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

I stand with the grain growers who have expressed concern about the current activities of the Grains Research Development Corporation. I have the highest regard for their chair. In fact I appointed Richard Clark as chair of the Grains RDC, so he enjoys my confidence, as does the team there. It is of course one of the RDCs being bullied out of Canberra, which will cost them a lot of money and, in my view, severely undermine their effectiveness.

The Grains RDC is spending a lot of money on marketing. They are sponsoring the Global Food Forum; they are running, as a complement to that, ads in The Australian; and they are doing a roadshow, which is headed by Alan Jones. I have heard the ads on 2GB: 'Come to the roadshow—Alan Jones—fantastic. Come along and hear about the bright future of the grains industry.' I trust and hope that the grains industry does have a bright future. I just do not know whom they are telling. I have had a look at some of the panellists. They are great people—big players in the sector. But I do not know how levy payers are benefiting from these Alan Jones led roadshows.

These are serious questions for this parliament and for levy payers, but Minister Joyce will not ask the question. I have asked him to ask the question. I have publicly required him to ask the Grains RDC, a statutory body, why they are spending this money on Alan Jones and this roadshow—when they do not have a marketing remit from either this parliament or this government. I invite the assistant minister to address that issue as well. Surely he has been briefed? Surely he has been briefed about one of our statutory RDCs spending a lot of levy payer money on newspaper ads, sponsorships and Alan Jones led roadshows?

I have not been invited to the roadshow, by the way. That is not the reason I am offended by it of course, but you would have thought that, if the government were interested in working on a bipartisan basis, I might have been invited—I suspect Barnaby Joyce may have been. Surely these roadshows are not going to include Minister Joyce preaching the gospel of the National Party alongside Alan Jones? I wonder what the assistant minister thinks about that prospect? Maybe he has been invited to speak at some of the roadshows too. It is a pretty clever way to produce some cheap campaigning—have the GRDC hold a roadshow with Alan and just turn up! It will be interesting to see whether Minister Joyce does turn up. I might have just put the kibosh on it—that is the risk in making this contribution. It might have been better to just let it go and then see what happened. But surely the assistant minister will have something to say about that when he closes this debate? It is a great shame the Deputy Prime Minister is not closing the debate, by the way, but I will be very welcoming of the assistant minister's contribution.

Still on levies: recently the minister announced that he would be supporting an industry request to place levies on chestnuts and sweet potatoes. That is a good thing. What is happening there of course is that the growers and the producers themselves are saying, 'We would like the opportunity to have a government matched levy. We will use that for R&D and possibly marketing purposes.' That is a good thing and we support that. The interesting thing is that at the same time the minister was considering levies for chestnuts and sweet potatoes he was considering a levy for thoroughbred breeders. I proudly represent the horse capital of the nation, part of which, by the way, is going into Minister Joyce's electorate as a result of the redistribution in New South Wales. Sadly, Minister Joyce declined the request of the thoroughbred breeders to strike a levy, notwithstanding the fact that—as you would expect—the thoroughbred breeders produced a very sound plan for how they would spend that levy on genetics, workplace safety, horse safety et cetera. It was a very good plan.

Why chestnuts and sweet potatoes but not thoroughbreds? I do not know. Minister Joyce has made no attempt to explain. Maybe the assistant minister, when he closes, can enlighten us on this too. Unfortunately, when some people think of thoroughbreds they think of racing—of course they would, because the two are incontrovertibly linked. They are one and the same in many senses. But thoroughbred breeders are as much primary producers as are grains producers, beef producers, lamb producers et cetera. They are primary producers. I suspect they are being discriminated against because they are part of the racing industry and that this minister fears that maybe someone will resent the government funding what is seen as a wealthy elite part of our society. Let us push the importance of the racing industry aside for a moment, although it is a very important economic contributor to this country—many in this place like a punt, no doubt. But putting that aside, the thoroughbred breeding sector should not be penalised because of where their end product plays a role. They are primary producers like all the others. Minister Joyce wants to discriminate and give the levy to two commodities in addition to all of those who already have a levy—and there are many of them; name pretty much any commodity and there is a levy attached—but not to the thoroughbred breeders.

To make it worse, the equine industry is potentially facing a crisis. It is facing a crisis, sadly, because of a thing called equine herpes—I think that is the technical term. There is no vaccine in this country at the moment for this terrible herpes, and it poses a very significant risk to the sector.

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