Brian Mitchell (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to support the passage of the Primary Industries Research and Development Amendment Bill 2017 and the proposed amendment. This bill will impact the four research and development corporations established under the act: the cotton, grains, fisheries and rural industries research and development corporations. It would allow these four corporations to undertake marketing activities funded by voluntary contributions and remove the requirement that they only undertake marketing where a levy is attached to the corporation, which can be a cumbersome and expensive undertaking. The four statutory R&D corporations covered by the Primary Industries Research and Development Act 1989 have been permitted to undertake marketing activities only since 2013, when an amendment expanded the scope of their activities. The amendments we are debating today will not change the process by which R&D corporations establish a new levy, but they do remove the requirement for one in order to undertake marketing.

In addressing the substance of this bill, which is primary industries R&D, it is fair to say that regional Australia has been let down by this government and particularly by the former minister. Funding for research and development in primary industries under this government has absolutely been neglected. We have a new Minister for Agriculture and Water Resources now. Indeed, he's a fairly new member of this House; he was elected in 2016. I hope that he can renew the focus on research and development across the whole of Australia, including in my electorate of Lyons, rather than being like his predecessor and concentrating his efforts in his own electorate. Using ministerial authority to feather your nest in your own electorate might make you popular in your own seat—it might make you popular with the local businesspeople in your seat who stand to profit from government money rolling into town—but it makes you an appalling minister of the Crown. Under the former minister, policy progress in primary industries went to sleep. The agriculture white paper came and went with barely a whimper. One legacy of the paper is its cuts to R&D: $6½ million a year, which, if left unchanged, over eight years comes to $52 million.

One of the few bright spots in agriculture in recent years has been the lower dollar, resulting in better export demand for our producers. The lower dollar meant better export dollars. Who can forget the former minister treating this House to a daily stock report of the cents per kilo and boasting as if that had something to do with him? The fact is that the successes of the primary industry sector in the past five years have come despite the former minister holding the reins of the portfolio, not because of it. I do hope the new minister does better, but the early indications are not hopeful. He appears wedded to the former minister's wrecking behaviour on the Murray-Darling Basin when it comes to some irrigators stealing water. And inexplicably, for someone representing a vast regional electorate with many people on middle to low incomes, he has an almost cultish fascination with trickle-down economics, which history has shown to favour big business and multinationals at the expense of domestic primary producers and wage-earners. I really wonder how farmers in the electorate of Maranoa would feel about their local member, now the minister for agriculture, siding with big business over the legitimate concerns that producers have when they have to deal with the likes of the grocery duopoly.

I do urge the new minister to take his predecessor's white paper out of the drawer, shake off the spider webs and dust, have a read and bring it back to this House with the changes that are necessary to get primary industry policy in this country back on track. A good place to start would be to stop wasting money on the forced and ill-considered relocation of public servants to the former minister's own electorate and redirect the savings, the actual cost of that process, to research and development. Or how about having some evidence based policy to address the effect of climate change on our farmers and regional communities?

And you don't have to look far for the evidence. The new minister might like to talk to a constituent of mine from York Plains in Southern Midlands in my electorate. Peter has been farming in the area all his life. He is worried about climate change and the effects it is having on his property. The changes in the cycle, the weather patterns—dry, very dry, floods, dry again—are challenging his way of life. This is something we know farmers have put up with in Australia for generations, but when farmers who have farmed the land tell you in their own words that this is the worst they have ever seen it and that it is a systematic part of genuine climate change, no longer just an annualised weather change, you'd better to listen to them, the people on the ground. Peter's is not the only story about the real effects of climate change on our farming communities, but apparently this government does not care much for the lived experience and the evidence from generations of farmers who are concerned about their futures. The Labor Party has a sub-caucus of members who represent country electorates and senators whose duty electorates are regional. We met recently with the group Farmers for Climate Action. These are real farmers with real concerns about the future of productive land in this country. Too often we see from those opposite an ideological obsession with refusing to acknowledge the reality of climate change and the devastating economic and environmental impacts it carries.

If the minister cannot bring himself to fund R&D into climate change action—I don't know whether he believes in it or not—perhaps he can consider investing funds into combatting fruit fly in Tasmania. My colleague, the member for Braddon, spoke on this subject at some length. Our island has always been free of this pest, but four years after a $1 million cut to biosecurity funding under the state Liberal government in Tasmania, fruit fly is emerging in our state. Exclusion zones have been established in the north of our state, in prime fruit-growing regions like Kentish, resulting in heavy losses for farmers.

