Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

The reason we have a single desk is twofold: firstly, the advantages to our growers domestically and, secondly, the advantages to the marketing of the product overseas. We have heard a lot of argument and contention about the advantages or disadvantages domestically but the facts stand that, on the 2006 census from Rural Press, about 73 per cent want a single desk. In fact, 69 per cent of them want it to be run by the AWB.

We have a campaign in Western Australia that is based on the fear that if you present your grain you will not get payment and that inordinate liabilities are hanging over the head of AWB. I think this fear campaign has been strategically placed to come out during the Cole inquiry with the result that it breaks the single desk. No doubt anybody can cherry-pick a market in such a way as to get a certain section of the market, a certain period of time in the middle of a drought when the wheat crop is low, supply their own mills in another country and say that they have created a situation that no longer spells the relevance of the single desk. But over a period of time that will prove to be completely and utterly wrong. Furthermore, the results of the advantages of the single desk are that the marketing of this product throughout the world has been built on the work of a company called AWB. Since 1939 the AWBI has built up the marketing of this product. Anybody can go into an established market of another person and say, ‘If I can basically steal some of your market, I can get the same price or better than what you have, because you’ll be left with all the contingent liabilities and I’ll get the benefit of the revenue.’ That is what is happening here.

AWB, in the marketing of the product, has to take a long-term position in the market; it is the diligent and safe thing to do. In taking a long-term position in the market, you take out the troughs but you can also take out some of the peaks. Nonetheless, today we see that CBH, which has been put up as the shining light of where this is all going, offered a price that is basically approximate to what the AWB offers in any case. Even with all that, the AWB is still basically on the mark, and the AWB is always conservative in its price. In fact, it has gone below it only once; that was in 1990.

What we give up if we lose the single desk is no better enunciated than by our major competitors. People such as Pascal Lamy from the EU, Senator Norm Coleman from Minnesota or Tom Harkin, Democrat senator in charge of the agriculture committee of the congress, want to get rid of our single desk. They want to get rid of it for one specific reason: it is a strategic market advantage that they feel compromises the price they can get—not the price we can get but the price they can get. On destruction of the single desk there is only one person who will lose and that is the Australian wheat grower. To have a single desk you must have integrity of the pool. The integrity of the pool relies on the power of veto. You cannot ask a certain company to be the buyer of last resort yet not give them the integrity of the pool. If we get the destruction of this, we will have a case where we can have certain deals for certain mates and other deals for other people. What I do agree with is that we must have greater transparency in the single desk. We must have a move back to grower owned directors. But to get rid of it, to throw the baby out with the bathwater—to prove a point for a very peculiar, specific period of time based on the fear of an inquiry into the actions of certain people in the executive of a company, who are now sacked—is blatantly ridiculous. If you do that, you are creating a great mischief in the lives of people.

However, we could see the numbers. I do not know where the Greens were on this issue; I suspect that they want to get rid of the single desk. I know that the Democrats have been clearly on the record that they want to get rid of it. The private member’s bill was being put forward by a number of members of the Liberal Party, so the obvious reality was that we were about to have a total deregulation and I think that would have been an extremely unfortunate outcome.

But we have a period of time. It is a fact that, if no other legislation is passed through this parliament, on expiry of the six-month period of time the single desk will revert to the status quo and then it is back with AWBI. As a final statement, I say that it is up the growers who write to me from Western Australia—from Bob Ifler to all the local growers in New South Wales. I also am a wheat grower. I do not have shares in AWB, but I am a small wheat grower nonetheless. I did not have a crop because we had a drought, and the insinuation that it was somehow hidden or warehoused is slanderous. The fact is that we got eight tonnes from 350 acres of seed wheat for next year—that was it—and then we stopped the headers because there was no point in going on. The position is that growers must be absolutely open and vociferous in their campaign to protect the single desk. Ambivalence or saying nothing will be taken as a vote to get rid of the single desk.

Debate interrupted.