Senate debates

Tuesday, 12 November 2019

Bills

Farm Household Support Amendment (Relief Measures) Bill (No. 1) 2019; Second Reading

6:20 pm

Photo of Malcolm RobertsMalcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

I stand as a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia. This Farm Household Support Amendment (Relief Measures) Bill (No. 1) 2019 is intended to introduce improvements to the farm household allowance payments scheme. It may provide some mild improvement in terms of relief, but it shows no understanding of the plight of the Australian farmers facing one of the nation's worst droughts in remembered history.

Dairy farmers have been forced to walk off their farms or to sell them for next to nothing. Our sheep and cattle graziers have been selling their breeding stock and, in some instances, been forced to shoot their starving animals. Grain growers have been seeing crops fail season after season and the land is parched and dry, with little change in sight. And what does the government do? Well, next to nothing. Rivers flow past farmers desperate for water when money-hungry investors have bought up the water rights and yet have no interest in farming. Water mismanagement has occurred on what some would say is a criminal scale, denying needy farmers access to life-saving water. The government has no national water plan. The government has no national drought-proofing plan.

Where is the new infrastructure? The government has failed Australian farmers by providing no leadership in preserving and protecting the men and women of the land. Where is the real support? Where are the guarantees that farmers can continue to farm the land, where many have lived for generations, and provide the necessary food to feed the nation? Will we have to import our basic food products—milk, dairy products, flower, vegetables, fruit and meat? Seriously, we are proud producers and exporters of all these things in the good times.

I have recently travelled all over Queensland and down into the Murray-Darling Basin to listen to farmers across these regions. What I hear are stories of tragedy where the government is failing these people who are the backbone of our nation. I have seen people who are in debt, savaged by the banks—who have acted like vultures—and with no help in sight. Where is the infrastructure which should have been built 20 years ago? Where are the dams, the new power stations, the pipelines and the road linkages and upgrades that will make access easier for farmers to get their produce to market and allow our farmers to weather the drought? Why does the government dither in providing the emergency assistance to lift farmers out of their dire positions? The tragic side of this is the unacceptable number of farmers who have taken their own lives because of the desperation they feel in losing everything. Many farming families' lives remain shattered in the dust.

I must digress for a minute to discuss how government, under the Liberal-Labor duopoly—Liberal-Labor-Nationals following a Greens plan—has really hurt farmers. There was the stealing of property rights initiated under the John Howard government in 1996 with Rob Borbidge, the National Party Premier at the time in Queensland, and then two years later with the Labor Premier of Queensland, Peter Beattie, and the Labor Premier of New South Wales, Bob Carr. They were stealing property rights with no compensation. All we ask for—and, again, we will keep asking for it until it happens—is restoration of those farmers' property rights or compensation. Restoration or compensation!

We want energy. That comes back to the original competitive federalism structure, in which states are responsible for electricity prices. Now we see a mishmash that is acknowledged—indirectly, but certainly clearly—by the government's so-called 'big stick' bill. The government created the mess and now the farmers are paying for it. We have farmers in northern, Central and southern Queensland who are refusing to plant fodder because they can't afford to irrigate it. They won't plant fodder in a drought!

One of the forms of assistance offered by this bill, though, is a change in the time frames for when a person is able to access farm household allowance. The change—from four years access over a lifetime to four years in each specified 10-year period—offers no significant immediate benefit, as the time to receive these benefits remains limited to four years of payments only. This scheme is unrealistic, and, during a major catastrophic drought, is unworkable. It shows the lack of understanding of the plight of farmers depending on this small allowance to survive, by those who wrote this part of the bill.

Why set up a time frame at all? People living in the city who receive Newstart allowance do not have a similar time limit attached to receiving their allowance. If a time frame is warranted, would it not be better to consider a period ending some years after the drought has broken? When farmers have destocked during a drought, it takes several years to rebuild numbers in their herd to reach a viable herd size.

The bill establishes the possibility of a lump sum payment for recipients who have exhausted the maximum farm household allowance payments by 1 July 2020, and allows for the minister's rules to prescribe further lump sum payments as required. The minister is going to be very busy considering individual applications, unless the rain arrives! This still is not a long-term solution to assist farmers in the future.

The bill also expands the off-farm income offset, with an upper limit moving to $100,000, up from $80,000. This will benefit those who are able to access the second income stream, but not everyone can. The real issue here is the lack of government leadership—to provide real relief to our farmers who have been crippled by the drought, and to provide real prevention, starting now, to prevent the ravages of drought when we have our next drought. And we will—just as this drought will end and the next cycle will commence, we will have another drought. Let's hope that the infrastructure is in place. There needs to be an overall strategy to ensure that plans are in place to support farmers long before a disaster like this unfolds again, and especially to prevent it. It's a pity this was not done 20 years ago. But the strategy is still missing. What is needed is a coordinated governmental response that will ensure continuity of support for farmers when the weather turns against them. Farmers of course are resilient and know that the weather will be either favourable or not. They plan for that. But dealing with a lengthy drought strains the best of plans.

Just a couple of weeks ago I was in northern Victoria, listening to farmers on the banks of the Murray River. I listened to a construction worker who came up and said that farmers are just not spending this time, because, although they have confidence that the drought will end, they have no confidence that government interference and suppression will end. They don't know where the government is going. They have no clue about the future. So they are not willing to spend any money, and so businesses in town and construction workers are not being supported. We need confidence amongst farmers, and that comes from knowing that government won't interfere as it has been.

The government is obliged to support the farmers the best way it can. This bill does go at least some way to achieve this, but much more needs to be done. I call on the government to formulate an Australian drought-proofing plan, including national water management and realistic social and monetary support for those affected by natural disasters—a solid plan, based on solid data and facts, aimed at meeting people's needs and our nation's needs.

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