Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Where the rubber meets the road is that 50,000 new horses are registered each year in Australia. If there is an outbreak of some description then the owners of those 50,000 horses will have to pay. The cost of repairing the damage of this last disease outbreak—isolating the disease and eradicating it—is expected to be $110 million. But I suspect that these people will not be up for $110 million. I suspect that they will be up for the $1,000 million that Mr John O’Shea and other leading racehorse trainers will be taking the government to task for. I do not blame the current government. The last government was responsible for this. I suspect that those 50,000 horse owners will have to pay not only the $110 million but also the $1,000 million. I would like the minister to clarify this and include a guarantee in the bill that we will not have to pay for the incompetence of the people at AQIS. They should have been sued over the papaya fruit fly, white spot, most certainly citrus canker, Brazilian meat, Chinese peanuts and fire blight in apples. AQIS should have been sued. I also think the individual officers that made those decisions should have been sued. That is going a long way, but there must be some punishment for the level of incompetence of the people who managed the quarantine station and allowed the equine flu to come into this country. If you expose this nation to the loss of $1,000 million then there must be some punishment that accrues to those who commit the grossest possible irresponsibility.

I thank Noel Chiconi, from many generations of horse lovers and cattlemen in Australia. I am happy to say that I have been associated with four generations of the Chiconi family and their great contribution to the cattle and horse industries in Australia. We cannot really run cattle without horses. There will be those who claim that you can, but I would simply say that you cannot.

As for the government listening to the Australian Horse Industry Council, in all rural industries we have a saying: the peak body disease. That is extraordinarily true. When any primary industry representative organisation goes above a certain level it becomes part of the government. It comes back and tells you why you have to accept a program—and that has again happened here. I could go through a hundred such cases, but time will not allow me. It was always said that the NFF stood for ‘no family farms’, because its policy was about corporate farming. Anyone inside rural industries of Australia knows that a former president of the NFF—I think it was Macfarlane but I may be doing him an injustice—went on to the Reserve Bank. People asked, ‘Was he representative of rural industries?’ I said, ‘He is representative of the enemies of rural industries.’

Here we have another organisation saying that they are representative. The pony clubs may be a bit bigger than the Australians Campdraft Association, of which Noel Chiconi is the president; in actual fact, the campdrafters are probably as big as any group on the Australian Horse Industry Council. He said that that they most certainly do not speak for the campdrafters. I dare say, if we went to the rank and file of every one of these organisations, we would find that they disagree violently with the Australian Horse Industry Council. We have asked the minister again and again. I remember when the former member for Gwydir Mr Anderson was appointed as the primary industries minister. Mr Causley, the now retired member for Page, said, ‘My first words of advice to you as the minister are: do not listen to the peak bodies.’ He was one of the most successful ministers in recent Australian history. He said: ‘Do not listen to the peak bodies. You will get yourself in all sorts of trouble, John. You will not be the minister in three years time if you listen to the peak bodies.’ The former Leader of the National Party and primary industries minister, the member for Gwydir, listened to the peak bodies. Three years later, he was not the minister. I knew what was going on behind the scenes: it was just put quite bluntly that he was no longer to be the minister.

He carried out the will of the peak bodies. That will is not the will of the people in these industries. They have had a free-market policy. You would not find a farmer in all of Australia’s farming industries—except for a couple of short-chinned galoots who had a silver spoon handed down to them from their grandaddy or something—who would think that the NFF spoke for them. Look no further than the biodiversity act and the Mabo act in this place. The member for Calare is smiling. I suppose he can, because he said, ‘Unless you change your position on Mabo, we’ll take the New South Wales farmers out.’ I must pay him tribute and praise him for that. But it was just a classic example of how the NFF never spoke for the farmers.

We would plead with the minister not to listen to them. We would say that, in this case of equine flu, the owners of horses that were registered in the last year in Australia would be up for $1,250 per horse. They would take the entire cost burden instead of all of the horse owners in Australia. But what we need is a fund that covers all of agriculture so that, when we have an outbreak of anything, the farmer will be game to open up. At the present moment, he is terrified to find out what the disease is because he will be wiped out financially. We need an all-encompassing fund.

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