I was driving through there just last week, and the orchards are groaning with apples that aren't being picked. The farmers don't have the markets to sell them to. They have to sell them within the zone; they can't travel outside the zone. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of produce that will be either left to rot on the tree or picked and sold locally for cents on the dollar. Just this week, fruit fly larvae have been found in the south of the state. Biosecurity Tasmania assures us there is nothing to worry about. I truly hope that is the case, that these are all isolated incidents and that we can in the next few months continue to declare Tasmanian produce fruit fly free, but we face a nervous wait. Last week Biosecurity Tasmania released this information. Since this crisis came to a head some weeks ago:

That is 88½ tonnes of fruit that isn't going to market and is not adding to the incomes of farmers in Tasmania.

And more than 100 biosecurity staff have been deployed to work on eradication. Hindsight's a wonderful thing, but it's arguable that had resources not been cut in the first place we would not have to scramble now, at considerably greater expense, to fix the problem. Labor said at the time when the state government sought to make these cuts to biosecurity, 'Don't do it; the penny-pinching is not worth it.' We were ignored, the cuts went ahead, and we should never forget it. Some R&D into combatting fruit fly would be most welcome, as would R&D into Pacific Oyster Mortality Syndrome or blueberry rust, which are also having impacts on production in my state.

The lower dollar, as I've mentioned before, has been good for Tasmania's exported produce, but the clean green image is not a matter of luck or of floating on the global sea of economics; it is something producers in Tasmania have worked hard over 20 or 30 years to attain, with the support of the former state Labor government and, I must say, the former Labor federal government. Both were very supportive of Tasmania's emergence as the gourmet producer of food, wine, cheese, gin, whisky and beer in this country.

I'll never forget it was Labor's Barry Jones and Duncan Kerr who had the federal law changed to allow distilling in Tasmania, a simple decision that has led to the birth of a world-beating spirits industry not just in Tasmania but one that now spreads across the continent. It's a simple change in this parliament to make it legal to have a distilling industry without all the hoops that people used to have to go through, and it's transformed regions. It shows the effect, with just a bit of foresight and a little bit of attention, and the change that this place can make, and it doesn't have to have a negative effect on the budget.

I would welcome some R&D into the effects of excise reform, because I'd like to see excise reform for the spirits industry, and beer and cider. It's long overdue. I'm personally convinced that reforming our outdated excise laws will lead to sustained growth for Australian distilled spirits, and beer and cider. There are so many innovators with great ideas in Tasmania, but they do need expert support to make their ideas a reality and that's where R&D can come in.

R&D is central to increasing industry productivity, ensuring sustainability and every dollar spent has a positive impact going forward. The member for Forrest mentioned in this debate earlier on that every dollar spent on R&D returns $12, which is a great return. It's even better than education. Every dollar spent on education gets a $7 return. That's something those opposite should remember as they merrily chop through the education budget.

It was a great shame that Labor was not elected to government in Tasmania on 3 March, as the agriculture platform of the Labor opposition included the creation of a centre of excellence in agricultural research, education and commercialisation. That sadly will now not happen. That's a real loss for agriculture in our state.

In Tasmania R&D falls under the umbrella of the Tasmanian Institute of Agriculture, a partnership of government and of the University of Tasmania. Our state has an ambitious goal to increase the annual value of Tasmanian agriculture to $10 billion every year by 2050, and R&D is core to that goal. To reach it, Tasmanian Agriculture will have to grow at double the rate it has grown at for the past 20 years.

Some TIA initiatives include research and development collaboration into Poppy Downy Mildew; a research and development collaboration to improve the productivity of vineyards; a biofumigation vegetable productivity project to investigate the benefits of using brassica crops to manage disease, pests and weeds to boost productivity and vegetable crops, including potatoes; the Precision Agriculture Project to look at the benefits of adopting technologies to improve farming practices and performance. There's a project that aims to ensure the future viability of Tasmania's vegetable processing industry by increasing yields of key crops and decreasing input costs. And two other priority projects more recently announced are a project to look into pastures and livestock productivity and one to look into crop and pasture seed, to grow our place in this potentially high-value market.

R&D has a particularly important role in Tasmania because, of course, we are committed as a state—both Labor and Liberal—to keeping GMO out of our state's food cycle. I personally accept there is a role for GMO in the global food market, but allowing it to enter Tasmania would be a disaster for our state's clean green image and our ability to leverage premium prices in niche markets.

With that, I will conclude by saying the importance of R&D cannot be underestimated when it comes to agriculture. It's a terrible shame that we've undergone some cuts in this area, but here's hoping that with a new minister in the chair there will be a brighter way forward for agriculture in this country.

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