Slade Brockman (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to make, for the sake of future speakers, a fairly brief contribution today. I just need to address some of the falsehoods put out there by Senator Watt as to what the government is doing. Senator Watt, and to a degree Senator Roberts, talked as if the Future Drought Fund Bill before us here today is the only thing this government is doing for drought-affected farmers. As my colleague sitting here near me Senator McGrath would know very well, in Queensland and New South Wales this government has put a lot of support towards drought-affected communities in a variety of ways—grants to local governments, farm household allowance, grants for fodder et cetera. The idea that we are waiting for a future date to assist farmers is just an absolute falsehood. It's a nonsense, and it's something that should be condemned in the strongest terms possible.

What this bill does is it sets a path for the future. It sets a path to build the resilience of our farming communities. I grew up on a family farm, a family farm that's been in our family for quite a number of generations now; worked for rural bodies, in particular the Pastoralists and Graziers Association of Western Australia; and have looked into the eyes of drought-affected farming families—very, very good farmers who have been on the land for generations and who are facing the loss of their property and the loss of their ability to pass that farm on to the next generation thanks to, in this case, the 2006 drought in the eastern Wheatbelt of Western Australia. What this bill will do over time is it will continue to build the resilience of our farming communities. Its initial investment of $3.9 billion grows to $5 billion over the decade. Over time, obviously, this will provide a source of funding to enable on-farm drought-resilience projects to be undertaken.

Farmers are resilient. Farmers have got through droughts in Australia for more than 100 years. Even though I saw droughts make it impossible for some farmers to continue, others kept going and they battled their way through the hard times. Families that have been on the land for generations found a way to fight their way through. What this fund will do is provide an opportunity, an option, to continue that process of continually building the resilience of our farming communities, allowing them to proactively adopt new technologies and new opportunities to drought-proof properties and drought-proof agricultural in their particular region.

It's vitally important that we provide communities with hope for the future. It's certainly not the only thing we are doing in this space, but this is a very important component. It's a vehicle that will be there over the long term. It's a vehicle that will provide to rural and regional Australia over a long period of time a consistent, stable and growing source of funding that will allow regions to undertake significant projects to protect them against future drought events. It will provide farming communities and farming families with a degree of certainty and stability that they perhaps currently don't have. So I do commend the bill. I commend the work that's been done in this space by a number of ministers. This is not all that we are doing to assist drought-affected farmers and drought-affected communities, but it is an important part of that jigsaw.