture his attention—and certainly not the attention of the Treasury or the Treasurer.

The Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, the Hon. Tony Burke, has failed us absolutely. This day has been spent calling for the Prime Minister, the Treasurer, the Leader of the Opposition and assorted others to resign. I actually call on the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry to resign. He has failed absolutely to address the drought crisis in most of southern Australia and Tasmania. He has also failed to address the crises in other agribusiness sectors due to the costs of production and the failure of this government to properly address emissions trading schemes and incorporate agriculture other than as an additional cost-taker. This government has absolutely failed to understand the needs of research and development and has systematically abolished those organisations who have been doing that work—in some cases for many decades—to assist the agricultural community. How can this minister have stood by when I, amongst many others, went and begged him to address the crisis currently affecting the export exposed dairy industry? We have a world-best dairy industry. Along with the rest of the domestic milk suppliers, it employs some 40,000 people in this country. The industry is worth some $40 billion. It is on its knees because the prices being paid to the milk producers and manufacturers are below the costs of production. In our export markets we are now competing with highly subsidised product from the EU and the USA.

The minister listened politely and has done absolutely nothing. Meanwhile, we look on as the automotive sector received billions of dollars of support before Christmas last year and as the retail sector received billions of dollars of support. Every man and his dog has $900 in their pocket to go and buy a new television. The dairy sector only needs perhaps 18 months of support to keep them going—it has been costed at about $73 million—until hopefully prices come back, but this industry has been totally and cynically ignored. Murray Goulburn, our biggest co-operative and the only Australian owned dairy company left, has begged to have a place in front of Penny Wong, the Minister for Climate Change and Water, to tell her about the problems that this government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme will force them to deal with if the government does not change its ETS arrangements. They cannot get an audience with Minister Wong. That is shameful. When I myself spoke to Minister Wong about the problems in the dairy sector I was told by her and her advisor, ‘Well, they’re irrigators, aren’t they? That is a problem.’ Let me assure this government that irrigated agriculture in Australia is amongst the most efficient in the world. No-one wastes water when you are paying for a 100 per cent entitlement and getting a 30 per cent allocation. No-one wastes water when it costs you hundreds of thousands of dollars to improve the on-farm water use efficiency assistance for your property because this government refuses to do a thing.

What did Penny Wong, the minister for water, the ETS and assorted other things, and Tim Fisher, her advisor, say to me when I put before her the extraordinary problems of the dairy industry and the fact that they needed to seriously consider on-farm water use efficiency and the ETS? She said, ‘Well, you know, we have got a good exit package.’ In other words, she was saying, ‘Get out of the industry; we are not interested in your future’—the future that would employ some 40,000 people and would be worth $40 billion in export earnings. It was a matter of saying, ‘Get out, we think we have got a decent exit package.’ Let me just say as well that the exit package is not what it is cracked up to be either.

Why should an enterprise like dairying be driven out of business because of government policy? This is extraordinary. It is not the drought killing the dairy industry. It is not yet the ETS, because it is yet to be introduced in this country. It is government policy which is killing off an export industry which over generations has brought wealth to southern Australia, to parts of Western Australia and to Tasmania. It is wealth that has multiplied into the manufacturing sector, the transport sector and into workers in metropolitan Australia. I think it is disgusting the way Minister Tony Burke comes into this chamber day after day and tells us how he has triumphed over some other sector and made them a showpiece, when all the while he knows a sector like the dairy industry is going to the wall.

How can members of this government lie in bed at night knowing that their so-called award modernisation activity is going to drive horticulture out of business? Horticulturalists need flexibility in the management of their workforces. Their products, their crops, their tomatoes, their strawberries and their soft fruits need to be picked when it is optimal for that product to be picked. They cannot wait for the following weekday or, indeed, sometimes during the day. The new award modernisation proposal for horticulture demands double time for any hours worked over the weekend, whether it is shed work or picking work. The proposal says that workers cannot work between 6 am and 6 pm without accruing penalties, even if they are within their overall work week time frame. The proposal says that they must be paid for a minimum of four hours and they must be paid a minimum salary, not on piecework. So that is the end of the slow worker being able to start and develop a career in horticulture as a picker, pruner and packer. They will simply not be taken on because horticulturalists will not be able to afford it.

What other developed government, parliamentary democracy would inflict this sort of award on a sector that cannot pass on prices because it is exposed to the duopoly of Coles and Woolworths, who will not pay a cent more than they can possibly get away with because there is the import option always in front of them. ‘You don’t want to supply your strawberries at next to nothing? Then we’ll bring them in from somewhere else. There’s a queue behind you,’ is the way they tackle it. I say to this government, ‘How can you stand by and inflict the horticulture award modernisation strategy on the Australian horticultural industry and imagine that you are behaving in a responsible fashion?’ This is a most disgraceful piece of business and I cannot imagine how Julia Gillard, the minister responsible for this work, can lie straight in bed at night knowing that the horticultural industry’s demise will be on her head.

Then we move onto something like faster broadband. Everyone understands and appreciates that telecommunications and broadband in particular are moving and developing at a rapid rate, and Australia must be world best. We must be able to have our industries, whether they are located in Brunswick or Broadmeadows or Mooroopna, able to access systems of telecommunications or broadband that are equal in speed and efficiency of use and cost. After all, Mooroopna is only two hours from Melbourne. But let me tell you, the problem is that this government has declared that if you are in a town with fewer than 1,000 people, the policy does not apply. You do not get access to the $43 billion broadband rollout. You will pay for it through your taxes, of course, but if you are in a town with fewer than 1,000 people do not expect to see anything happen in your part of the world. You are out of sight, out of mind.

Lest someone listening thinks those towns with fewer than 1,000 people are all out the back of Uluru or Bourke or Katherine, let me tell you that in my electorate of Murray, which is between two and four hours from Melbourne, we have more than 30 towns with fewer than 1,000 people in them. The entire shire of Loddon has not a single town with more than 1,000 people. Campaspe shire only has a couple of towns with more than 1,000 people. So how can a democratically elected government, which should be governing for all people—a statement Mr Rudd made, obviously with his fingers crossed behind his back. He made that statement at one stage; he was going to govern for all Australians. If so, then how come this broadband policy is only for people in towns of more than 1,000 people? Doesn’t he understand the settlement patterns of this great country? He clearly does not.

And then we get to the cynical abuse of the opportunities of young rural and regional Australians to go to university. Can you imagine the shock of that announcement on all of those young Australians who had earned a place and an offer to go to university and who are in their gap year now, as we speak? Can you imagine their shock when they realised that this government has now made it impossible for them to take up those places? That is because Minister Gillard—the Minister for Education among many other things—has said that they will now have to work for 30 hours per week for 18 months out of two years, or 24 months, in order to qualify for the independent youth allowance, which is essential for most rural and regional students whose parents do not have the $20,000 or so extra needed to pay for their living away from home expenses?

You would have thought that Minister Gillard would have taken into account those in their gap year right now and would have had some sort of grandfathering strategy or clause, like most responsible ministers in government. But no, she had forgotten about these people—about 30,000 of them. When we phoned her office on the night of the announcement of the changed conditions for Youth Allowance, we said: ‘What about those rural and regional students in their gap year right now who can’t go to university while living at home with mum in Toorak or the North Shore of Sydney? They live hours away from university.’ Her office said: ‘Oh, we’ll have to get back to you. We’re not sure about those. We haven’t quite got to them yet.’

