Janelle Saffin (Page, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to say to the honourable member for Mallee, whilst he is still here, that listening to his contribution I felt like he was talking for my electorate as well on this matter. All the issues that he flagged had clearly been raised since November 2007, when I became the member for Page. It has been one of those emerging issues; it has been just sort of bubbling away across a whole range of communities. There are also a lot of forestry plantations in the seat of Page. There is a lot of land under cultivation with forestry, and I will turn to some of that now. I welcome the report. The inquiry followed the collapse of Timbercorp and Great Southern, and it was like a lot of things: I wished it had been done earlier. I welcome the report because I see it as the start of the debate, not the finish of the debate. It is at that point we are able to enter into it. There are people from across the political spectrum in my community who are opposed to managed investment schemes, full stop. There are other people who say, ‘Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.’ They say the schemes can be good models to encourage agribusiness and that we need to rethink how we do them, so they say not to do anything too rashly. I have canvassed all of those views across the electorate.

I invited the Chair of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services, the honourable member for Oxley, to come to my electorate and meet with a whole lot of people who had views about MIS, and I thank him for doing that. We held an informal meeting on 6 July at Kyogle council chambers. People came from around the region, from places like Woodenbong. Three generations came from there: the grandfather, the son and the grandson. They were all conservative-background farmers who were concerned about it. It is just one of those issues that bubbles away. The Kyogle branch of the New South Wales Farmers Association had written to me saying that they wanted the tax breaks for the forestry plantations gone completely. I also had environmentalists talking about the scheme.

I will come to the heart of the scheme. I noticed the headline of an article by Andrew Main in the Weekend Australian of 13 June 2009. It read ‘Untangling MIS mess is a nightmare’. I agree it is, and I think we are at the stage now of entering that territory. But the issue is that you have international equity trusts, you have time share and you have a whole lot of products that are in that realm, and then you have agribusiness. The controls and regulations that are in place for those products, I submit, are quite different from what is needed for agribusiness with managed investment schemes. We also need federal, state and local governments working together to make sure that, if we have managed investment scheme agribusiness, it has that coordination. Local government are completely locked out of the process. There is state legislation that governs and controls how these operate. Then there is the issue of royalties; we have a lot more trucks going over the roads but no more money going into the local government area. There is also the issue of water, which the honourable member for Mallee raised. It is a big issue and a lot of people have not been aware of that. We all know that water is rather scarce.

One of the issues raised was that in my area we are using prime agricultural land and we have about 30,000 breeders now out of the market. I know we have to accept change, and that may be okay, but these are issues that were not thought through. While I welcome the recommendations in the report, because they go some way towards addressing some of the issues, we need a more forensic review to drill down further into how we manage the agribusiness component of it on a day-to-day level beyond the products.

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