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

I intend to address some of the issues that were brought up by both the shadow minister and the member for Lyne. I have now been advised by the department that, when we had carriage of the concessional farm finance package, there were only three states—Queensland, Western Australia and Victoria—that had signed off on it. The statement made by the shadow minister of 'all but one' is incorrect. We had three. In the Commonwealth of Australia there are more than three states, last time I checked, so we had to get the others to sign off. We had to progress this deal. There is always an issue with picking up the paperwork from the Labor Party and trying to finish the job off. They never get there. It is always like a packet of poo tickets caught in the corner. You have to try to fix it up, sweep it up together and try to make some sense out of it.

What we also had was this complete confusion. Yes, there was a presumption that the number of farmers we had in Tasmania—and Tasmania is a great place—was the same as the number of farmers we had in New South Wales. It was an absurdity. After we got everybody signed off, we had to redesign the whole thing to make it work.

With regard to some states, and I refer to Western Australia, they placed conditions on how they were going to lend the money in that concessional farm finance package out. It did make it vastly more restrictive than other states, and it was difficult for those farmers to get access to it. So what did we do? When we got the $320 million package through, we made it so that it was generic—so that people could get an equivalent loan in different states and territories. This is the sort of process you do to try to make a program work.

Moving on to biosecurity: biosecurity is terribly important. I think that, throughout the room, people understand that if we do not maintain our most competitive advantage—that is, our clean, green image—then we have real concerns. That is why, even in the last week, we have been on the front foot making sure we deal with the detection of three beetles. It might sound innocuous, but they were not George, Paul and Ringo. We had the longhorn beetle, the mulberry beetle and the sawyer beetle and these have the capacity to devastate our timber industry, as they have devastated Canada's. We have been on the front foot. We have been ventilating this issue. We have been making sure that we track it down. We have been getting the quarantine in place and collecting all but, we believe, a few pallets that are around Adelaide. This is where we have to make sure we have the competencies in that field that are so apparent in the Department of Agriculture. I am happy; we stand behind that program and are making sure the Department of Agriculture has a front-line role in all the mechanisms of connection so that we can detect these issues.

If we had an incursion of foot-and-mouth disease, the person who brought it in would probably not even realise they had it. They could have been backpacking in Nepal. If they brought it in, we would have to shut down the beef industry, the sheep industry, the wool industry, live cattle exports—the whole lot. The whole lot would shut down. It is absolutely imperative that we keep up our image and we are doing that.

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