Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for his question and note the importance of backpacker employment and labour in making sure that we harvest the permanent planning in the dairy industry. I note that it is incredibly important that we went into bat for the backpacker industry and backpacker labour. We now have a package coming forward with a 19 per cent tax. This is after consultation with 178 industry groups—welfare groups, unions and labour-hire companies. We invited participation from the general community and got over 1,700 submissions.

The announcement by the coalition of a 19 per cent backpacker tax has been welcomed by the National Farmers' Federation, the Queensland Farmers Federation, Grocon, the Northern Territory Farmers Association, the Tasmanian Farmers and Graziers Association, the Australian Regional Tourism Network and the Western Australian Farmers Federation—just to name a few. We also see that Geoffrey Thompson—a stone fruit and apples company—who employ over 1,000 backpackers a season, right down to the Goodwill family, who employ four or five backpackers, are all wanting this to go—

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