Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

It is interesting that the National Party says there is not enough money when the National Party did not put a proposition to the minister. How much money did you ask for? I do not believe the coalition spokesperson went to the minister and put a figure on the table. I will stand to be corrected. I would like to hear from any senator in here who knows that Mr Cobb or anyone else went to the minister and said, ‘I want X amount of dollars.’ I do not believe they did. I believe they said, ‘We need more money.’ They did not ask for a specific amount. They did not have a specific proposal. They are clearly not used to negotiating if they take no for an answer. I do not believe in taking no for an answer if someone says that there is no more money. There was $3 billion on the table yesterday for the car industry. I made the point in my speech in here that if there is that much money on the table for the car industry then there is money available for the farmers. Senator Colbeck said before that $20 million would fix the problem. I am back here with $20 million, in addition to the $39.3 million the government had on the table. Now the coalition, together with Senators Fielding and Xenophon, are going to reject the $39.3 million for reform and the $20 million rebates for the farmers.

For the next 12 months that money will be recouped and they will get their 40 per cent, but the reforms will not proceed because there is no additional money in order to take both the rebates and the reforms beyond this particular package. I was at least prepared to go to the government and say, ‘This is what we need.’ The grain industry said that they want this to proceed; they do not want the disallowance. The horticulture council, having been very conflicted before, I have to say, were back today saying that with that $20 million on the table and the fact that they will get their rebate on fees for the next 12 months, until the end of the financial year, they do not want the disallowance to proceed.

I think you are going to find as you go out there that a lot of industry sectors are very annoyed, because the progressive end of the industry sectors realises that the best way forward for them is to get the reforms in order to reduce the costs. There is duplication. There is no doubt that there is duplication between federal and state inspection services. There is no doubt that we need an electronic system to be able to lodge documentation for accreditation and that sort of thing. There is no doubt that we need the AAs in place and the government negotiating with our high-value export markets like Japan and the US to get the protocols changed. Whether that can be achieved in the time frame I do not know. If it cannot then there has to be another mechanism because we have to get these costs down.

The only way you are going to get efficiencies is if you actually try for a reform process. I have to say that the coalition did not push a reform process between 2001 and 2007. Not a single reform was on the table from the coalition in that time, and nor is there today a proposal from either the Liberal Party or the National Party for how to progress the reforms—not one. There was not a proposal to the minister about a sum of money. There was not a proposal on the table for the minister about how to proceed. In my view this motion is just purely playing politics, because we now have a situation where the Liberal Party and the National Party are refusing $20 million for rural and regional Australia. What is absolutely on the table is an additional $20 million so that the rebates will be paid for the next 12 months while the reform process is on. So it is almost $60 million—the $39.3 million and the $20 million—that is on the table to get the reform agenda up and the rebates paid for the next year.

You are now risking all of that, and I have no idea what the minister and the government would do in response. But let me say that it will not be Family First putting any proposals on the table. It clearly is not the Nationals, it clearly is not the Liberals and it clearly is not Senator Xenophon with a proposal on the table. I know it is the citrus growers in South Australia who have been talking to Senator Xenophon, and of course he is listening to his constituents and that is more than reasonable. But we have got several industry sectors here who want to proceed. Grains said they want to proceed. Dairy want to proceed. The meat industry want to proceed with the reforms and they were very clear about that. They want the reforms, but they want to make sure they get the rebates so that they have a transitional package, if you like, to the new arrangements. They all want to proceed so that by the end of the next financial year the reforms would be in place, with a transitional arrangement.

Now there is nothing. If this goes down, there is no transitional arrangement. There is no $20 million on the table. There is confusion out there. Yes, they will get their fees and rebates paid for the next 12 months, but under this arrangement that is precisely what I intended—that is what the $20 million is intended to do. So I really think this motion is letting down rural Australia with a lack of leadership, to be honest.

Leadership requires that you go out there and drive a reform process that is in the interests of the country in the longer term. It is about making rural and regional Australian export industries more competitive, and that is what they want. I spoke to the cherry growers and what they want is the AAs in place. They want to have accreditation. They want to be able to compete with their New Zealand counterparts. That is what they want, and their frustration is that AQIS has not gone out there and finished the process for them. AQIS has let them down in terms of the reforms that they want, and they want those reforms now. They are not going to get those reforms if this goes down, and there will be a lot of progressive people out there who are frustrated in their efforts to become more competitive in their business and to hold AQIS to account. For years they have been saying that AQIS has been promising these reforms and has not delivered. This was a process for forcing actual reform to occur because the whole thing had to be done in the next 12 months in order to get the fees and charges down in the longer term.

