Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak on the Rural Research and Development Legislation Amendment Bill 2013, the Primary Industries (Excise) Levies Amendment Bill 2013 and the Primary Industries (Customs) Charges Amendment Bill 2013. I am pleased that this cluster of bills are receiving bipartisan support. I always find it very interesting when members of the opposition, who until very recently were the government, talk about how wonderful agriculture is given that they presided over some of the worst attacks upon agricultural sustainability and survival that we have seen. I include, and I will refer to it again later, South Australia's Senator Penny Wong's decision, as the then minister for the environment, to go into the irrigators' market and buy irrigation water off farmers in the heat of the worst drought on record. Those farmers were desperately poor at the time and were trying to survive—trying to put food on their own tables; trying to rescue their own herds—and so they sold their water to an environmental water holder, which now has so much water in its environmental bucket that it does not know what to do with it. The outcome of that decision to simply plunder the irrigators' market rather than investing in on-farm irrigation water use efficiency has left us with only half of the high security irrigation water left in northern Victoria.

We now have a situation where these bills can help fix things. Minister Barnaby Joyce said:

The statutory RDCs—

or rural development corporations—

will be able to undertake collective marketing using industry-raised funds. For example the Fisheries Research and Development Corporation will be able to promote Australian prawns, if the industry requests this.

I personally believe our various industries should also consider very carefully levying the importers of various food products who will also benefit from any Australia-based marketing effort.

The minister also said:

The legislation will also provide industries with greater freedom to amend their levy and charge rates in response to changing circumstances such as seasonal market issues.

And finally, he said:

These bills will make statutory RDCs more efficient and transparent through statutory funding agreements and streamlined board selection processes.

So these are good bills, and they are already supported by the Abbott government's commitment to provide an additional $100 million in funding for agricultural research and development. These bills are fundamentally about how to increase the current levels of investment, whether from the private sector or the public sector, in agricultural research and development efforts in this country. Without that investment we will stall as a nation in terms of our capacity to take advantage of the so-called 'dining boom' that the former minister for agriculture, the member for Hunter, referred to in his remarks on these bills a short time ago.

It is both tantalising and depressing for farmers when they are reminded that after the mining boom comes a dining boom. They would love to imagine that that was going to be something that occurred seamlessly in their own lifetimes. Unfortunately, there are so many barriers and impediments—the natural resource fluctuations in this country, the seasonal variations and, thrown at them every day, the invasive and often out-of-control state, local and federal government bureaucracy and regulation. The red tape accumulated in particular under the last government, and one of the key outcomes we will be able to deliver under the Tony Abbott-led government is a reduction in the red tape that kills farmers' capacity to innovate or to take advantage of our superb soils and climates and that could kill the potential to exploit new markets in the dining boom.

We are among the world's most effective and efficient innovators in agriculture. We are the world's leaders in arid zone wheat growing. We developed techniques which have us growing wheat where in other countries you would simply look at the flowing sand dunes. This is where we have done extraordinary work in wheat seed breeding. A lot of that seed breeding was undertaken by state governments, particularly in Western Australia and South Australia but also in Victoria. Very sadly, most of those state-supported seed-breeding stations are no longer, as the states almost universally have pulled back from supporting research and development in agriculture and have instead presided over the closing of a lot of research stations and extension efforts. It has become so serious that now, as I face a crisis in my electorate with the attack upon our last Australian fruit-preserving company, we find that, when we turn to the state government asking for them to give us some ideas about alternative crops, they throw up their hands and say, 'Sorry, we've just sacked our last agricultural scientist, and of course we've closed our local research stations or they've been sold to the Chinese.'

So we have a serious problem in this country in terms of how to have an appropriate level of research and development undertaken. As I said, we are some of the world's biggest innovators in increasing agricultural productivity and introducing new crops and genetics. We have, for example, developed some of the world's most productive rice growing, and now we are moving into more areas where we might grow rice in drier conditions, not the traditional flooded rice paddies. We have some of the highest rice outputs per hectare in the world. We are also some of the world's highest producing field tomato growers. In my electorate of Murray, it has been sad to see our 20 or more field tomato growers decline to just two or three, but those two or three are still benchmarked as amongst the world's most creative and productive.

We in Australia pioneered what are traditionally called flood irrigation techniques—I would call them gravity-fed irrigation techniques, because 'flood' implies that the water is out of control or that somehow it might not be environmentally sustainable. In fact, our gravity-fed irrigation systems, particularly in northern Victoria and southern New South Wales, are some of the oldest in the country—over 130 years old in the case of the Victorian Goulburn-Murray water system—but they have used innovative laser grading technologies, re-use systems and solar-powered measurement systems to the point where they are now some of the lowest energy users to produce some of the most environmentally sustainable irrigation. The only thing killing them now is the cost of that water.

