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

There are a range of things that the member for Hunter, the shadow minister for agriculture, has brought up, and I will try to go through them and be as succinct as I can. The first question he asked is about the white paper. The white paper is complete. It has been through the ERC process. It has been through the cabinet process. We are now merely finding the day for its announcement, so everything that we need to do there is complete.

I can understand the frustration that may be held by the shadow minister and possibly held by others, but it was very important, extremely important, on behalf of agriculture that we stayed at the table and bargained as hard as we possibly could for the best possible deal for regional Australia. I believe that we have done that. We have done that because the alternative was to come up with a motherhood statement, and the last thing I wanted was a glossy brochure that talked about aspirations but never actually delivered any money on how to do them.

Within the food plan there were many ideas. The Labor Party food plan had many ideas, but the capacity to finance them was not apparent. That was the problem we had with it.

What we have now—and you have already seen sections of it—are three issues: on fencing, on water write-off in the first year and on fodder. They are from the white paper. They were announced in the budget. Also on the back of that is that any person with a turnover of less than $2 million gets plant that is pertinent to their business to the value of $20,000 immediately written off. This has been overwhelmingly supported in the community.

It just stands to reason that you are not going to announce the Northern Australia white paper, a dams task force and the agriculture white paper in the shadow of a budget or all together at the one time. We will make sure that there is the proper absorption of the material that we need. Without giving too much away: within a month we will have the agriculture white paper out—and probably sooner. I am trying to be as honest as I can in answer to your question. I note your weekly media releases in this space, every Friday. It is good. I take that as advertising, and I do want the focus to be on this agricultural white paper because there has been so much work done. It is such a substantive document, with over 1,000 responses from the community, that we want to make sure that it gets the very best absorption by the public, and—regardless of whether I am the minister or someone else is, or we are the government or someone else is—that we have a formidable document that can be carried forward and utilised into the future, because in agriculture we do not work for three-year terms. This is something that the shadow minister and I are at one on. It is a long-term plan. It has to be a long-term plan. It is very similar to Defence; you cannot have wild oscillations in policy; otherwise, you have chaos on the land and you will have the loss of a sense of stability, and that is not respecting the people we represent.

The other question he asked was: what role does the government have in the turnaround in commodity prices? That is a very fair question, and now I propose to answer some of it. We have opened up six new live animal destinations: Egypt; Bahrain; Lebanon; Iran, after four decades—four decades—of it being closed; Thailand and Cambodia. We started this work immediately. The first place I went to as a minister on receiving the job was the Middle East. Even as recently as last night I was back talking to the ambassador and representatives from Kuwait, from Egypt, from Lebanon, from Jordan and from Iraq, trying to make sure that we further expand that trade. That is the role you have to do. It is a vitally important market to us. Today I have been speaking with Minister Gao, who is out here, and the ambassador about furthering the protocols to try and get the export of kangaroo meat. It is vitally important that we do this and export this product into this market. These are the issues that three free trade agreements have assisted with. I commend my department for expediting so many of the protocols so we can move products—whether it is tropical fruits, cattle or sheep. These are the things that we do that bring the return back through the farm gate.

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