It is months later now. There have been protest rallies right across Australia, particularly in places like Bendigo and Ballarat, with students saying: ‘What about us? Can’t we now train as professionals—as doctors, dentists, teachers, nurses, engineers—because we have earned a place in university, but your new rules cut us out.’ Minister Gillard has come back and said: ‘Look’—and she says this regularly with a smile on her face at question time—’you’re lying. You’re not looking at the means test and how we’ve changed it. More people will be eligible due to our means test changes.’ However, if you get out the taper rates from Centrelink and have a look at them, you will see in fact that while the means test rates have indeed changed, you are only looking at a few dollars a week difference—a few dollars a week into your pocket when you are still so-called ‘eligible’ for Youth Allowance at the higher cut-off rates. We are told, ‘Don’t worry; you can be independent at the age of 22 now.’ Most students leave school at 17 or 18, and if they have to wait until they are 22 to access their university of education, because that is when they will be eligible for independent youth allowance, then it is probably too late. They will have to apply as a mature age student and there are fewer places.

This is one of the most cynical and short-sighted and devastating decisions this government has made in denying rural and regional youth an opportunity for university education into the future. We know that people born and bred in a country area who then train as a doctor, dentist, nurse or teacher that they are likely to return to practise in these professions as qualified adults. So this government is removing generations of rural and regional professionals who would have served our needs in a skill-short Australia.

This is a disgraceful piece of policymaking. It was presumably done on the run on the back of an envelope. The minister quite clearly has too many portfolio areas to get across. She has made a mess of the industrial relations scene. I have mentioned horticulture—that is just one area on its knees; you could add to that the retail sector. The tourism and hospitality sectors have equally been dismayed and distressed to find their viability affected by Minister Gillard’s extraordinary lack of grasp of what really needs to happen in this country. Then there are the changes to youth allowance, which is a devastating situation.

Let me get to perhaps the worst situation of all: water policy. Minister Wong clearly does not understand that, in a drought stressed country—in my part of the world, we have had drought for seven years now—saying that the government will provide $1 million, $2 billion or $3 billion to buy back water from willing sellers is quite simply the most cynical and cruel joke to play. You have people who certainly must sell their water. The banks and other lenders are leaning on them very hard. But that water should be sold back into the irrigation communities, which can continue to produce food for this nation and for export. Penny Wong—with the full understanding and permission of Prime Minister Rudd, I suppose—has created a situation whereby irrigated agriculture in this country right throughout the Murray-Darling Basin is now at risk, and she has not delivered a single extra megalitre to the environment through this extraordinarily short-sighted policy.

The pipeline to Melbourne is a classic and typical example of what the Labor governments, both state and federal, are doing to an irrigated, food-producing sector which was once called the ‘food bowl of Australia’. I am talking about northern Victoria, of course: the area which straddles the electorates of McEwen, Indi, Murray and Mallee. The pipeline to Melbourne has now been thoroughly exposed as not being based on any business case. The general manager of the government’s Office of Water, David Downie, now says that factors such as expected flows, water quality and rainfall predictions for the pipeline and irrigation projects have undergone ‘substantial changes’ since April last year. That is wrong. No, the factors have not changed; they have simply always been based on wrong calculations by the Bracks and Brumby governments.

The Victorian government, however, is refusing to release the documents which describe exactly how much water it is going to take out of the Murray-Darling Basin and the Goulburn system to push down the north-south pipeline. The Victorian government is refusing to release those documents because it says they are only a snapshot, they were prepared by junior staff and they ‘do not contain sufficient information for an uninformed audience to interpret them correctly and reasonably’. What an insult. In other words, northern Victorians whose water is to be taken out of the Eildon dam, which is now at less than 12 per cent of its capacity, are ignorant and stupid and cannot comprehend the facts about what the Victorian government, in collusion with the federal government, intends to do with irrigated agriculture.

The Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts, Mr Garrett, has an EPBC controlled action over the north-south pipeline. He is refusing to step up to the plate and tell Premier Brumby that what he is doing with the pipeline is wrong. Seventy five gigalitres of water, which includes environmental reserve water out of Eildon and water already paid for and accounted for through the Living Murray and Water for Rivers funding is to be taken and there has been no independent audit of the water savings from the Food Bowl Modernisation Project. Premier Brumby is ignoring all of those facts and factors. Minister Garrett refuses to rap Premier Brumby over the knuckles and say, ‘Stop.’ The pipeline is an absolute travesty. There is no water to put down it. It is going to cost taxpayers nearly $1 billion and provide no more water for Melbourne. This is an example of what this government is doing to irrigated and ordinary agriculture. It is a disgrace. (Time expired)

Judi Moylan (Pearce, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Given that the Rural Adjustment Amendment Bill 2009 proposes to amend the maximum length of service for a member of the National Rural Advisory Council, it is a great opportunity for me to acknowledge from the outset the great contribution that farmers and their families make to the economy, both domestic and export, and their contribution to conservation and innovation in this country. I have seen some amazing examples in my electorate of farmers who have made a great contribution to conservation and to restoring some of the land in Western Australia that has been badly affected by salt and is no longer productive. In many cases, farmers have poured thousands of dollars of their own money into dealing with these problems successfully and ensuring that their land is more productive but also that the local ecology is better off for that contribution. In terms of innovation, I think we have some of the most innovative farmers in the world. We should certainly all acknowledge in this place the importance of farmers and their contribution to food production and food security.

I would like to acknowledge some of the very eloquent contributions of some of my colleagues today. It is notable that there have not been contributions from speakers on the other side. The member for Riverina mentioned comments coming from ministers on the other side about our National Party colleagues and particularly those of us who represent farming communities. I would have to say I agree. We are here to represent people out there who contribute to the building of this country, to its economy, to its communities and to its ecology. Some of these people have done it very hard. While the minister stands over there and makes trivial comments and asks trivial questions about anything other than issues to do with agriculture, there are people out in the rural communities of Australia who are genuinely hurting, genuinely making sacrifices and doing it tough. I think we could see a little bit more interest from the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry in looking after the farming sector, because that is his job, rather than trivialising those opportunities in this place to raise matters of serious import.

I will go back for a moment to just talk about the efficiency and innovation of farmers in Australia and particularly in my electorate of Pearce. Quite a large slab of my electorate is involved in productive agriculture. I have seen over the years that farmers were the first to suffer in this country but they were also the first to innovate and recover during the economic changes that we made in the early nineties. Not all of them recovered, but a good many of them learned to innovate and become very efficient as they faced fairly savage tariff reductions. I am not saying that these decisions were not right decisions at the time, but I sometimes feel that systems were not put in place to cushion some of the worst blows that were sustained by agriculture when we removed the tariff barriers and floated the Australian dollar. It did cause a lot of pain out in rural electorates.

Despite all of that, we have seen some of the most efficient farming practices in the world—without subsidies. There are very few subsidies provided to the farming communities today. They are very efficient. They have done this in the face of massive cost increases and cost pressures. As you would know, Deputy Speaker Washer, having an interest in horticulture, in these last few years farmers have faced increased cost pressures in the cost of petrol, which flows into the cost of chemicals and the cost of fertilisers. Of course, the rise in the value of the Australian dollar, although it helps many sectors of the community, does not actually help our farmers who are exporting. That is quite difficult at times for them to manage.

