John Forrest (Mallee, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Development) Share this | Hansard source

I do. I will never forget it. If you were to visit Mildura today you would have a different perspective. You would see dead vines and you would see dead citrus trees as farming families, hard-struggling working families, have given up. Their only source of any significant income is to trade their water on the annual water market. So what these communities are looking for is some absolute certainty from this minister. Minister, don’t leave them dangling on the fishhook of uncertainty about what the government’s intentions are and what it wants to replace EC with. Get out there, like some of us are doing and, as the member for O’Connor has indicated, talk to people.

In Victoria I have been talking with the Victorian Farmers Federation about options for some sort of insurance basis or commodity funded multiperil insurance. We have got to offer these people some certainty that this government has their interests at heart. But we are not getting those signals from the minister so I will make this plea one more time. In fact on a couple of occasions in the corridors I have invited him to come to Mildura. He says he has been there. But it was not a visit long enough for him to get a comprehensive impression of what has been happening to the district. If you close down horticulture around a strong provincial centre like Mildura, Swan Hill or even the other provincial centre in Mallee, which is Horsham, that has an impact on the small businesses that are associated with the economic activity that goes on around the centre. So, Minister, we are talking about real people. We are talking about human beings in situations which city based people have not yet established the capacity to even understand.

Take the challenges they are confronted with in getting their children through to the tertiary level of education. They were delivered another body blow by the budget. I have never seen before such a strong reaction from country youngsters as their recent reaction to the budget’s intentions for youth allowance. If we want these children to fix the various challenges that our generation did not confront, we need to ensure they come back to our regions with a strong tertiary education, yet the process by which country youngsters have been doing that over the last period of time has been withdrawn from them. Worse than that, the goalposts have been slightly shifted for those who were working their way through their gap year and wanted to go on to university and create for themselves the capacity to consolidate their future.

So, Minister, my last challenge to you, and I have received this request from my constituents, is to please fight for your portfolio. Get into cabinet and argue your case and do not be the minister presiding over the only Commonwealth government department that has to endure productivity gain constraints which will ultimately reduce the numerical size of their department—in this case, the department of agriculture—and its capacity to provide ongoing positive advice to meet the challenges faced by these people. Don’t let the economic review committee shave the budget to the extent that we lose important research, particularly into land and water. Fight for the constituency you are allegedly trying to represent. Send them a signal that this government cares. Don’t wait for the eleventh hour before you make announcements about what the government intends to replace the exceptional circumstances system with. It has served a very good and useful purpose. It has cushioned the impacts of the drought that has affected the whole country. It has been coming since the mid-seventies and my primary producers are fairly well convinced by now that climate change is upon us all and they want to see some positive action to address that.

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