John Cobb (Calare, National Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture and Food Security) Share this | Hansard source

Obviously I do want to talk about my own region and about the agricultural situation around Australia, as part of my portfolio, which is very much agriculture and in this case food security. It has been an extraordinary few months. Without doubt, last year started off as a big year for eastern Australia and south-eastern Australia, with the biggest cropping season ever in my lifetime. Up until middle or late October, the rain, by and large, was a very welcome event. But my part of the world is I guess where all this really started—rain, flood and eventually cyclone, and flood again in Victoria last weekend. It was about moisture and it was about water. Basically, unless you were in the path of a flood, the rain had pretty much the same effect as flood itself—there was just too much water. We had 10 years of the worst drought in my lifetime, and droughts always finish with a bang when they finish, so I suppose we should not be too surprised that the biggest drought also had the biggest ending, and what an ending it has been.

The Murray-Darling system, by and large, has been replenished, though not quite everywhere. The biggest dam in Australia is still not full. In my area, the Oberon Dam is not full and Wyangala Dam is not yet full. But the system has been replenished and it has been done with one heck of a bang. As I said, this started off as a rain event in my part of the world—the central west of New South Wales. Towards the end of October, it rained and it pretty much rained through November, off and on in December and even through into the new year. The initial effect was to very much downgrade the crops in the central west of New South Wales—Parkes, Forbes and, even earlier, Nyngan. Even before it had started in that part of the world, the crops had pretty much been shot and sprung. The harvest was still a very big harvest. The saving grace has been that it was such a big harvest, even though the price was down. But it was not just the cereal harvest. It went through to Orange and Young, further south of us, and finally to Bathurst et cetera. The cereal crops had so much rain they shot in the head, they sprung and they went down. A lot of barley could not be harvested at all. Southern Queensland was the first to be affected. Most of the crops there got harvested but some, on the heavy, flat country, did not and nor did they in northern New South Wales.

Horticulture also suffered badly and cherries just blew up. At first growers thought they would not be able to harvest the early cherries, and then it was the lot that they could not harvest. The vineyards were very much affected by so much rain. In fact, a few weeks ago, they found that there were no chemicals left in the country to spray for things like downy mildew. That has continued right through, encompassing most of eastern Australia. It was not just the obvious losses in agriculture. This sort of wet brings in disease and brings in insects so that herbicides and various other chemicals have to be used ad nauseam or, in the case of horticulture, cherries and various other fruits soak up so much water that they just blow up. Vegetables become so downgraded that no-one wants to put them on the shelves.

Very early on, with one exception, every single local government area in my electorate of Calare became a natural disaster area. As I said, in the Parkes-Forbes area, crops were lost or very seriously downgraded. As you moved further east, the damage in Cabonne, which was probably the most affected area, included lost roads. There were approaches to bridges where, although the bridges were standing, on each side of them the roads were just cut about. The town and the oval were isolated, basically, for a couple of weeks because it took the council so long to repair the approaches to two bridges. Eugowra, a very small town, was in the news very early on because it got flooded about three times within a couple of weeks. The town was split. Thankfully, with one exception, we did not lose any lives in our region. One week before her 45th wedding anniversary, Denise Brownhill, one of our old assistants at Parkes, drowned when she tried to cross a path of water in the Parkes region. We were devastated by that, but as a region we have been lucky as far as those things go. We all sympathise with her family.

Talking about the incredible events in Brisbane, I want to briefly mention a gentleman called James Perry, who was one of the casualties in the Lockyer Valley. His wife, Jenny, and her family come from Orange. I know that is just one family out of a lot of families, but she is a local from my region who has been through an incredible situation and her husband is not coming home any more. She and her child were very lucky to survive.

My region has had enormous agricultural losses and enormous local government losses, particularly because of damage to roads. As early as months before that, Lithgow had had a landslide because of the rain which was up towards Capertee, which was going to cost a lot of money to deal with. Some local governments, two or three months before, had spent a lot of money on roadworks, which really was wasted because the rain just ripped it all out. Nothing destroys roadworks like consistent rain, which even digs holes in the bitumen. It is something I have not seen before and I do not think many have.

Much of our area was affected—a lot more than most of Australia but obviously not nearly as much as the lower areas, and neither the Lachlan in the south of my electorate nor the Macquarie in the north flooded to the extent that it was dangerous. It caused inconvenience, it caused flooding, but in the grand scheme of things it was quite doable, to put it mildly. But everyone had their issues and certainly there was serious financial loss. Despite all that, when the incredible events started happening around Central Queensland and Bundaberg and then in Toowoomba right through to Brisbane, the businesses, schools and local governments in my electorate raised money not for our own area but for the people of the Lockyer Valley. I am very proud of the people of my electorate. Les and Cheryl Birdsall, two very good friends of mine who own the Telegraph Hotel in Molong, at their own expense brought in a heap of gear for kids and families. One Sunday about three weekends ago, and at their own expense, they put on this day and held auctions and all these things. That money was not to be spent locally; it was for the Queensland flood appeal. The schools, local government and all these people did that, and it was pretty damned good.

Over the last month as part of my responsibility I have visited the flood areas in Queensland and in New South Wales, and earlier Warren Truss and I went to Wagga and Dubbo after the rain events—which actually started in October—in December, when it was apparent how heavy the crop losses were. Late last week I spent quite a few days in Victoria around the Loddon and Campaspe, and on the weekend down the rain came again at Mildura and various other places. I guess we hoped that we were going to have a little bit of respite for a while, and now we have got fires in WA.

