Tony Windsor (New England, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I was intrigued with the history lesson in terms of the Labor Party and what is currently going on. I think the wheat growers are very concerned about what is going on in relation to the daily exposé of the Wheat Board. I think there are only two or three wheat growers actually in the House of Representatives, of which I am one. It would be pertinent for those entering the debate to have a very close look at the history of the Australian Wheat Board and the history of the farming movement as to how and why the Wheat Board came about.

Undoubtedly, this particular issue of the corrupt activities of members of the Australian Wheat Board is going to damage our credibility in any international forum in relation to trade negotiations. I think most people would be aware that Australia has been at the forefront of trying to achieve free trade and a more balanced nature of our trade. Whether the government or the ministers that have been named in this issue have been involved or not or can be proven to be involved or not is almost irrelevant compared with the damage that is being done internationally. In the future Australia and our current Minister for Trade, Mr Vaile, will have to go into those forums and argue for free trade when this sort of activity has been going on. There have been, rightly or wrongly, a number of missives that have been sent, messages that were not properly picked up or maybe ignored—I do not know the answers to that and I do not think Commissioner Cole will actually find the answers to those things either—but the fact is there has been enormous damage done.

There have been a number of meetings across Australia with political players, some wheat growers and some organisations where the issue of the Wheat Board has been discussed. But wheat growers are very concerned. They want the truth to come out and they feel it has to come out before we can regain any credibility internationally. Wheat growers are very concerned about the future of the single desk arrangements. Wheat growers do not want the baby thrown out with the bathwater on this issue. There may be some finetuning that needs to be done to the Wheat Export Authority or a body such as that where there can be greater scrutiny of and transparency in the Wheat Board’s activities. I think that is an issue that has to be decided. Many members of the government have been saying that we do not want to mix those two issues, and I agree with Mr Vaile’s statement, but many members of the government are actually mixing the issues to a political end. Some people believe that this issue of corrupt activity by members of the Wheat Board in dealing with Iraq may well open up an opportunity to free up the single desk arrangements into the future. As I said, the wheat growers that I have spoken to do not want that to happen. They do not want the two debates to run at once.

I call upon those members of the government in particular, but all members of parliament in general, who are suggesting—and the Treasurer is one of them—that there should be alternative ways of marketing grain and that there should be a freeing up of the way in which export grain enters the marketplace on the back of the Iraqi activities to support the single desk arrangements, to allow the Cole inquiry to take its course and, on the determinations that are made by the Cole inquiry, to keep in place the single desk. That may well, as I said, require some degree of tinkering with the Wheat Export Authority or a similar body into the future. But there is enormous damage being done. I think we all recognise that.

One thing the government has not done is to recognise that there are other ways of using this grain. We tend to have a mindset that Australia is an exporter of grains. We export something like 75 to 80 per cent of our capacity; therefore, we think we are dependent on the world market. That has been one of the issues in running the free trade agenda. But there are alternatives, and I do not think this parliament, and particularly the government, pay enough attention to those alternatives. The government should be serious about looking at those alternatives, particularly given the fact that the grain market is corrupt. Every day we have someone from the government or the Wheat Board saying that that is the way the world is. I do not actually believe that, but let us assume for the moment that they know more than I do—that is the way the world is; it is a corrupt marketplace. So we have an absurd situation where we grow our grain, we export it on a corrupt market and then we use some of that money to enter another corrupt market, that of the oil business. There are the fuel companies themselves and there are the various countries in the Middle East that have the oil, and we go out into the world market, trade our grain in a sense and bring back oil. As time goes on, that will happen more and more.

The government is not looking at ways and means of cutting that corner. I know I have raised this issue before, but I will raise it again because I think it is particularly pertinent. If Australia adopted a mandatory 10 per cent ethanol in our petrol, that one stroke of policy would remove half the export grain from the marketplace—eight million tonnes. We export about 16 million tonnes a year. Ten per cent ethanol in our fuel is something that many other nations are doing. Even the President of the United States, George Bush, has recently announced that they will move towards much more sustainable energy and that they are going to get off their addiction to oil. They can see what is happening and potentially happening internationally. If we adopted a policy of 10 per cent ethanol in our fuel, that would potentially remove eight million tonnes of grain from that corrupt market. Twenty per cent of the total wheat production for export would be removed, and it would remove the necessity to enter these two corrupt markets. Those markets will get worse as time goes on.

The government has not looked at those options. The government tends to be locked into the mindset that we have to export and that, if we export, we have to take it for granted that those markets will be corrupt and that we need to get rid of the grain—we need the money, our farmers need the money—and, therefore, that is the way the world operates. It is not the way the world operates in the United States, the bastion of free trade, and it is not the way the world operates in Brazil. Brazil, for instance, is expanding its ethanol industries at the rate of one Australian sugar industry per annum. The United States is building ethanol plants at a rate of a little under one a month.

As the Minister for Community Services at the table would realise, we are looking at grain prices of about 25 years ago. The grain prices to the farmers in Australia are very low at this time. Irrespective of whether or not the government is involved, the damage has been done to our trading reputation. It is time that we looked at alternatives if we are really concerned about the wheat growers that everybody is crying about. It is time that we looked at real alternatives to the uses of grain products, rather than having this constant harping. I was one of those in the eighties—because I was involved with the Grains Council of Australia and the New South Wales Farmers Association—who was arguing for a level playing field internationally. That is fantasy land. It is fantasy land in United States, it is fantasy land in Europe and it is fantasy land in the South Americas, and it should be considered as fantasy land here. We have to start to look at alternatives to the exportable surpluses we produce. There is an enormous opportunity in the grains and sugar industries through sustainable energy and renewable fuel in biodiesels and ethanols. I would suggest that, if both sides of this parliament are, as they say, really concerned about wheat growers in Australia, they start looking at those alternatives. (Time expired)

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