John Williams (NSW, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to contribute to this discussion, which I think is a crazy topic, to be frank. I agree with Senator Cameron. What this topic put forward by the Greens says is:

The only solutions that the Liberal and Labor parties have to inequality and wage stagnation come straight from the neoliberal handbook, like ever-increasing company tax cuts and free trade deals that hurt workers.

I find this amazing. Let's turn the clock back to the Hawke-Keating government. What happened? They opened up trade, and it hurt us, I can tell you. My brother Peter and I were pig farmers. We built a large piggery. It was hard yakka. We got 100 tonnes of gravel out of the creek and we got 16 tonnes of bagged cement, and we shovelled it into a cement mixer to lay the floors, the slabs, the drains et cetera, only to find that the Hawke-Keating government allowed the importation of pig meat. It was not a very good time, especially come 1994 and the drought, when we sold our pigs as bacon, as heavy pigs at the end of the month. What we sold them for did not cover the cost of the grain we were buying to feed the pigs. Cheap imports came in. Even if the imports didn't come in, they could quote a price, and that was enough to make the market stay low here, because the buyers could say, 'Hang on, I can buy it for $2 from Canada or Denmark; I won't pay more than $1.80 in Australia by the time I add the processor to it.' So that put a dampener on it, and the five or six large piggeries in our area, the Inverell area, shut down, costing jobs. So I thought: 'What's Australia doing? It's crazy with all these trade deals, removing all our barriers—removing the excise, the tariff and the quotas—and letting everything come into Australia.' I tell you that it hurt. However, we've gone past that, and now the other countries are doing the same thing Australia did in the late eighties and early nineties. We're doing these deals where they're removing their barriers and quotas, and it's working.

During my life in rural Australia, you usually got one commodity that was good. It might be wool at the time when cattle were bad, lamb prices were bad and wheat prices were bad. There are exciting times in rural Australia now when we have record prices for wool and we just had a record price for lamb. I pity those who have to buy legs of lamb in the shop at the moment. Lambs made over $300 a head just recently, which is amazing in a drought. All of my life, whenever there was drought, livestock markets just crashed and sheep and cattle sold cheaply, but not this time, because people need and want our food.