The losses to agriculture are just incredible. From talking to the locals and various industry bodies like the banana people, sugar cane growers, the various state bodies and ministers and shadow ministers, in the three main eastern states estimates are that losses are probably around $2 billion. In New South Wales it is mostly loss of income and in Queensland and Victoria it is probably more fifty-fifty infrastructure and income. When you go to places like Theodore in Queensland—who got belted with floods in March last year and had serious infrastructure losses then—you find blokes like one fellow I talked to who had spent almost half a million dollars since March last year getting ready for this one, because he lost infrastructure last time; everything he had done was wiped out. He had lost his whole crop. It looked like it had been defoliated. Almost all the cotton crop around Central Queensland did. The irrigation did, because it got flooded. Cotton does not have to be underwater for long. This is very high input cost. On top of the loss of the income and the inputs was the infrastructure. This bloke had spent nearly half a million dollars last year; all that had gone, plus he lost all his pumps—and that was very common in the area—and his off-river storages. The water just came in on the wrong side and then burst out and took the storages. So heaven knows what sort of losses people like that are up for.

But human nature is an incredible thing. Theodore is a town that came out of irrigation; it did not exist once, but it is probably the oldest cotton area in Australia. Within a couple of days, all those cotton farmers who had suffered that incredible loss—not just income but, as I said, infrastructure—had ignored their own problems, got their tractors, their pumps and their tanks, dragged them into Theodore and helped the locals clean out their houses. Half of them were on stilts, but they still went under. They just hosed them out. They just ignored their own troubles and went out and helped the locals deal with their house situation. So human nature is a pretty good thing when you get right down to it.

Actually, that is where I was when Toowoomba copped it, then the Lockyer Valley and subsequently Brisbane. When we were travelling between Theodore and Biloela, late on the Monday, Ken’s staffer who was with him knew one of the mayors in that area. We had heard about the rain, and no-one realised the extent of it then. He rang up this bloke, who had just gone across a crossing, just below Toowoomba, which was under a couple of inches of water, and while he was driving over it he got hit by seven feet of water—bang! He was still shaky on the phone.

I do not think we can comprehend it. I certainly cannot. I am a bush boy. I have lived inland my whole life, out in the semi-arid country. You just do not expect something like that to hit that far inland—I think Toowoomba is around 80 miles inland—in our country, certainly not that far south. Knowing country people as I do—and, to me, that is almost rural—I shudder to think how long it will take those communities, which are very close communities, to deal with their issues. I think we will all plug in for them for a long time.

To get back to the overall effect of the losses in Central Queensland—and by that I mean the potential losses—that is where a lot of New South Wales, not to mention South-East Queensland, get their winter vegetables and fruit from. They get them from that part of the world. So, unless the growers can get back on their feet and get settled before then, it is going to be a little different this winter. I hope not. Let us hope that they can deal with it.

The one thing I find, whether I talk to the northern cane growers and banana growers or the dairy farmers way down south in Victoria, is that they keep asking, ‘Is the government going to provide the interest rate subsidy?’ It might be a drought thing, but the drought basis was a one-in-25-year occurrence before you got Exceptional Circumstances—by inference, the interest rate subsidy. We are talking about a one-in-50- or, more particularly, a one-in-100-years circumstance, so I do not think there should be too much of a moral problem for any government in looking upon this in the same way that you do drought.

As I said, these people, most of whom have serious debt after a decade of drought, need to be able to deal with their banking. The banks, by and large, I think have been pretty good, but people have this debt. They have to be able to separate their minds and be allowed to deal with the debt they already have before they sit down and try to deal with the infrastructure problem they have to get over now to go on with next year’s planting, next year’s crop and, in the case of fruit and vegetables, one hopes this winter’s crop. It is an enormous issue.

How they personally feel about it all is a shock to the system. It is not the kind of shock fire gives; it is different to that, but it takes longer for what you have lost and what you have potentially lost to sink in. The only good thing as a farmer is that at least the ground is going to take a long while to dry out, and we need moisture in the ground to grow anything, whether it is to regrow or whatever we do.

I could go on about this for a long time. I will not. I will just say that the government and the opposition have to realise that, after a decade of the worst drought in my lifetime—and I am 60 years old—people have now had the worst natural disaster in their lifetimes, and it is very much an exceptional circumstance. It will be dealt with, in a productive sense, only by money and, yes, by strong will and hard work. But they have always had that. I do not care whether you are a banana grower or a sugar grower in the north, a dairy man in the south or anybody in between—as I said, horticulture has been hurt; wine cultivation has been hurt; everything has been hurt—this is about water rather than floods, because rain has exactly the same effect. Even without what has happened in WA or Tasmania or anywhere else, I think we are looking at a $6 million issue for the agriculture industry to deal with.

I am very proud of the people my area. They have their troubles, but they recognise that other people are far worse off at the moment. I am very proud of the agriculture industry because I have not heard anyone say, ‘That’s it; I’m out.’ People sometimes have to go to the wall because, financially, that is it. But I do not think that the spirit of the Australian agriculture industry is broken any more than I think that the people who live in the Lockyer or anywhere else are going to call it quits. They are not. But I do believe that as a parliament, whether in government or in opposition, we have to recognise that there are limits after a decade of drought and now this.

And we should not be surprised. We may have been surprised by what happened in the Lockyer Valley. But the longer the drought goes on the harder it is going to be to get out of it. And people cannot get out of it on their own, for the most part. I would certainly say that as a parliament, not just as a government or as an opposition, in the same way that we work together when lives have been lost, such as when Australian lives are lost overseas while doing their duty, we have to look upon the agricultural industry at the moment as being in that plight. Thank you.

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