Judi Moylan (Pearce, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am really pleased to have an opportunity to participate in this debate on the Farm Household Support Amendment Bill 2007. I begin my remarks by saying that I am supportive of this bill as it further assists rural communities and the vital businesses providing services to primary producers in this country at a time when we are experiencing one of the worst droughts on record. I listened carefully to the words of the member for McMillan, who spoke very passionately. Clearly, he has a very close working relationship with his constituency. I thank him for the work that he has done to personally convince our government and ministers to continue to work on providing a better response to the people in this country affected by drought.

I also listened to the member for New England. It has often been said in our community that rural people are the backbone of our society. It is certainly true that over the years primary producers have made a very significant contribution to the development of this country. We live in a country that has seven amazing parliaments, a national library, libraries in every state and territory, art galleries, museums and theatres. Many of these were built during the heyday of primary production, so we did indeed ride on the sheep’s back, as they say, although we also benefited from the wheat and other produce that was grown as well as from the dairy industry and the many other industries that form the primary production sector.

Like the member for New England, I get very angry when I hear members in this place, those in the financial press and others in the financial sector having a go at the farming sector when it gets a bit of help during these ‘extra’ exceptional circumstances, accusing farmers of being agrarian socialists. I really find that highly offensive. As the member for Kennedy has just said, many in this country have a very short memory. I think that all of us have an obligation to stand by those in our community who are going through hard times through no fault of their own. This is not about poor business management. This is about adverse conditions, in this case the ‘extra’ adverse conditions that these people have no control over. I also agree with the member for New England that we could better respond to and overall plan for these drought events because they are regular events in Australia, although we are never quite sure of the time frames between them.

Having grown up in rural Western Australian towns and as I am now representing a substantial farming area, I have seen first-hand the contribution that rural communities make to our country. I have also witnessed the suffering that drought brings, not just to the producers themselves but to all the people who live in those communities and rely to some extent on the health of primary production for their wellbeing. I think the coalition recognises the importance of primary production in our country and the fact that our primary producers not only grow food for local consumption but also play a very significant role in producing the exports which assist Australia to maintain a healthy balance of trade. I think this point was lost on the previous Labor government when, indeed, the then Prime Minister had to be shamed into providing support for drought stricken farmers by the generosity of the wider community. Who can forget the previous Labor Prime Minister saying these people had just got to learn to deal with these situations and the government was not going to provide subsidies for them? This was after four years of sustained drought going back to the early 1990s. We saw through the Farmhand Appeal project—run by Ray Martin, if my memory serves me correctly—a generous outpouring from the general public of Australia that shamed the then Labor government into doing something about providing support for farmers in drought stricken areas.

Despite a widening disconnect between rural and urban dwellers, when the dire circumstances that farmers face in adverse conditions become known to the community at large there is considerable sympathy and a real willingness to dig deep and help. Etched deeply in my memory bank is a visit I made to drought stricken rural New South Wales in 1994, when I was a new shadow minister for small business. After four successive years of drought, many primary producers were at breaking point. I witnessed during that trip grown men, tough men, cry—and women, but I mention men in particular because men in this country are not supposed to cry; well, that is the folklore. I saw men break down and weep as they told the story of the devastation on farms—farms that had been held by their family for several generations—where they had no hope of a future. These people were unable to keep their breeding herds alive. They watched as the country sank deeper into drought and as their life’s work, and indeed that of several generations of their family, disappeared before their eyes. Along with that, sadly, this country saw record numbers of young men in rural areas taking their own lives.

The generosity of town and city folk was evident in Casino, for example. In Casino business women set up a scheme to invite farm women to come into town once a week to use showers and washing machines. Things were so bad that whatever little water that could be carted was used to keep their breeding herds alive, leaving no water for the basic things that we take for granted like having a shower and doing the weekly washing. Meetings in town halls in Coraki and Tenterden and in towns in other parts of rural New South Wales brought heart-wrenching tales of proud people and proud communities brought to their knees by drought. One of the flow-on effects was the disastrous effect on businesses in the towns. As the member for New England said, I can never understand why we do not have a proper planned response to drought so that there is not this lag time and there is not this ridiculous political discussion about—

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