In a speech I gave to the House just a short while ago in May on the appropriation bills I commented that, in the face of the uncertainty:

… perhaps it is timely that we share with the government the lessons that have been learnt by farming communities over many lifetimes on how to deal with the climate of uncertainty. After all, the agricultural sector is the only one to record growth in recent times. In the September quarter national GDP went up one per cent, yet farm GDP went up 14.9per cent. Similarly in the December quarter, which was the country’s first quarter of negative growth in national GDP, national GDP went down by 0.5 per cent, and by contrast farm GDP increased by 10.8 per cent.

Primary producers have held their own under economic conditions that would literally floor most people. Drought, fire, flood, currency fluctuations, steeply rising costs of fuel, fertiliser and chemicals, and the global financial crisis have failed to dampen the enthusiasm and the determination of this—

the farming—

sector. They just work harder, smarter and longer to achieve results.

As I said in that speech:

As I move around the rural and regional areas of the electorate of Pearce, I am reminded of the most important lesson that we can learn from the farming community: they know to call a spade a spade; and they know to call the drought a drought and not a temporary reduction in localised precipitation.

It is an important thing that they do know that; otherwise, they would not be in business

To move on to the Rural Adjustment Amendment Bill 2009 that we are debating, currently the NRAC members can only be reappointed once so the maximum time they can serve is six years. This will change so that members may be reappointed twice and hence serve for a maximum of nine years. The significance of this change comes from the importance of the NRAC in the process of delivering assistance to farmers coping with crisis conditions—and there have been plenty of those, as I said. These are natural crises in this case. The NRAC has been operating for nearly 10 years as an advisory body to the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry. It has always been important that there is a strong link between the decisions made here in Canberra and what happens out there in rural Australia. The NRAC have been invaluable in this association, but they need to understand that realities of rural living in recent times, with farmers being placed under the very real pressure of an increasingly unforgiving and, may I say, malevolent environment.

Having grown up in the small country town of Narrogin, south-east of Perth, I know firsthand of every farmers perennial concern about the weather. Their livelihoods and the environment are inextricably linked for better or for worse. Now I represent the seat of Pearce into which Narrogin falls, and much of Pearce of course is agricultural land. I am again reminded of the ever present anxiety about the climate. But today’s farmers need to contend with not just the odd year of light rain but, as I said, with a malevolent climate which has left them year after year falling short. So it is important that we have an experienced team on the National Rural Advisory Council and that we are able to ensure that people can serve there perhaps for a little longer than they would under the current provisions.

The decisions that the council makes are of course in relation to exceptional circumstances funding. Exceptional circumstances have been defined as ‘rare and severe events outside those a farmer could normally be expected to manage using responsible farm management strategies’. The result of these circumstances must be ‘a severe downturn in farm income’ for a protracted period—that is, for more than 12 months. When a declaration of exceptional circumstances has been made, farmers and small businesses dependent on agriculture will have access then to exceptional circumstances relief payments.

I want to make a comment about this whole process of exceptional circumstances relief payments. As a new member of this place and the then shadow minister for small business—which I think, in a sense, covered farming, because farming is sometimes big business but a lot of it is relatively small business—I did a trip through northern New South Wales, where all of the little towns such as Walcha, Coraki and Tenterfield had been in the grip of drought for four years at that time. And the government, I felt, was extremely slow to respond. That trip is etched deeply into my mind, my heart and my soul, because what I encountered on that trip, in the many meetings we had in those small communities, was incredible heartache and pain. Often people do not understand that, when the farmers go down, so does the supporting community around them. In those little towns, the loss of one family or perhaps the closure of the school or the loss of the schoolteachers and their families can be an absolute disaster for the rest of the town. The little store that provides a few groceries, the newsagent, the bank—suddenly they all begin to tumble and close because they cannot be supported any longer.

I saw tough men who for decades had provided for their families break down in tears in town hall meetings. And I know these kinds of people; they do not break down very easily; they are tough. What really gripped me was the fact that on many occasions people told me that they had to put down even their breeding herds. It had taken them years and years to build up their breeding herds, but they had to put them down because they simply had no feed to sustain them; they had been handfeeding for a long time. I remember in Casino, I think it was, if my memory serves me right, talking to the farm women there. They told me the women in the town had set up a scheme where the women on the farms could go once a week to take a shower and do the family washing, so difficult were those times. We met under trees, we met in town halls, and as long as I live I will never forget it.

As a new, green member of parliament I came back here so deeply moved by this that I started investigating how we might address this. Drought is a fact of life in Australia, just like floods and fires and frosts, and yet we treat it so differently. We are so slow to respond. And the EC system is cumbersome, it is complex, it is means tested, and you have really got to be almost at the end of the line before you can get help. We need to have some kind of drought relief system that allows farmers to continue to farm, to keep the breeding herds—not wait until there is nothing left before the drought relief kicks in.

You might remember, Mr Deputy Speaker Washer, as others would, when Ray Martin started up the Farmhand appeal. It was designed to get donations to help sustain these families and, I am sorry to say, it actually shamed the government into doing something; they were not going to do anything. It so engaged the Australian public that the government were forced to make drought relief available.

So I would like to see us re-examine how we deal with exceptional circumstances assistance, how we provide drought relief—understanding that, as some of the effects of climate change kick in, we are probably going to see these kinds of disasters more often than we would like. I think we need to have a dialogue about this and have a serious think about how we deliver better relief to farmers.

There has been a lot of talk in Western Australia about how we might better manage disasters, and one of the schemes that have often been talked about to me by some of my farmers is multiperil crop insurance. In fact, Derek Clauson, who is the grains section president of the WA Farmers Federation, has also spoken on this. He highlighted the fact that this would be high on the WAFarmers agenda in 2009, and a WAFarmers lobbying group was set up to intensify efforts to get this up after frost hit WA very hard last year in September. It decimated crops in the southern and south-eastern wheat belt after causing severe head and stem damage to the grain crops. So this has been much talked about over the years.

When you consider that the federal government chipped in $1.2 billion in drought related relief to farm households between July 2001 and June 2008, and another $1.8 billion was provided to farm businesses and rural small businesses—which was one of the changes that we made when we were in government, to make sure we included small farm businesses and rural businesses, like machinery dealerships and so on, to make sure that fabric was not lost—it would make sense perhaps to consider rolling this money into a multiperil crop insurance scheme. It has been discussed in this place before. In fact, my colleague the member for O’Connor has had quite a bit to say on it. He gave a presentation not so long ago, and I would like to acknowledge the work that he has done on this particular issue. In his presentation, he listed under ‘Basic principles’:

To create an insurance product to allow growers to insure their cost of production at the beginning of each season

This would be a very good step. He also said:

EC is a Government grant and as such is complex—

and I agree with him on that—

and means tested which frequently excludes growers simply on the basis of property value or off farm investments

As I said, it does not give farmers much real control. They are on the bones of their backside, on their knees, by the time they get the current assistance. The member for O’Connor said:

This product—

multiperil crop insurance—

would be available to all who choose to use it and the subsidy would not be means tested.

Those who did not purchase the product would be deemed to self-insure and therefore be ineligible for Government assistance.

I think mulitperil crop insurance is worthy of consideration. Indeed, many other countries, such as Canada, the United States and Italy, have mulitperil crop insurance. It is a process that would allow growers to better manage their own risk and give them better control over the future of their farms in exceptional circumstances.

