Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Minister for Agriculture) Share this | Hansard source

I think it is important to reply in kind at the first available opportunity to what the shadow minister has brought about. Today one was the monkey grinder and the other was the clown—

An honourable member: Organ grinder!

Right. But I do commend the shadow minister because I do believe that there is a general view that agriculture policy is similar to defence policy. It has to be consistent. We do not want wild oscillations of policy, because people on farms do not plan for three years, they plan for 30 years, and therefore we need consistency. I am sure the endeavours of both sides will be to make good decisions better rather than make holistic changes that create major uncertainty.

I would also like to commend the work that has been done over such a long period of time by John Cobb, who is here today. He has had very strong involvement at a personal level, owning a farm, in agri-politics and also in politics itself. However, I have to take up one thing straightaway. People ask: 'What are some of the major changes?' I will give you a major change between when the Howard government finished and when the Rudd-Gillard-whomever government finished. When the Howard coalition government finished, the budget in agriculture was $3.48 billion. In the last Labor budget it was $1.6 billion. So the Labor Party cut $1.88 billion over their tenure. This is a substantive change for our attention. I look forward to the opposition's policy showing reinvigoration for that. How their policy addresses some of the issues rests a lot on the shadow minister's shoulders. One thing I do want is real competition—competition of ideas—because that helps progress where agriculture goes.

I can quickly point to some clear changes. When we came in, we had the concessional farm finance package, which I acknowledge the Labor Party drew up but they just never signed it off. Because it was never signed off, it could not be delivered. We had a package which was not signed off and was not actually designed for the people who were to use it. We had to completely recalibrate it. Because we wanted to get all the states and territories signed off, we had to go around to get them all to sign off. To the extent it was designed, it was inoperable, because it wasn't signed off by all the states and territories. We had to do that and we had to reallocate money. So we had the same amount of money, God bless them, going to Tasmania—that is fair enough—as we had going to Queensland. One area was in the middle of a drought and the other area wasn't suffering the privations of a drought. We did that. It was the coalition that did that, and the people are getting that money because we organised that.

The next thing is we also found money for water—that is definitely something that we did; $10 million—and we have been receiving strong support in that policy initiative, because people like the capacity of getting new watering points out on their place. That is something we did.

On 4 March we got the changes to the interim farm family payment, and now over 1,400 farming families who have been doing it tough have been receiving payments in access of $900 a fortnight. It is amazing when people say, 'You haven't actually done anything in agriculture. You haven't got any money out.' That is an awful lot of money and it has been going out, and we have been doing that. So we did that.

The free trade agreement to Korea was not signed off; we did that—that was another thing we did. The progress that has been made with the ag white paper, which was a clear statement by the coalition of their intent to have a holistic and very discerning view on where agriculture goes and create a policy format that becomes not a direction of the— (Time expired)

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