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

Out of deference and respect for you, I will return to something very specific. That is the abolition of the National Rural Advisory Council. It is in here, Mr Deputy Speaker. The National Rural Advisory Council is a statutory body. On that basis, it has all those things you associate with statutory bodies. It has tenure for its members, an annual report, plenty of transparency and accountability. It is chaired by none other than Mick Keogh, a highly regarded agricultural professional in this country. It is gone. I do not recall the minister promising that pre-election. It has been replaced, I concede, by something the minister promised he would do before the election. So I will qualify something I said earlier. He has done something: he got rid of one body and put in another body. That is a big achievement by the minister.

The problem is that the new body, the Agricultural Industry Advisory Council, is not a statutory authority. There is no annual report. There is no tenure for its members. They are there at the minister's whim, hand-picked by the minister and there at his pleasure, and it has no transparency. We asked at Senate estimates, recently, what this body does. The officials did not seem to know very much. I challenge the minister to come back into the House and tell me which things he has done—it is going to be pretty hard because he has not done much—off the advice of this advisory council. He said that is what it was going to do. They were going to consult around the country and advise the minister. As a result, he was going to come up with these new ingenious ideas for the agriculture sector.

There is another interesting thing about the advisory council—and, again, this new body has some very good people on it, many of whom I know personally, and they are very good people, but we need to know, given the expenses involved, what the advisory council is doing. For example, this is very important because in August 2014 they had dinner in Darwin, to do some consultations, apparently; it was $3,042. In April 2015 in Devonport in Tasmania there was dinner and networking; it was $3,916. These may be legitimate expenses. I was not there; I do not know how many people were there. But they are pretty pricey dinners. If the taxpayer is going to be investing that sort of money in an advisory group completely chosen by the minister, made up of members who only serve at the pleasure of the minister—and you know what that implies: it means, 'Don't come to me with ideas I don't like or you might not be on the advisory panel much longer,' and I do not think there is anyone in this House who would deny that the minister is capable of that, having gone through two secretaries or departmental heads, by the way, during his tenure; no-one is going to doubt that the minister would not hesitate to act if he was given advice he did not like—then taxpayers are entitled to know what the advisory council is doing, what advice it is giving and what the bases of these expenses are and so on.

This repeal bill does serve to highlight many of the failings and broken promises of this government. It is a government that has done nothing in agriculture except to claim credit for things it has had no responsibility for and can therefore claim no credit for.

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