I notice that there has been a Productivity Commission inquiry into government drought support, which was released last month. They have made several recommendations to extensively alter the operation of EC relief payments. Clearly, further investigations will need to be made but I hope that the minister makes sure that in any new design as to exceptional circumstances money the government will make sure that the rural communities are properly consulted with, because this is a very, very important matter. As I said, with growing risks of climate changes and adverse climate episodes, this is going to become a more frequent encounter and I think we have a duty in this parliament to make sure that we have a scheme in place that is workable and allows our national farmers to manage their own businesses. (Time expired)

Darren Chester (Gippsland, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I congratulate the member for Pearce for her thoughtful contribution on and insights into this issue. It is with pleasure that I join the debate on the Rural Adjustment Amendment Bill 2009. The bill removes the current provision that a person may be reappointed on one occasion only to the National Rural Advisory Council, or NRAC. As all regional MPs would be aware, particularly those of the many drought affected electorates, NRAC’s main role is to provide advice on regional issues, particularly in relation to the assessment of areas for drought exceptional circumstances support. This bill will allow for NRAC members to serve an additional term in the future, and I can understand the government’s reason for moving in that direction.

This evening I want to make some general observations about my involvement with drought and NRAC as it relates to the Gippsland community. One of my first experiences upon entering federal politics a year ago came about through the need to strongly represent the interests of my community as a result of a decision made by NRAC. On 10 August last year, without warning and without any explanation, I received a phone call from the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry’s office explaining to me that EC assistance for the Gippsland region would not be extended beyond 30 September 2008. While I appreciate the effort by the minister’s office to make that contact with me, it did strike me as a bizarre decision at the time. I quickly informed the staff member that I thought a mistake had been made. In fact, I think the term I used was that I thought they had ‘made a blue’. It set off a chain of events in the Gippsland electorate and I ended up writing to the minister on more than 30 occasions representing the interests of individual landholders. At the time, the minister accused me of playing politics with this particular issue, but nothing could have been further from the truth. I accept that the minister does not know me that well, but there was never any intention on my part to play politics with the lives of my constituents on such a serious issue.

NRAC had actually let down my farmers. The farmers were reporting conditions that were worse than the previous year, for which they were in receipt of EC funding and support. There was a complete erosion of confidence in the community as their cash reserves had been exhausted and many people were doubting their future and the future of their children on the land. In particular, taking over the family farm was in jeopardy. The decision to withdraw EC funding at that particular time was the final straw for many of them. They had long suspected that there were some city based MPs—dare I say it, on both sides of the House—who really could not care about the plight of the farming sector, and for them this decision confirmed it. In my short time in this place it is one of the most difficult jobs I have had to undertake.

I listened carefully to the insightful contribution on this bill of the member for Riverina. The passion that she exhibited over the emotional impact of the drought on her electorate was obvious in her speech to the House this evening. It was an exceptional contribution by an exceptional local member. Just like the member for Riverina, I found the emotional toll of trying to assist my drought affected farmers to be quite draining, but it was nothing in comparison to the turmoil that they were going through. It was made worse by the decision of NRAC and the minister to endorse a particular decision at the time. The uncertainty it created was terrible: visiting these drought affected farmers and telling them that, yes, their EC funding had been withdrawn and that we were fighting for it to be restored, but we had no idea whether we would bring the government to its senses in the future. The mood in the community was stressed to say the very least. The ‘we’ I refer to is my electorate staff, who did a magnificent job to assist in the campaign that we were running at the time, and my local farmers, who also rallied to assist us.

Quite apart from the obvious economic impacts, droughts are insidious to the soul as they sap away the energy and enthusiasm of our communities and corrode, I believe, the hopes of the next generation. You see—and the member for Pearce referred to this as well—our big strong farmers reduced emotionally through the strain of having to put down stock or of having to constantly ‘feed out’ stock, when they are in a position to be able to afford to do so. The constant drain of dealing with these droughts is emotionally gruelling for everyone in those communities.

The decision to withdraw EC funding in Gippsland was made after a desktop analysis by NRAC. There was no visit to Gippsland at the time, no attempt to assess the circumstances on the ground and no effort to listen to the locals. I am no farmer and I do not pretend at all to be an expert on agricultural affairs or practical land management issues, but blind Freddy could tell that the farmers in my electorate were facing extraordinarily difficult conditions. These were exceptional circumstances in every sense of the words. In particular, the Tambo Valley from Bruthen to Benambra and beyond was suffering enormously, and conditions in the Bruthen Valley were little better. Right across Gippsland there were tales of farming families doing it very tough. There were dams and creek beds that had never run dry in the living memory of the families of several generations who had experience of farming on that land, and they were faced with a water crisis. It was an extremely difficult situation. In many instances now the conditions in parts of Gippsland have actually improved. I am happy to report that to the House. But the recovery does remain patchy and the EC assistance is still needed.

One of the great challenges we face going forward is how we manage the transition from EC to sustainable and viable farms in the future. It is a challenge that exercises my mind and the minds of many others in Gippsland. Many farming families have become dependent on the income support that they receive and the transition from now into the future is going to be very difficult for us. It took considerable time and effort and it placed a lot of stress on farming families to actually get NRAC to visit Gippsland and recommend an extension of the EC funding. I commend the minister in this case. I know the minister has copped a bit of a hiding here this evening, but I commend the minister and acknowledge that, once he came to appreciate the gravity of the situation in Gippsland, he did respond to representations that were being made to him and he did seek a further on-the-ground assessment of the conditions in Gippsland.

But such is the inefficient system we face at the moment that, even once NRAC had visited Gippsland and a ruling was made to return the EC provisions, some parts of the region were actually excluded again. We have this bizarre situation where people separated by the width of a road were in very different circumstances in relation to the EC support. There were those who were in and those who were out, just by the 15- or 20-metre separation of a road reserve. I quote from a letter from one of my constituents in Traralgon. The letter was written on 22 January this year when Latrobe city was actually left out of the EC declaration:

We cannot understand why some farms within the Gippsland region are able to access the EC benefits yet we are not able to even though our area in Gippsland is suffering drought.

The EC declaration seems extremely unfair and inconsistent as we are in just as much need of the financial assistance as are other drought stricken farms in Gippsland that have obviously received rain.

That was typical of the pleas for help that I received from several of my constituents in the circumstance where some of my farmers were considered to be requiring EC assistance while others were excluded, as I said, just by the width of a road.

There was, however, something of a breakthrough after the Black Saturday bushfires when the interim EC assistance was granted for those affected regions, but we await the NRAC findings on the longer term measures. I commend the minister for taking those steps in the aftermath of the Black Saturday bushfires. It was already a very stressful time in Gippsland and every effort was made to accommodate the needs of the Latrobe city farmers in the aftermath of that event. I am hopeful that there will be a positive finding to continue support beyond the current interim measures.

It is interesting to note that, on this occasion, NRAC has actually visited the region to make its assessment. I would commend that course of action for future assessments. I do not give this background to particularly chastise the minister or NRAC representatives. In fact, I thank the NRAC board members for their service and willingness to do what I believe is a difficult and largely a thankless task. There is no enjoyment to be had in inspecting drought hit communities. I fully acknowledge the difficulty in managing the EC arrangements going forward. But I do make my comments to highlight some of the failings of the current system which, while it was changed from time to time by the previous government, still does not meet our needs. The lines-on-the-map methodology of ruling regions in or out of drought assistance has created many problems in Gippsland in just the past 10 months. I accept the need for a better system, but it must be a better system for regional areas, not just better for the government to administer. I take the minister at his word that there are no plans to pull the rug out from under farming families who are currently in receipt of EC assistance measures at the moment.

