Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Fremantle for her question. It is good to have a number of Western Australian members of this parliament who will be defending the interests of Western Australian wheat growers, because there are quite a number who intend to vote entirely against the interests of wheat growers. The process of moving away from the truly ugly days of the AWB monopoly has gone through a few stages. We began with an entirely regulated and controlled system. We then went through a system of partial deregulation in the last term, and we have legislation before the parliament now for full deregulation. There were media conferences before we came into parliament today, with a number of additional undertakings, such as switching with the ACCC from a voluntary code to a mandatory code, that have been of particular interest to the Greens. I am pleased that those negotiations have gone the way they have.

But think, in the plan of deregulation, about the pathway we have gone down. When I was agriculture minister and introduced the first stage of that plan, we did have amendments from those opposite. They said we were not going far enough. They said that the amendments that were designed by the member for Groom, that were put forward in the Senate and that were accepted by us—when the Liberal Party were going ahead with the values that the Liberal Party were meant to hold, back with Brendan Nelson—were all about saying, 'You're not pro-market enough.' All we are saying here is that a wheat grower grows the wheat and they should be able to choose who they sell it to. But these days the only thing we are asking from the Liberal Party is that they in some way support free enterprise. It has become too much to ask the modern Liberal Party to be on the side of free enterprise.

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