I am not naive about the whole reform agenda being able to be delivered in 12 months. We heard evidence from a number of people that some reforms would be more readily accessible in terms of savings than others and that other reforms may take longer. But the clear evidence is that once you start the reform process you build momentum through that process and you get continual improvement; you get the department focused on actually delivering reform, which is what the agricultural community wants.

Contrary to Senator Fielding’s very poor understanding of this matter, I have been part of the agricultural community for my entire life, having been brought up on a dairy farm in north-west Tasmania. It was in order to save the farmlands of Wesley Vale that I campaigned against the Wesley Vale pulp mill for all those years. I stopped subdivision after subdivision of agricultural land. I brought in the mapping of soils in Tasmania so that we protected high-quality agricultural land, and to this day I am trying to stop the incursion of urban areas into high-quality agricultural land. We have to protect that land for food production into the future, and I am passionate about that. I am also passionate about making sure the people who are growing our food are competitive.

Biosecurity is a key area for Australia’s export competitiveness. We have to do better than we are currently doing in biosecurity, and that is why I have put so much effort into this. That is why I went to the minister the last time we were discussion this here, in June, and said to him: ‘We have to drive this process. We have to get an agreement for horticulture. I want those plans on the table by 1 August.’ And on 31 July I was on the phone to the minister’s office saying, ‘Are you meeting that?’ As a result of the deadline, they had a massive phone link-up that went for hours with the producers to try to get some agreement on a work plan and drive the process during that time. When we came back here after last Friday, I was the one who was then in the minister’s office yesterday with a proposal on the table, and I think $20 million is not to be sneezed at.

I think most growers would be relieved to know that that $20 million was to be spent on giving them their fees and rebates for the next 12 months while that $39 million is being spent on reform. If this goes down, that process will not occur. That would be appalling for competitiveness, because why would there then be any drive for reform into the next 18 months? There will not be, and a lot of these sectors will be very annoyed. So if the National Party and the Liberal Party and the two Independents think that this is some kind of leadership for rural and regional Australia, let me tell them it is not. It is actually pitching to a populist response rather than looking to industry leaders, who are the ones who are going to take us into the future with the best innovation in their sectors. It is the innovators in their sectors who are begging for this reform. And it is the $20 million that the government was going to deliver on top of its $39.3 million that would have supported those innovators in bringing about the changes in AQIS that need to occur to give us better biosecurity and better security for the producers and exporters around rural and regional Australia.

I ask people to think very carefully about moving this disallowance because this is an opportunity. Of course, there are risks associated with it. I sat and listened to all of the people giving evidence to the Senate inquiry about the risk that the reforms may not be delivered in time and that they would be passing out the cost recovery while the reforms may not be delivered. That is why I said, ‘We want the $20 million to give them the rebate at the same time that the reforms are being implemented so it is not costing them in the meantime.’ You can argue about whether 12 months was long enough, and perhaps it is not. I would have loved to have got more for years further out for some of these sectors; nevertheless, the letter signed by the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry says in black and white that there is $20 million of new money. It says:

… the additional funding will effectively allow a rebate on fees and charges for the 2009-10 financial year to all affected sectors while the full reform agenda developed jointly by industry representatives and AQIS is implemented ...

That is my proposal, that is the proposal I went to the government with, that is the proposal that they agreed to and that is why we now have $60 million on the table. Senator Back said to me last night, ‘Surely there must be some resolution to this,’ and that is right—we want a resolution to it. At least I thought people were committed to finding some way through this to a resolution so that we got reform and money. But it appears that is not the case. I think that you are doing a disservice to the innovators and all of the sectors that have said that they want reform. You are now jeopardising reform for an uncertain future, whereas what is on the table is a reform agenda and 12 months guaranteed to get their fees and rebates paid. I think that is a good proposal for rural and regional Australia. It guarantees improvements in biosecurity and efficiency—those things that the coalition never did when it was in government. From 2001 to 2007 not one single reform was implemented or attempted, yet in that time the coalition government made the decision to go to full cost recovery having not implemented a reform. At least this is an attempt at a reform agenda and $20 million to help farmers adjust to it. The coalition—the Liberal-National Party—Senator Xenophon and Senator Fielding will deny rural and regional Australia this $20 million.