I also take the opportunity to put the minister on notice. If there are any steps taken to reduce the level of support or otherwise compromise the treatment of Australian farming families, he will face a battle beyond his wildest imagination. Again I refer to the member for Riverina and I invite the minister to view the tape of the member’s contribution if he has any doubts about the passion with which we in the Nationals will continue to represent the interests of farming families. The member for Riverina may be small in stature, but she is a firebrand in her electorate and she will stand up for the needs of her community and those of all regional Australian families every step of the way. The farming families of Australia deserve our support and I will stand shoulder to shoulder with them and other regional MPs to ensure that assistance is provided in the future when it is needed.

The minister has flagged, in letters to me and in the public domain, that he will be seeking to introduce a new system. I stress that his new system needs to be fair, it needs to be equitable and it must send a message to farming families across our nation that we will not abandon them. The minister has the opportunity to send that message to farming families—that this parliament and all who sit in this place will not abandon the farmers of Australia. We need to send that message loudly and we need to send it clearly. Our farmers need to know that this parliament respects the extraordinary contribution they have made to our nation’s development and will continue to make to our nation’s prosperity in the future.

Australian farmers are world-class producers and they are selling their products into a corrupted world market. In many cases, there is no level playing field, but Australian farmers are consistently the best on the ground. If there were a Brownlow Medal for excellence in agricultural production, it would be awarded to the Australian farming sector year after year. Gippsland farmers are at the forefront, with world-class wool producers, dairy farmers, beef farmers, horticulturalists, timber producers and many more. All of these people are doing an extraordinary job in our community. The member for Murray referred to the impact on the dairy industry of the corrupted world markets and the impacts of the government’s proposed emissions trading scheme. I urge the minister to also engage with the dairy industry in Gippsland and beyond as our farmers deal with the current crisis they are facing. Farming families are the backbone of many regional communities and we need to help them prosper not only to protect the food and fibre resources of our nation but to support the social and economic prosperity of communities across Australia.

I have spoken before in the House on this topic. At that time—and again today—I deliberately referred to ‘farming families and their communities’, because when drought hits regional Australia it hits us all, from those on the front line of our nation’s diverse farming enterprises to the many small businesses which supply them: the teachers; the doctors; the health professionals, who often deal with some of the social consequences; and the families themselves. When a drought hits a region, it hits every person within that region. I think the member for Pearce put it beautifully in her speech when she reflected on the impact she saw in one of her early visits as a member of parliament.

Drought is not a matter of ‘odds and evens’ on the watering of the prize roses that it may be in the city. It hits the economic prosperity of the individual families in regional areas, their neighbours and the towns themselves. It has a dramatic effect on the social life of the community. The other often neglected issue of drought is that it affects the environment of the farms themselves and the broader environment of the region. It is for those reasons that there needs to be a long-term commitment to EC declared areas and to support communities like Gippsland as they move into the recovery phase of the drought. As I mentioned earlier, there are signs of recovery in Gippsland, although they are patchy at the moment. It is an old truism that ‘When it does rain, it won’t be raining money’ or, as the shadow minister put it just the other day, ‘It rains opportunity’. With that opportunity comes the prospect of possibly more debt as the farming sector invests in equipment, in stock and in seed—to take the next gamble, as it were.

It does take time for communities to recover and there will be a lag time in the recovery process. I urge the federal government to work in partnership with state and local government agencies to continue to support communities throughout Australia as they emerge from this drought. There is a direct correlation between the length of years in drought and the community’s capacity to recover. During a drought regional areas suffer as they often lose skilled workers, and many young people move on—literally seeking greener pastures. Governments must invest in the capacity of these regions to help them get back on their feet. Money is needed, as we emerge from drought, for on-farm works such as fencing and basic maintenance along with productivity related investments in improved pastures, which are often neglected during periods when many farmers are suffering from reduced incomes.

Our challenge in the future, when we address this issue of EC funding, is to support viable farming families—to get them over the hump, knowing that on the other side they will prosper. This is not welfare or charity; this is an investment in the future of our nation’s productive farming enterprises. And on that point I urge our farming families in EC areas to seek information on whether they are entitled to receive assistance at the moment. I urge farmers not to self-assess. They should not take the view that it is some form of welfare if they access the income support or interest rate subsidy. I have met with many farming groups in my electorate over the past 12 months and I fear that many individuals are too proud to put their hands up for assistance, or do not realise that support is available for them.

It disappoints me that state and federal governments—not just the current governments—are prepared to spend a small fortune on advertising propaganda but fail to inform our farming families about the benefits which they may be able to access when it comes to EC assistance in their areas. I believe there is a place for reasonable government advertising to inform farmers and the accountancy profession that farmers may be entitled to some forms of assistance as they deal with the impact of drought.

I touched previously on the issue of the environment and the impact of droughts. I want to return to the topic because it seems to be a favourite of the minister. He just cannot seem to talk about farming without firstly seeking to discredit the Nationals and secondly referring to climate change. I know the minister is most pleased with himself when he stands at the dispatch box and ridicules the Nationals but he does a great disservice to the industry which he is meant to represent in this place.

When the minister does engage as to topics—his main focus is always climate change—it is as if he is too scared to talk about agriculture. It is probably some sort of recognition that there are members on this side of the chamber who have forgotten more than he will ever learn about the farming sector. I want to make a few points in that regard because I believe the minister’s obsession with talking about climate change is counterproductive to his relationship with many in the farming sector. At the risk of being seen to give relationship advice, may I suggest to him that he put aside some of his inner suburban obsessions whenever he moves out into the regional areas.

Through its political approach to the issue of climate change I believe this government is responsible for dividing Australians on the important issue of sustainable environmental management. By its constant attacks on people who raise any concerns about the current CPRS legislation it is driving a wedge between many regional Australians, who are instinctively uncomfortable with the doomsday scenarios which the Prime Minister likes to propagate.

Farmers and rural landholders are the practical environmentalists of this nation. They have a vested interest in caring for the land and they are keen observers of the weather and longer term climate patterns. Many farmers in my electorate have rainfall records dating back several decades. They know the land and the environment in their locality better than anyone else. They have been taking steps over many years to restore the land to balance. As each bit of research has come along the most successful farmers have learnt more about managing the environment and the productivity of their land.

They have embraced new technology. They have demonstrated their ability to be early adaptors. Throughout history, as they have learnt more they have employed those practices on their land. And their land-use improvements are constantly evolving. That is why any cuts to research funding are such a disaster for agricultural industries.

The feedback I am receiving in Gippsland is that farmers are worried about the long-term drought and they are investigating different techniques and investing in new ways to manage their properties. But they are also telling me that this is nothing new—farmers in Australia have always faced the challenge of growing our nation’s food and fibre in a difficult and variable climate. That is not to say that they do not believe that the climate is changing; it simply makes the point that they are innovative and able to adapt if they are not crushed by the heavy hand of government regulation.

It is in this context that I urge the minister to focus more on the things we must all agree on if we are to achieve positive environmental outcomes, rather than on pursuing a political objective of wedging people on either side of the climate change debate. As I said, farmers are the great practical environmentalists and there is overwhelming support for sustainable environmental practices in my community, both in the context of the long years of drought and of better seasons ahead.

In conclusion, I want to refer briefly to the Productivity Commission’s report on government drought support. And I take up the comments from the shadow minister, who said in this place:

That Productivity Commission report is the most ruthless thing that I have ever seen in any industry in my time …

It is a ruthless report. The recommendations are quite scathing and amount to a complete gutting of the existing support programs. There are recommendations that EC interest rate subsidies should be terminated; EC small business income support should be terminated; EC relief payments should be replaced. All of this is subject to what the report calls ‘transition arrangements’. It does amount to a root and branch overhaul of drought policy and it raises many serious issues which bear greater consideration at the appropriate time.

