Mark Coulton (Parkes, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Development and Emerging Trade Markets) Share this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to speak on this motion in support of my colleague the member for Mallee. He has been a fierce advocate for the farmers in his electorate in what has been a very difficult seasonal decade in the Mallee area.

As a rural representative whose electorate’s new boundaries after the last redistribution now cover 40 per cent of New South Wales, I too have an interest in this motion. Largely because of the debt mediation legislation that New South Wales operates under, as a member I do not get the level of extreme cases and brinkmanship between banks and farmers that comes to the member for Mallee, but I am picking up an undertone. I have received some correspondence from some farmers in the Coolah area. They showed me the interest rates they have been paying over the past five or six years. Even with the record low rates of recent times, the minimum rate they paid was nine per cent and, on default, they paid up to 21 per cent—and that was recently. The member for Mallee mentioned that it seems rather perverse that the sector that is most under stress pays an exorbitant rate compared to regular mortgagee holders.

As a farmer myself for more than 30 years, I truly appreciate the relationship between a bank and a farm business. Indeed, I am extremely grateful for the relationship I have had with the different banks I have dealt with in my time before I came here. And while we should not single farmers out as being different to the rest of the community, one of the issues with farming businesses when they get into a tight financial spot is that it is not just about losing your job or about losing your business; it is about losing your home—and quite often there are several family members, mainly across several generations, who are impacted by this. So it is important that the banks, in relationship with farmers, foreclose as the very last resort. I also acknowledge the role of rural counsellors. Unfortunately, we have far too few rural counsellors, but they have done a mighty job over the past decade or so of keeping many businesses afloat and keeping that relationship and the lines of communication between lenders and farmers open.

One of the real problems we face, and in my electorate I do not think I am that far from the crisis that the member for Mallee is facing, is that the increase in property prices to a certain degree has masked an issue that is coming our way. Quite often many farmers are there because the increase in the price of their property has enabled them to stay there with their equity levels. But that is starting to run out and certainly farmers are making the decision now whether they should go. But the real tragedy of this is that it is not just the most inefficient or the poor farmers that get caught up in this level of debt; more often than not it can be the most innovative and quite often it is the youngest. The most vulnerable time for a family farm is during intergenerational change, where, because of the price of land, quite often large borrowings are undertaken to allow the next generation to continue on in the farming career. Once again, people outside farming might say, ‘Why should they be any different to anyone else?’ Farming is highly skilled and you need certain levels of motivation to undertake it as a career. We rely on farmers in this country and around the world. Australian farmers feed 70 million people around the world. If we do not do something soon to keep those younger farmers on the farms, we are going to have a crisis in Australia’s ability not only to feed itself but to feed countries around the world. (Time expired)

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