Tyron Whitten (WA, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

Farmers in Western Australia and all of Australia are under attack. They are bullied from pillar to post by every level of government, by crazy climate zealots and by radical animal activists. All these people are happy to eat the food they produce and bask in the wealth they create, but do they actually care about the human beings, their fellow Australians, who toil from sun-up to sundown with the hope that next year will be better?

Farming is an intergenerational business. Farming knowledge is handed down from generation to generation. These men and women take incredible pride in imparting their deep knowledge of the land to their sons and daughters. But the average age of farmers has increased. It went from 44 in 1981 to 58 in 2021. This reflects the sad truth that the next generation is turning away from the family farm, as the government vilifies and punishes these hardworking Australians. They treat them as ecoterrorists, as terrorists of the environment and as thieves that are on stolen land. These are the farmers that turn up every day and produce over 90 per cent of the food that we eat, that take care of their land and that tend to the soil, whose very livelihoods depend on the care of the environment around them.

One Australian farmer dies by suicide every 10 days. Farmers are twice as likely to die from suicide than other Australian workers. Farmers must deal with the unpredictable. They aren't promised a return. Farmers know that there will always be hard times, times that strain mental health and wellbeing as they are impacted by weather, financial distress and geographic isolation. Farmers struggle to ask for help. They don't want to burden family and friends and have difficulty accessing suitable mental health services. We as a nation should be rallying around farmers and trying to help them in any way we can. These are the people feeding our nation.

The sheep industry has been the backbone of rural towns for over 100 years. The ban on live export is driving family farms out of business and causing large-scale rural unemployment. It is risking food security for millions of people around the world, reducing competition and supply and making higher prices for consumers. This ban sets an alarming precedent for other industries. In WA, we've seen the Labor government launch an ideological tax on gun rights, treating law-abiding farmers like criminals. Western Australia is a huge place, and we rely on our farmers to keep all sorts of pests and introduced species in check. These unworkable and unnecessary regulations add complexity and uncertainty to farming.

Across our country, we're losing productive farmland to intermittent electricity generation. Wind and solar farms are popping up everywhere. If we haven't already desecrated enough rural land in New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland and Tassie in this government's reckless pursuit of net zero, now there is more than 35 wind farms planned across Western Australia. This number represents more than four times the amount of electricity that our grid can currently handle at any one time. We're destroying our farmland to build electricity infrastructure that is incapable of providing reliable electricity to keep the lights on.

And the Prime Minister wonders why he gets heckled and chased by tractors in Ballarat! They've had their land taken off them. It has been destroyed by high-voltage powerlines and mining companies running roughshod over them, trampling the rights they thought they had. We have state governments inventing new regulations and red and green tape as far as the eye can see. Then we have the local shire councils, with their clipboards and pencils, enforcing all manner of crazy regulations. What happens when it all gets too hard for our farmers? Where will our food come from? We're going to need more tractors.