I urge the minister to engage with leaders in the industry before he rushes to implement these recommendations. There are many wiser heads than mine and—dare I say it?—wiser heads than the minister’s when it comes to the practical application of agricultural policy across this nation. And I refer to my earlier comments that there must be a strong message of support to the farming sector that its contribution to our nation is of value now and will be similarly valued in the future. I thank the House for the opportunity to speak on this bill and associated issues and I wish the NRAC members well in their future deliberations.

Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I applaud the previous speaker for the sentiments that he put forward in this debate on the Rural Adjustment Amendment Bill 2009. I wish we had more people here talking like that. But I must give him a tiny educative lesson of course: it was his own government that did all of these things. Why the ALP keeps attacking the National Party has got me rather curious, because there are only six of them left. The LNP in Queensland is an affiliate body of the Liberal Party.

Darren Chester (Gippsland, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Chester interjecting

Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

No, the three Queensland members are affiliates of the Liberal Party. It is the Liberal National Party of Queensland—the LNP. You can check it out. Ring up the people that determine these things—the Electoral Commission. The tariff subsidy and the AQIS decisions were principally carried out by the last government, to their shame. The history books will read that it was the National Party ministers who carried out those actions, which destroyed industry after industry after industry in agriculture in Australia.

The last member talked about there being no level playing field in corrupt markets out there. I would like him to demonstrate—and I do not criticise him because he was not in this place at the time—one single act by the previous government that was a concession to the fact that we had a corrupt world marketplace. Just the opposite took place. Whether it was grapes, tobacco, oranges, sugar or whatever, these people imposed upon us a free market system and forced us into a situation where we were competing against other countries whose farmers had a 49 per cent tariff support level. It is quite extraordinary to me.

To those people in what is left of the National Party, the six members that are here: ask yourselves why you were reduced from 19 members when I came into this place to six members now. Ask yourselves that question. I can answer it for you. In speech after speech after speech in this place, and at great cost to myself, with vicious personal attacks in the party room, behind my back and in the media, I spoke up against the things that my own government was doing. It was not because I liked doing it. In the end it became a matter of personal integrity. I had to leave the party because clearly their policies were the antithesis of every policy I had been brought up with in the Country Party through most of my life and also in the National Party as it was in Queensland up until Bjelke-Petersen was stabbed in the back by his own National Party colleagues in 1987.

I will return to the bill proper. We do not have an exceptional circumstances declaration. The minister has been kind enough to give me another meeting on this, but we must bring the following to the minister’s attention. We have just experienced not the worst but the most extensive flooding in our history. In almost every town in North Queensland, in a belt from Ingham to Normanton—which is right through the centre of North Queensland—we have experienced either the second or third worst flooding in our entire history. If that is not an exceptional circumstance, I really do not know what is.

The last speaker talked about drought. We have droughts—there is no doubt about that—in North Queensland, but we do not have a drought at the start of the year. At the start of every year we have just the opposite; we have flooding. On the extent of the flooding, when I flew from Cloncurry to Normanton a few weeks ago, I thought, ‘Jeez, what a magnificent season,’ because it was green on either side of the aeroplane for the whole 400 kilometres. When I got within 150 kilometres of Normanton it turned brown. I had assumed the flooding was still there because there was 150 kilometres of brown. We were flying over green and suddenly we were flying over brown. When I got on the ground and said to Ashley Gallagher, a prominent grazier and ex-Mayor of Normanton, ‘It’s all brown; is the water still up?’ he said, ‘No; all the grass is dead and it won’t come back.’ This is much worse than a drought, because we have no grass at all.

Minister—through you, Mr Deputy Speaker—we desperately need an exceptional circumstances declaration. In that area, which is maybe 200 kilometres going east from Normanton and maybe 150 kilometres going south—do not pin me down on the exact dimensions of the catastrophe—it would appear that between 10 and 30 per cent of the graziers’ cattle has gone. If you lose 15 per cent of your cattle you have no chance of survival. I do not see how you could have any chance of survival. I must emphasise that the sugarcane farmers at Ingham are in exactly the same hole. They are talking about 20 and 25 per cent losses over a very large area of the Herbert River basin. That would probably be about seven to eight per cent of the Australian sugar industry, which—we have very good prices for sugar because India has withdrawn from the market—may well be bringing in $3,000 million a year.

No-one here bothers to read any books on the Depression, but if you read the books on the Depression in Australia—

Greg Hunt (Flinders, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Climate Change, Environment and Water) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I do; I just read one.

Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Well, I do not know which one you have because I asked the library for all 15 of them before Christmas and I have not had a request for one single one of them to be returned. I do not know which one you are reading. But, if you read them, you would know that the only industry that showed serious economic clout as far as taking Australia out of the Depression was the sugar industry. It is very interesting because in 1938—almost after the Depression was over—the government belatedly decided that they had to give a minimum-price scheme for sugar. The minimum-price scheme followed the German economic model, and by 1932 Germany had no depression. They were flying; they had great prosperity in 1932. I might add, for the edification of the opposition, they spent money—they spent absolutely heaps of it. They actually printed money. Hjalmar Schacht printed money. When the scheme was put in place, the first thing they did was give the farmers a guaranteed livable price for their product, and one million of the six million people unemployed were taken off the unemployment rolls and put on to the farms in Germany, by the farmers themselves. Once they were given a price they could live with, they went out and spent money and employed people and got the German economy going.

Returning to the bill proper, leaving the present group of people there: Minister, I have to say that I am really not pleased with the exceptional circumstances situation. I had two very bad cases under the previous government. In fact, the cases were so bad that it was alleged that the then Minister for Trade, the now member for Wide Bay and the Leader of the National Party in this place—although it is rather a curious situation—

Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Indigenous Health, Rural and Regional Health and Regional Service Delivery) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

But is he a National Party member?

Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Well, he is not; he is a Liberal Party member, and he is still holding down the leadership. I would say to the National Party people in New South Wales and Victoria: there is a golden opportunity here to pull the rug out from under a person who I believe is one of the worst members of parliament I have seen in 35 years in politics!

Sid Sidebottom (Braddon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I just remind the speaker to remember the legislation and to speak through the chair, please.

Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Indigenous Health, Rural and Regional Health and Regional Service Delivery) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That was a very strong claim!

Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Through the chair, thanks.

Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Indigenous Health, Rural and Regional Health and Regional Service Delivery) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

All right, through the chair: that was a very strong claim!

Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Indeed. Now be quiet, thank you.

Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I couldn’t quite see there for the shine coming off his head! I had two very bad examples of the performance of the exceptional circumstances committee, where they were very dramatically wrong and then refused to admit their mistake. Whether it was the fault of the Queensland government or the federal government was never clearly indicated, but at the present moment, if the minister could take cognisance of this fact, we have had the second-worst flood in Ingham or Normanton’s history, in 130 years of European occupation, and we do not have ‘exceptional circumstances’. We are returning the people who are overseeing the board and saying, ‘They’ve done a good job; we should leave them there.’ I have to say that I am very curious to know how they justify not giving exceptional circumstances. We would desperately like the minister to take cognisance of the very serious plight of the sugarcane farmers at Ingham and, on the other side of the Great Dividing Range, the graziers, right through, certainly from Croydon and arguably from Georgetown, all the way to Normanton—right across North Queensland.