We are also one of the few countries left that have managed to hang onto their honey industry with healthy hives. Most of our competitors are now buying hives from Australia because of the deaths of their hives as they are exposed to their diseases and their inappropriate chemical use regimes on their orchards, but in Australia we still have—I would hope more through deliberate action than through good luck—the world's most sustainable, healthy and disease-free hives. The bee pollination services are worth hundreds of millions of dollars to our orchard and horticultural industries. Our research and development needs to continue to focus on how we keep our Australian hives disease free.

In Tasmania and South Australia we have some of the most sustainable and healthy wild fisheries, but we also have some of the world's most sustainable and disease-free farmed fish or aquaculture industries. Again, this is not simply due to good fortune; it is because of research and development, very often as a consequence of private research and development investment. We can stand tall and proud in not having diseases like the twirling disease affecting our Tasmanian salmon. We have extraordinarily successful aquaculture enterprise—particularly, as I said, off South Australia—yet ironically we now import more than 80 per cent of the fish that is consumed in Australia.

So we are a country of quite extraordinary contradictions when it comes to our innovation, our effective agribusiness output, and our family farming—which, of course, Paul Howes has been snide about, implying somehow that 'ma and pa' farmers, as he calls them, are like Ma and Pa Kettle or hillbillies from the Appalachians! Of course, what was behind Paul Howes's comments as a key mover and shaker in the Australian Workers' Union is that family farms typically do not have their labour unionised. They are not card-carrying members of his union, in particular. And wouldn't he love to have the landscape populated by factory farms and corporate farms where he could get his union membership completely infiltrated and make our labour even more regulated and less productive and efficient! But I will move on from Paul Howes's snide and calculatedly disparaging remarks about Ma and Pa Kettle farmers in Australia.

Our farmers are extraordinary in their capacity to survive some of the most wildly fluctuating seasons in any agribusiness focused country on the globe. We have managed to deal with pestilence, whether mouse plagues or locust plagues, and a whole range of threats. But the whole business of Australian agriculture is under threat, and ironically it is not because of mouse, locust, fox or rabbit plagues or pestilence—it is because of the duopoly of Coles and Woolworths.

Would you believe that if you are in a company like SPC Ardmona, or Heinz in Echuca, or Cedenco or Kagome, and you set about your research and development effort and, through your research and development investment, come up with a brilliant new product or perhaps a brilliant new variety of fruit or vegetable, and you put it on the shelves of Coles and Woolworths and they see it is a great seller, then within weeks you, as the owner of that new technology or recipe or packaging or process, can expect to get a call from Coles or Woolworths, who will say to you: 'We'll have that product, thank you. We'll have it at about the same size. We'll have a red cap instead of a blue cap on our home-brand generic version. And, by the way, we'll take it from you at 30 per cent less than we are paying you for your branded product. And, by the way, if you do not want to cooperate, you might find your branded product out the back somewhere near the toilets—or, indeed, we might find a very good reason why we don't carry your branded product at all'? So you can see that, if you do invest in research and development, as perhaps one of the few remaining food manufacturers in Australia, then you are up against it when it comes to the power of the big supermarket duopolies. And Aldi, unfortunately, is not far behind them in this.

Our government has recently ushered in the voluntary code for supermarkets to try and get less unconscionable behaviour and less flagrant use of their market power. Time will tell if those supermarkets realise that the writing is on the wall or if we have to move to a mandated code. But also, as a government that understands and cares, we will have a root-and-branch competition policy review. All of that, hopefully, will happen sooner rather than later and will, in turn, make a difference in research and development investment in our country, because, as I said a moment ago, if you come up with a new product in Australia, you have only weeks before that product is demanded as a no-name version on the big supermarkets' shelves. In the case of Heinz, when this happened to them with their tomato sauce factory at Girgarre, they threw up their hands and said: 'We're out of here; we're going to New Zealand—even though they do not grow manufacturing-variety tomatoes in New Zealand, it's easier for us to go to New Zealand, where we don't have these pressures. We will produce our fabulous tomato sauces elsewhere.'

So this bill talks about research and development: the need for it in Australia, and how we want to make it more efficient and effective, particularly in rural and regional areas in agriculture. But, at the same time, we have got to acknowledge what constraints we are up against in terms of having proper investment within Australia itself. The states need to come back into the game. They need to reinvest in research and development.

When Labor closed those generations-old CSIRO research stations in the electorate of Mallee along the Murray River, killing off literally hundreds of years of continuous data on what had been grown and how it had responded to different climatic conditions, that was a tragedy. That was a death blow to some of our local vineyards in terms of new varietal development. It makes us more dependent on imported or GMO products or patented products—seeds or genetics—where we lose control of the final output and where we end up paying royalties rather than giving our farmers a better return for the food or fibre that they produce.

I commend this bill to the House. It is a very important piece of legislation. It is noncontroversial in many ways but what it does is highlight that in this country research and development will have to be improved and expanded if we are to get near the potential or opportunities that the dining boom tantalisingly offers us.

See this speech in context