Angus Taylor (Hume, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On July 14, we lost the former member for Hume, Alby Schultz, a dear friend of mine and a tower of strength not only for the people of Hume but for his parliamentary colleagues, his friends and not the least, of course, for his wife Gloria and his family. Parliament will remember Alby tomorrow.

I was in Alby's home town, Cootamundra, last Friday. It is to the Cootamundra and Young regions which I want to turn my focus on this evening. With my colleague the Assistant Minister for Education and Training, Simon Birmingham, I toured a terrific local enterprise last week. This is one of the best examples of local entrepreneurship that I have seen in years. Cootamundra Oilseeds has been trading for 20 years. It employs close to 30 staff, and only a couple of months ago it commissioned a major new greenfields site. Coota oilseeds is the largest cold-pressed oil producer in Australia and is leading the way in removing tentacles from its processing. It is the only commercially-sized oil producer in Australia supplying chemical-free, extra virgin canola oil. I took Simon Birmingham there to see how the staff are being trained in new state-of-the-art computerised oil processing, with the help of some federal dollars from the Industry Skills Fund. This is an absolutely fantastic business, supporting jobs in the Cootamundra community through innovation and fast-growing new markets. General Manager, Andrew Puckeridge, expects the new plant to double production over the next six months. In his words, 'We want everyone who is here to stay working here, and we want to support this town and so we are upskilling with the help of the government.'

Confidence is returning to the food processing industry and their farm suppliers. There has been huge investment from businesses like Cootamundra Oilseeds and state-of-the-art systems. Similarly, abattoirs in Cootamundra and Young have been sinking millions of dollars into new processing facilities. These are all investments coming off the back of our free trade agreements, and these are the very real export opportunities ramping up in my electorate. Hand in hand with free trade agreements signed with our major export markets of Korea and Japan, Hilltop Meats at Young has upgraded its beef slaughter floor, building a new beef boning room, a new refrigeration plant and a new rendering facility, after being shut down for several years.

Another industry in Young investing heavily in product plant and research is the cherry growers. The message I am hearing loud and clear is that they need more government targeting of non-tariff trade barriers in Asia to access new markets. We have to give them that leg-up as quickly as possible. I sit on the parliament's Joint Select Committee on Trade and Investment Growth, which is inquiring into how we best utilise our free trade agreements. For the mainland cherry growers, the protocol in Asia for the treatment of fruit fly remains a huge stumbling block. Many of these countries will only accept fumigation at high temperatures, which damages the fruit, or cold sterilisation via weeks of transit by sea freight. This is just not commercial because the fruit degrades so much after three weeks from the tree. If we actually picked, packed and sent it via air freight, we could be in South-East Asia within 48 hours, as Tasmanian cherries can be already. If we can get key markets in Asia to accept more workable protocols for fruit fly then growers are in an unique position to fly their product in quickly. This is our big advantage over competitor countries like Chile, Argentina, South Africa and New Zealand, which cannot get their product there as fast.

The most immediate thing we can do as a government is to get the right focus inside relevant departments. We need to demonstrate the effectiveness and the workability of our proposed protocols, market by market. If we can open up these markets, we know we will see transformative investment in coming years. We know that we can create a fast-growing new set of export opportunities, with untold job opportunities and business opportunities with that. I will continue to focus on making this a reality in the coming months.

House adjourned at 21 : 31