Joel Fitzgibbon (Hunter, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to follow the Deputy Speaker and to comment on his contribution on drought. I have a high regard for the Deputy Speaker. He is a good local member. He has a good and thorough understanding of rural and agriculture issues, and I too share his concern about the ongoing nature of the drought and the el nino which is ahead, so I cannot understand that within his agriculture white paper the minister has not included resource sustainability or climate change. How are we going to produce more food and increase farm productivity with the same limited and, indeed, in some cases depleting food, water and people resources? This is the really big question for the agriculture sector and those who survive and rely on it. It amazes me. Whatever the causes of climate change might be—there are certainly different views about that—climate change is very real and should be part of the white paper.

I also cannot help but make the point that the Prime Minister and the Minister for Agriculture in great fanfare undertook a drought tour three months ago. There was plenty of television footage and plenty of picture opportunities, and straight after a big announcement, the centrepiece of which was a $280 million farm financing package for drought affected farmers, three months on, sadly, not one cent of that money has gone to struggling farming families. That is very disappointing. I just hope that in the not-too-distant future the minister can prove to the parliament and to the farming communities that are being affected that he is capable of putting a drought package in place.

I am here to talk about the budget. Never before has an electorate felt so misled and let down by a Commonwealth budget. I have been here for 18 years. My first budget was 1996. It was a tough budget delivered by Peter Costello, the Treasurer in the Howard government, but this one is extraordinarily worse. It is full of inconsistencies, it is full of mixed messages and it is full of bad priorities. It has inconsistencies in that it is spending big money on programs like the paid parental leave scheme, feeding big money to high-income families while cutting the lowest-income families and people in this country. They say it is about fiscal consolidation, but we are seeing very little consolidation. We are feeling the pain.

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