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

This carbon tax will quite obviously be a disaster for our economy, especially for agriculture and the food industry. Today we found out that it is not $26 a tonne but $45 a tonne. It has been a tumultuous time in agriculture in recent years. In recent years agriculture has faced every possible disaster. It has had 10 years of drought, it has had locust plagues and in recent times it has had floods, it has had fire and it has had enormously fluctuating commodity prices, not to mention probably the highest dollar we have seen in many years—all of which are not to our advantage.

Over the last two, three or four years other countries have, quite rightly, focused on food security. They have focused on the fact that the world population is growing. Those in the know are talking about climate change and world food supplies. They are looking to tighten up. Other countries and global companies have been investing in food security. In the last three years, there has been 10 times the investment in Australian agriculture, particularly in agribusiness. That should send a message. You would think that in this climate we would have a renewed focus on agriculture by the federal government. But the opposite has happened. The government do not understand and they do not care what agriculture has to deal with or how. The government gained power on the back of rural Independents abandoning agriculture, and they are doing it with alarming regularity. Let us remember that we are talking about the sector of Australian industry that produces all the food.

In the last two weeks, the minister for agriculture and his predecessor, Minister Burke, supported Coles over the dairy farms. That is a great understanding of agriculture! Then we have the Minister for Trade, who is sitting at the table right now, skiting before he even starts negotiations with the Japanese on the free trade agreement that he would take no notice of—

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