Nola Marino (Forrest, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

As a Western Australian it is really hard for me to stand in this place and speak on the member for Calare’s private member’s motion on milk pricing. I cannot believe that Wesfarmers, a company that has its genesis in Western Australia’s agricultural sector, are doing what they are doing through Coles. It is a decision that they know will cause long-term pain to dairy farmers, their families and their communities. This motion is about small business. Dairy farming is small business and I am a dairy farmer.

I was interested to listen to the previous speaker talking about what will come out of this. What concerns me is that we recently had the Senate Economics Committee inquiry into competition and pricing in the Australian dairy industry and a range of issues were delivered by that, but the government and the minister have chosen not to respond to any one of those recommendations. My concern is that what will come out of this may well be ignored in the same way. I have not seen anything from the Minister for Small Business or the Minister for Regional Australia, Regional Development and Local Government regarding this and I am really seriously concerned. There has been no support at all for small farming businesses from the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry. I was really concerned to see that his first response was to support Coles.

If you are a dairy farmer at the moment in Australia, particularly in the liquid milk states of Western Australia, Queensland and northern New South Wales, you are extremely concerned. You know that as negotiations evolve for milk supply contracts this aggressive marketing will affect your bottom line. It is a fact of life that that is what will happen. We know that small business has employed 300,000 fewer workers since this Labor government came to power, so I suppose a few more dairy farmers may not be a problem. This is a complex issue and dairy farmers are absolute price takers. I do not know that this House understands the immediate and longer-term impacts of Coles’s milk pricing on small dairy farming businesses, on farming communities, on our food security, on nutritional quality and on food self-sufficiency. There will be long-term pain for short-term gain.

In a previous address I told this parliament that Australian farmers are hurting. Many survive on very limited returns. Farmers are sick to death of being told that it is great for Coles to continue to be almost voracious in pursuing market share but it is apparently obscene for a farmer to make even a standard Australian wage in some instances. This is the message that the government and even the ACCC are giving our small business farming communities. I refer to part 1(b) of the motion that:

… unsustainable retail milk prices will, over time, compel processors to renegotiate contracts with dairy farmers and the prospect that these contracts will be below the cost of production may force many to leave the industry;

In a liquid milk state like Western Australia, I defy anybody to deliver fresh milk on a regular basis from another state at $1 a litre. Anybody in the transport sector over a period of time knows that this cannot happen. We only have 165 dairy farmers left in Western Australia. We are suppliers of the liquid milk sector. I meet farmers every day who are seriously concerned about this. They know what this is going to do to their farm gate prices. This is not an illusion for them—they know what it will do over time and so do Coles.

Coles know what this will do to the broader market. They know that others have to match that price and they know how that will flow through, particularly in the liquid milk states. They cannot sit back and say, ‘We’re just going to look after one sector.’ They know that this will flow through and come back to the farm gate price as sure as night follows day. That is what is going to happen and Coles started this. As I said when I began, I cannot believe that Wesfarmers, which has its genesis in the agricultural sector in Western Australia, can be the architects of this.

Dairy producers in those three states are now dreading further negotiations in the next year, in the next two years and how this pricing will filter down to them. We do know about the power of the supermarkets. I am seriously concerned about their dominance and what this will do. There are those that cannot speak out and I spoke about these people before the Senate inquiry. I am seriously concerned that irrespective of the findings of the Senate inquiry, like the result of the last Senate inquiry, we will have a minister and a government who will fail to act. It is one thing to identify a problem, but the issue for this government is what they intend to do about it. That is the question facing us: what does this government intend to do about this problem?

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