Susan McDonald (Queensland, National Party, Shadow Minister for Resources) Share this | Hansard source

It's hard to beat that that final line! I want to thank Senator McKenzie for bringing on this matter of urgency so that we can have a debate about farming even in this short time in the Senate. This goes to far more than what happens at parliament and what happens in Canberra. This is about the men and women right across Australia who have incredible challenges, and the part that really worries me about Labor is how few of them understand how hard it is to farm. They don't understand that you are battling international commodity prices, a duopoly of supermarket buyers, variable seasons, skyrocketing costs of production, a shortage of workforce and, at the same time, your own government, which is putting more and more restrictions on how you operate. Farmers are spending more time in the office and less time on the farm because they grow food. I'm not sure if you're aware that 99 per cent of the population—most of us—rely on one per cent of the population to grow our food and fibre, and that one per cent of our population is saying, 'We have had enough.' Their children are saying, 'This is not a career that I want to choose anymore because of what Labor is doing.'

I have got a long list of issues relating to what Labor have done just in the last 2½ years. You really can't believe it when you look at it. There is the introduction of the Climate Change Authority and their out-of-control direction that is not being pulled into line by Labor, who say, 'Oh, it's an independent agency.' There is the Global Methane Pledge. There are water buybacks. They removed all of the funding for northern Australian water projects, took that money and bought water out of the Murray-Darling, resulting in less food opportunity in the north and less food opportunity in the south. They're bringing in scope 3 emissions reporting from 1 January next year. Superannuation changes are forcing farmers to pay for unrealised gains on their properties in super funds. They've removed gillnet fishing in Far North Queensland. They're refusing to settle the live export dispute. These very same cabinet ministers who shut down the cattle live export industry are now at the table shutting down live sheep exports out of Western Australia—and this includes cattle, by the way. Nobody talks about that part, but cattle are also affected by that. The salmon-farming industry in Tasmania is bowing under pressure and is about to break.

We should care that our farmers are labouring under the costs of Labor. We should care that their ability to grow food and fibre is being restricted. We should care that policies are being run by the Greens in inner-city places with this fanciful idea that we can have greenhouses and that manufactured food will feed billions of people around the world. We should care about that and say, 'Enough!' I say that because what the NFF has done is led a group of farmers from across Australia who have said: 'Please let us do what we do best. Let us manage our land. Let us farm. Let us grow food for you. Let us not be restricted by the EU's restrictions on deforestation—policies that do not apply in the Australian context. Please stop the World Heritage listings of our important food manufacturing places. Please let us make our own decisions and not be driven by overseas government and regulations.' These are the sorts of things that farmers talk to me about when they are complaining about how hard it is to be compliant and to grow food and fibre—all of the things that we don't have to consider. In fact, our biggest problem is eating too much food. We never ever stop to think about how hard it is to grow it. This government urgently needs to stop and understand the cumulative effects of so many separate and disparate decisions that are breaking the will of farmers and ensuring that young people are saying it is too hard.

I want to finish on this point. The thing that keeps the people in my part of the world, northern Australia, awake is when they see a dirty deal done with the Greens, in a Victorian by-election, to shut down their industry. They know that a Labor minority government with the Greens will shut down the cattle live export industry in northern Australia in a heartbeat. They won't even pause to examine the dead bodies.