Finally, I find myself in the situation of having to ask the minister to do a very difficult job. Well, I don’t think it is all that difficult a job. I am sure a person of his capacity would not find this a difficult job. The Reserve Bank of Australia is putting out money at three per cent. All we are saying is: could we please have some of that money at two per cent—so, we might need a million dollars in subsidy—and can we restructure our existing loans? Restructuring is a nice sort of phrase that obfuscates, but, with the money that we owe the banks, they have got us locked into overdraft at 12 and 15 per cent at the present moment. That is going to destroy all of the sugarcane farmers. And when their blocks are sold up, it will not be sugarcane farmers that buy those blocks; it will be lifestylers. Almost every single sugarcane block that is going onto the market is being bought by lifestylers We will close the mills. The AWA will lose their membership of 5,000 people. And this country will lose enormous income which it is enjoying at the present moment in the sugar belt. Over in the cattle belt, if we do not get this money it will take us 15 to 20 years to build our numbers back up to where they are at the present moment. If we get this money we can buy heifers or weaners, many of which would have been spayed—and they won’t be spayed; they will be purchased as breeders and we will replenish our herds so that we can keep this great beef industry of Australia going.

Turning back to the exceptional circumstances, what we are asking the government for is a loan to restructure our existing loans. If we get exceptional circumstances then our existing loans—and many of these loans are in overdraft at 12 and 15 per cent—can be restructured, at the very least at three per cent from the Reserve Bank; but I would hope that the government’s generosity could find $1 million out of the $270,000,000,000 it is going to spend this year to subsidise those loans down to two per cent. I just think there is a principle involved here.

I was soundly criticised—some would say ‘given a flogging’—when we moved the QIDC, the Queensland state bank, to become a fully fledged bank. They accused me of having set the bank up to look after my rich cocky mates. There was no doubt that I was one of the two ministers who had responsibility for the state bank of Queensland, the QIDC—and I was probably the one who had the more immediate responsibility. It was the Rural Reconstruction Board before it became the QIDC. It was set up on the premise that in bad times we would borrow money and lend it out to our farmers and to other businesses and industries in trouble. We would borrow the money and lend it out. The great advantage with the farmers was that they could provide our bank with security. Farming is a magnificently secure lending operation for banks. Land prices, even in the worst situations, do not tend to collapse; that is very rare. In fact, the wool collapse was the only time in my lifetime that we saw land prices go down. The banks have super security. So we could go in and lend the money through the QIDC, knowing that we had super security for that money.

In the old Queensland government we were regarded as pretty cunning blokes—and we were, because when things came good it was not the Bank of New South Wales or the Westpac bank, as it is now, or the National Bank that had that account; it was the QIDC that had that account. We took huge amounts of magnificently profitable business out from under the mainstream banks. They would not carry these people, they would not help these people in their times of plight and necessity—in fact, they tripped them into overdraft rates and cost them a fortune. I will go no further than myself, who started life as a humble labourer at Mount Isa Mines and who owned 250,000 acres unencumbered in the Gulf Country when I went into parliament. I was on 29 per cent interest rates in the second last year on Saint Francis station.

I do not want to go into the details of how farmers get tied into that sort of situation, but the banks say: ‘You’re an at-risk industry, so there’s an extra 2½ per cent. You’re an at-risk person, so there’s another 2½ per cent on top of that. You’re on overdraft rates, we’re not going to roll your loan over, so there’s another 3½ per cent on top of that.’ And, because it is an at-risk area, they lob another 2½ per cent on top of that again. Then they have charges each year. They want the thing to be valued every two seconds. There are numerous charges like that. It worked out to 29 per cent in our second last year on Saint Francis.

These poor people are suffering that sort of oppression at the present moment. They should not have to. They are decent, hardworking people who have done absolutely nothing wrong. They have been thrown a bit of a curved ball here. All they need is a little bit of time. If you have a bloke who knows how to run a cattle station in the gulf, you want to keep him there. These blokes know how to run a sugarcane farm and will continue as sugarcane farmers—they are not lifestylers who will buy a farm, sit on it and do nothing with it. They are providing jobs for mill workers. There are 5,000 AWU members alone in that industry before you get to the AMWSU and all the other unions, which are very good representatives.

Minister, please can you give us exceptional circumstances so we can transfer those bank loans to an interest rate that we can live with, instead of being put on a punitive interest rate and being punished for something we have not done and are totally innocent of. It is in the public interest to keep in the gulf those people who know how to run a property in the gulf. You do not learn overnight how to run a property in the gulf. I speak with very great authority, having had cattle in the Gulf Country all of my adult life. These people are experts in their field. They have honorary degrees from the university of hard knocks, and they are well deserved—and it is similar in the sugar industry. We have to get those exceptional circumstances.

I fail to understand how, when we have had the second worst flood in 150 years of white settlement, it is not an exceptional circumstance. Everyone thinks in terms of drought. In North Queensland we do not have droughts; we have floods. In the days of enlightened government we had banks. There were great men in Australia’s history. King O’Malley set up the Commonwealth Bank. Ted Theodore knew the answers to the Depression. Both Malcolm Fraser and Paul Keating quoted him as one of their two heroes, and of course if you go into my office you will see a big picture of ‘Red’ Ted on the wall. He set up the Commonwealth Development Bank. McEwen put huge amounts of money in the Commonwealth Development Bank and set up the Primary Industry Bank and the AIDC. They did that because they knew we needed these sources of funds so that we would not have to put upon our minister to go cap in hand to Treasury and ask for a loan that was going to return no benefit to the Treasury, but we did it because we were making huge profits out of it, to be quite frank. (Time expired)

Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

in reply—First of all I thank everybody who has participated in the debate on the Rural Adjustment Amendment Bill 2009. The amendment in this legislation involves only half a dozen words, but it has provided an opportunity for broad-ranging debate, and I certainly welcome that. Some people have used the debate only in part to give me a whack back for the different things I have said during question time—and good on them, that is part of the banter back and forth. Overwhelmingly, this debate has been an opportunity for people to put on the record the extraordinary levels of hardship they have seen and to deal with the policy challenges. We all acknowledge that we have not got this right yet. The emotion that has come out in some of the speeches—and I was not able to be in here for many of the speeches today—

Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You were here for a few, and you should be applauded, Minister, for that. We thank you.

Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I was here during the speech of the member for Maranoa, which I think was a really good example of somebody recollecting, when talking through the policy, the very deep hardship they have seen in their own electorate. As soon as he reminded me of the time that we shared a platform in his electorate, I recalled being told the moment the plane landed that in the previous few days there had been yet another suicide in that community. Those sorts of stories are far too commonplace for members of parliament, including in the electorate of the member for Mallee, who is here. It is difficult to see an area that is doing it tougher than Mildura. Drought is always hard, and an irrigation drought is something nobody thought to plan for. I also acknowledge the member for Calare, the shadow minister, and the very real hardship in many parts of his electorate. Some parts have good news again, but there have been some good farmers who were unable to stay in business while they waited for the good news to come.

There is one argument that has been put in a number of speeches. I continue to refute it and I will refute it again. I once again want to caution members about this particular fear campaign. The government has continued to say that any changes from a crisis management approach to a risk management approach with our drought policy—which we are still working through—are about trying to help people better prepare for the next drought. All our discussions with industry have worked on the basis that the rules will not change from under people who are still going through the current drought.

