Rick Wilson (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to update the House on the situation across the agricultural areas of my electorate of O'Connor. It's a case of the good, the bad and the ugly, but I'm going to start with the good. Last Friday, the Leader of the Opposition, Angus Taylor, wrote to the Prime Minister with a suggestion that the government cut fuel excise—or fuel tax—in half, which would immediately put 26c a litre back into the pockets of motorists. He also suggested that the heavy vehicle road user charge be scrapped temporarily, and that would save our trucking industry 32.4c a litre.

I'm very pleased to say that the Prime Minister stood up today and announced that he was adopting that policy. So that is a very good outcome, not only for the people of O'Connor and the people of Grey—the member for Grey is sitting with me here tonight—but also the nation more generally. So I applaud the Prime Minister for picking up on a very good suggestion from the Leader of the Opposition.

There was another good thing that happened over the weekend. While there was some damage from Cyclone Narelle further north, particularly to the town of Exmouth and down through the Gascoyne, and to Carnarvon and other towns in that area that received some damage—and my very dear friend and colleague, the member for Durack, is back home with her communities as we speak, and I wish them all the best—the good that came out of that cyclone was a significant rain-bearing depression that travelled down through the southern part of the state, bringing some very useful rains across the agricultural region.

Across my electorate, Quairading had 26 millimetres, which is a good start for them. Further east it was a little bit drier: Lake Grace had 19 millimetres; Narembeen had 15 millimetres. But the really good rainfall fell down in the western part of the Great Southern, in my home town of Katanning, with 46 millimetres, and Boyup Brook, with 44 millimetres. So it was an excellent start to the season for those areas.

Of course, the bad is that fuel supplies are still very, very tight. Most farmers have been gradually filling their tanks. They've been ordering large volumes and getting small increments, and, hopefully, getting those storage tanks full. But, as of today, they'll be going flat out, and those large tractors and sprayers will use a thousand litres a day. Most farming operations would have three or four of them running, so they will plough through a lot of diesel in a very short period of time. Let's hope that they can keep that fuel up and keep the crop going in.

But the ugly is very much the fertiliser situation. Seeding fertiliser, for the most part, is on farm—most farmers have received their seeding or planting fertiliser—and I think that the crop will go in in relatively good shape. The really disturbing and worrying situation is the nitrogen component of the crop. The most commonly used nitrogen fertiliser would be urea. Most of it comes out of the gulf, and my intelligence tells me that, of the 800,000 tonnes of urea required for this year's crop, about 100,000 is either here, onshore in Western Australia, or on the water. So that's about 700,000 tonnes of urea short.

For those who are not familiar with crop agronomy, as the member for Grey certainly is, urea is what adds to the yield. When you get rain and urea, you grow more biomass—you get more yield, and that's what generates the profit. So, for farmers across my electorate, with such a good start, they would be looking at a similar year to last year, if they can get the urea, and that was a 27 million tonne crop across the Western Australian wheat belt. This year, CBH, the main grain handler in Western Australia, is estimating that, without that urea, the crop will be around 15 million tonnes. That's about a 45 per cent reduction in the crop if farmers can't get hold of that urea.

I applaud the government, once again, for taking up the suggestion of cutting the fuel excise and the heavy-vehicle road user charge, but I urge them to take every step to ensure supplies of nitrogen for this year's crop. It is absolutely vital, not just for those individual farm properties but for the economy of the Western Australian Wheatbelt that those farmers get access to that fertiliser.