Ron Boswell (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to respond to the ministerial statement on wheat. The statement was laid down this afternoon and it is an attempted defence of deregulation which has obviously been cobbled together for the minister at the expense of the Australian working wheat grower families. The minister even tabled supporting statements from the grain corporations: GrainCorp, CBH Ltd and the Australian Barley Board. Why the minister felt the need to make a statement on this is quite unknown to me. There is nothing new in the pages. Does he perhaps feel pressed by the opposition of thousands of growers to his plans to dismantle the single desk arrangements that have stood the industry in good stead for over 60 years? I would have been most interested in the minister’s response to the Prime Minister’s following statement. The Prime Minister said in a letter:

It is essential that the debate over whether the single desk is the most appropriate arrangement for Australian wheat marketing is not overwhelmed by the wheat-for-weapons scandal and the revelations that came out of the Cole Inquiry.

That statement was made by the Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in a letter to a wheat grower dated 8 February 2007. It is totally at odds with his performance yesterday in question time when he blamed his deregulation on the ‘wheat for weapons’ inquiry.

In the same letter, the Prime Minister—then Leader of the Opposition—wrote:

The Australian Labor Party has supported the single desk wheat marketing arrangements for over 65 years since 1939. During that period Labor has been a strong supporter of the current single desk marketing arrangements and it remains Labor policy that the single desk should remain in place while ever these arrangements have support from the growers and the community as well as delivering a benefit to Australian wheat growers.

That is what Labor said when they were in opposition. Now that they are in government, everything is different. The minister for agriculture, Tony Burke, is rushing to dismantle the same marketing arrangements that Kevin Rudd said only last year would remain because Labor supported them. In that letter, the Prime Minister went on to justify why Labor believed in the single desk. He was a real single desk convert. He quoted a study by Econtech that found:

The single desk captures a premium of between $15 and $30 a tonne. The total annual value to Australian growers of this premium on Australian premium white is $80 million. On all grades the average premium attributed to the single desk is $13 a tonne and the total annual value of the premium on all grades is $200 million.

So he was very fulsome in his praise for the single desk when he was writing to wheat growers. Contrast these admirable arguments with this in the ministerial statement today:

Supporters of the single desk argue that the monopoly power extracts a price premium on the world market and this is passed onto growers. The evidence to support this theory is lacking.

There is about a 180-degree turn there.

This is the complete opposite of what Mr Burke’s leader, the Prime Minister, said just over a year ago. A year ago, the Labor Party told working wheat-growing families that they supported the single desk. They get into power and what do they do? They rush to wipe out every last feature of the current wheat export marketing arrangements. The Labor Party have shown themselves to be hostage to the interests of the powerful multinational grain traders, when their first duty should be to working wheat-growing families here in Australia. Wheat growers across Australia face the most radical overhaul of the structure in its history. They face the dismantling of over 60 years of a marketing system that was built around them and for them. Wheat growers who sow their crops today do not know what tomorrow will bring.

Today I had an email from Mr Terry Fishpool. He listed for me a number of benefits that would go when the wheat market was deregulated. There are about 20 of them, so I will not go through them all. But I will go through some of them because he took the time and the energy to email me some of the benefits that wheat growers would lose. With deregulation, there would be: no financial security for growers at point of sale or after; no buyer of last resort; nobody to manage supply when necessary for growers’ benefit; no quality control system for overseas markets; no classification system growers can rely on; no mechanism for stopping Australian wheat competing against itself, to growers’ detriment; no farmer cooperatives allowed to sell wheat overseas under your model; no reason for any company to sell Australian wheat if a greater profit can be attained selling grain from another source; extreme market volatility; no market stability; major losses, as in 2007, for hedging due to failure of production; and no sharing of risk across national pools to share gains and diminish losses.

As I speak, there will be very early grain being planted—in a couple of weeks, at least, but maybe now for some growers there will some grain going in. The impact of deregulation is going to be unbelievable. I am pleading with the government. I believe that a government has a right to implement a policy. It is a bit dubious that they told the people what the policy was and have done a 180-degree switch since they have come to power. But all this deregulation is going to take place in the next 12 months. The crop that is going in over the next three or four months will be subject to this deregulation. It is a brave new world out there. No-one knows how it is going to work. No-one knows who is going to supply the ships. The road transport operators have said, ‘Don’t rely on us, because we haven’t got enough trucks to shift it.’ The growers who normally hedge through the Australian Wheat Board do not understand how to do it properly now, and there have been a lot of financial fingers burnt in hedging in rural commodities.

It is absolutely necessary that the government calms down. If you want to implement a policy, that is your decision and your prerogative. But do not rush into this and try and do it overnight. Remember: these people were promised by a conservative government that if we were to win the election we would retain the single desk; they were also promised by the Rudd opposition that they would retain the single desk. One hundred days later, they find that they are in a completely deregulated market and if they look around they see uncertainty wall to wall. If the government want to implement this policy, I call upon them to not do it for this crop.

Nick Sherry (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Superannuation and Corporate Law) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

What is the opposition’s policy?

Ron Boswell (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am telling you the policy that the wheat growers have. What the Labor Party did was to tell the working wheat-growing families that they would listen to them and help to implement their policy. They have now found that they have been deserted by the Labor Party. They should have known that they would be, because the Labor Party does not have a great deal of affection for farmers. Wheat growers have been completely let down. They do not know where they are going. They do not know how they will finance a crop, because the estimated pool returns are not there. They cannot go to the bank and tell the bank manager what price they will get for their wheat. The bank manager is not going to take an estimate or a guesstimate. He is going to say, ‘I want to know what you’re going to get for that wheat before I come up with the $200,000 or $300,000 for planting.’ (Time expired)