Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of answers by the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, and Minister for Emergency Management, Senator Watt, to questions asked today.

Well, today was a masterclass by a minister who has clearly still got his training wheels on. This is a minister who is way out of his depth. I've got a lot of experience with this man. For the last three years, whenever we've done interviews together, this guy has done nothing but throw smear and mud. He hasn't been able to answer any questions. We just got a long list of answers then from the questions that he took on notice yesterday because he is not around the detail. He is not around the detail. He doesn't take the livestock industry seriously in this country, and it's not surprising. He grew up in inner-city Brisbane. He went to a posh inner-city school. He's never gone any further west than the Oxley pub!

He knows nothing about agriculture in this country. And let me tell you: the livestock industry in this country is the backbone of this country. It's not just beef. It's sheep and it's pigs. It's cattle and camels, and also all the wild feral animals. So if foot-and-mouth gets out—we've got wild pigs roaming around out in the regions—this will be very hard to contain.

Of course, what Senator Watt doesn't realise—he likes to blame the previous government for not doing anything—is that foot-and-mouth only got into Indonesia on 9 May, but the key part of it is that it only got into Bali on 5 July. That is after Labor took government. That is a classic example of spin by Senator Watt. Now, as he just pointed out, 90 per cent of the traffic that comes from Indonesia is from Bali. So that is why the previous government didn't do anything, in terms of not having to do anything—there was no serious outbreak until it got to Bali. But when you've got travellers going over to Bali and coming back—90 per cent of the people coming back are basically not thinking of foot-and-mouth; you don't expect to when you go to Bali; that's not the first thing on your mind—Senator Watt tries to downplay just how serious this issue is.

Let me tell you this: if foot-and-mouth gets into this country, it will be very serious. Every farm within a three-kilometre radius of where a foot-and-mouth outbreak is diagnosed will have to have all of their livestock destroyed on the spot. And if that continues, we will see the devastation of our livestock. That is not a laughing matter, and that is something that Senator Watt should be taking more seriously, and we know that he's not because his good colleague here, Senator Ayres, pointed out that they took a long time to even have any foot mats. They didn't have any foot mats. So he's taken a long time to respond. He's only bringing on 18 extra biosecurity staff. That is not enough when you've got 90 per cent of 323,000—about 300,000 people—coming from Bali. How on earth are 18 extra security officers going to actually make sure that we trap foot-and-mouth in this country?

The other thing that I want to talk about is the fact that the Labor Party think that they are going to look after our youth. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Labor Party have a long history of destroying the dreams and aspirations of our young people. There's no greater example of that than the introduction of superannuation in this country. Right now, our young children who are on low incomes are having 10 per cent of their income taken from them. It's just now jumped to 10½ per cent in the last month, and Labor want to take it to 12 per cent. But that's not enough, because in a second term, if they get in, they're already talking about lifting it to 15 per cent. Now, I fail to see how that's going to help our young people deal with the cost of living. They are ripping money out of young people's pockets and giving it to their mates in the industry super funds and their rivers of gold.

This is why they won't do anything about the corporate sector either. It is because the Labor Party today is the party of the big end of town, and never ever forget that. They've marched through the bureaucracy. They've marched through the corporations. They love big business. This is the party of big business, and they've just been ripping the fees—over $30 billion in fees—out of hardworking Australians every year, and this is why they go paralytic whenever you talk about touching superannuation. It's not your money. You should give that money back to the young people and let them pay off their mortgages. But, you see, they don't want that, because the industry funds own over 20 per cent of the banks in this country. They want to rip off our young people both ways: through bank fees and interest and through superannuation fees.