I know that each year when the budget comes out there is a level of alarm about EC payments not appearing in the forward estimates. I have here—and there is no point tabling them, because they are already public—pages from the previous government’s final budget. In the out years, nothing is there. That was not because they were planning to abolish EC. It is the strange way that these issues always appear in the forward estimates. Every budget, the same argument will be able to be run. This time, you had the added complication of some issues appearing in the Treasury papers which used to appear in the Agriculture papers. But of all the different political campaigns to run back and forth, I plead with every member of parliament to try to avoid running a fear campaign that puts people who are already very much living on the edge in a fear which they do not need to have.

The guarantee has been given many times by me and the Prime Minister. I hope that, when we hit next year’s budget, this will not be an issue. Whatever the new drought policy is, I do not know that we do much for the people who are still working under the old transition system, who have drought declarations and EC declarations appearing in the same form, by participating in a fear campaign when we know that this is the way that the budget has always been presented since this issue was first brought in.

There are other challenges with the current drought system that were part of the broad canvassing of debate. I do not know whether we will be able to fix all of them with the new drought policy. We are having very constructive talks with industry. But the issue of lines on maps remains a grave injustice. To have two adjacent properties that have an identical level of hardship, sharing a fence but not sharing an EC boundary, not getting the same assistance—one getting it and the other not—is an unjust feature of the current system. When I first made the ministerial statement referring to what we wanted to do with drought policy, the Leader of the Nationals, to his credit, raised lines on maps as being a problem and also said that the previous government had on many occasions tried to find a way around it and found that it is really hard to do. And it is. We are still wrestling with that and working our way through it with industry.

The other issue which has been raised, and it was raised just now by the member for Kennedy, is that drought is not the only form of hardship that farmers face. To the extent that we get drought policy right—and that is only to a limited extent, but there is certainly a lot of good done through the current drought policy—we do not take adequate account of other forms of hardship. The stories that the member for Kennedy tells are all too true. We have a very unusual situation in his seat. I was warned about it when I travelled with him to Cloncurry and Normanton. I was warned then by the pastoralists that, even though what I was looking at was a mass of water and a flood, if I were to come back a few months later exactly what the member for Kennedy has just reported on would be what I would see—a landscape that looked like a drought. That is for the very simple reason that, if you have a flood and it lasts a few days, a week or even a week and a half, when it goes the land will largely bounce back. When you have vegetation covered for something in the order of six weeks—and I think that is right—

Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Yes. It could be eight weeks.

Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

the vegetation is largely gone. What then happens, as the heat returns you have nothing to hold the soil moisture together. When you add the fact that—from what I understand from the first musters up there that took place last month and that are concluding know—basically the entire calf population is gone, you have very similar impacts to the ones that we talk about with drought, but they do not satisfy the EC test. Yet, on the face of it, if you took the words ‘exceptional circumstances’ for what they say, by any definition flood is exceptional and is a situation for which people would want us to find a way of providing greater levels of assistance than the current policy settings allow. Those talks with the member for Kennedy are ongoing. I cannot report a landing point yet, but the concerns that the member for Kennedy raises match exactly with what I have seen firsthand on the ground in his electorate.

They are a number of the challenges that we want to work through. I appreciate the genuine nature of the debate that has gone on across the House in this discussion. There will always be times when there is a whole series of issues such that the partisan nature of this chamber takes over, and that is part of it. We are not going to pretend to take the politics out of the parliament. But all people involved in primary industries ought to be able to use this debate as a reference point to understand the very high level of goodwill and desire to get policy right in their interests that exists on every side and in every corner of this chamber.

I should finally refer to what the legislation that we are about to vote on actually does. The National Rural Advisory Council only allows people to serve two terms. There are challenges and there are times when the National Rural Advisory Council gets it wrong. There were some very strong examples of this that were put forward earlier in the debate by the member for Hume. One of the challenges that I have tried to deal with within the current policy settings is to make sure that, where there is an allegation that the National Rural Advisory Council has got something wrong, they go back in there as soon as possible and reassess. We have been doing that constantly.

If an area is largely in recovery, I urge the state ministers to let us know beforehand what the revised boundaries should be so that we can do the check under revised boundaries, instead of having the situation we have at the moment, which is where the National Rural Advisory Council makes a majority ruling on a region and you end up with a whole lot of people who are not out of drought at all being told that they have no benefits and then having to wait for the reassessment under new boundaries so that they can be told, ‘Oh, no; now we’ll look after you.’

A similar challenge was raised very early after I got the portfolio by a number of members from each side of the House. There are challenges which occur due to the NRAC decisions coming down too late and too close to the concluding day. An argument has been put many times by David Crombie, which is that, if farmers are going to stay, they should be able to stay with dignity and, if they are going to leave, they should be able to leave with dignity. People are not treated well by getting a couple of weeks notice of benefits ending. The current system lends itself to that. We have now started to try to conclude the process earlier. But that of course means that we do not end up with the benefit of the latest data. That is a balance that we are trying to work through.

This bill allows us to appoint the members of the National Rural Advisory Council for a further term. They have a great level of expertise. They deal at the absolute coalface. Even though there will be times when members say they have made a mistake or the majority decision was not just, I have to say they are extraordinarily decent people. Originally all of them came to me as appointees of the previous government and I would like the opportunity to be able to ask each and every one of them to stay on. They do their job in an extraordinarily honourable and professional way. This bill, if it is carried, would provide that opportunity.

I urge the Senate in the time that it has remaining before we rise to deal with this bill hopefully more quickly than we did. I do not want to be in a situation from 1 July where we do not actually have a fully functioning NRAC to make those decisions. There is a strong case to maintain the expertise of the current serving members on NRAC. If the legislation does not get progressed in the winter sitting, the remaining members of NRAC could be required to take on additional responsibility and new members would need to be chosen to replace the retiring members, even though those members ultimately would not have needed to retire. I hope we can avoid that situation. Certainly it would be regarded as unsatisfactory by the farmers who rely on those decisions.

I commend the bill to the House. I thank the opposition and the crossbench for the constructive way that they have dealt with the debate. I certainly hope that at some time in the near future I am able to report on a proposal for a new drought policy that is able to retain the sort of bipartisan approach which has characterised this debate for so many years.

John Forrest (Mallee, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Development) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker, on indulgence and in the spirit of the comments of the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, I seek to put a question to him. The thing that is worrying my farmers is that the portfolio budget statements—I think it is page 60—attempt to explain why the forward estimates do not add EC but contain the sentence ‘because EC is to be terminated’. I wonder whether the minister might put on the public record and make a contribution to the gesture he is asking for by removing the fear.

Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker, on indulgence: I can give the same guarantee that I have given on many occasions. The date that appears in the budget papers refers to the termination of those payments appearing in the portfolio statements of the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry. It does not refer to the termination of the program. They cease to appear in the portfolio statements. I give the guarantee to each of the farmers in your electorates who are currently on EC payments that, when we reach 1 July in a few weeks time, they will continue to receive the payments. Those budget allocations now appear in the Treasury papers because of a COAG decision rather than in the Agriculture papers. That is why you have an annotation there. Where they appear in the Treasury papers, the usual problem with the forward estimates is still there. But that is the reason for the unusual annotation which is there. I hope that that provides an absolute level of clarity. The people who are eligible at the end of this month continue to be eligible next month and onwards throughout current declarations. I cannot prejudge future NRAC decisions and recommendations as to whether those drought declarations will be renewed, but if they were to be renewed it is certainly the intention of the government that those people continue to be eligible for assistance.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.