David Littleproud (Maranoa, National Party, Minister for Water Resources, Drought, Rural Finance, Natural Disaster and Emergency Management) Share this | Hansard source

Sorry, Mr Acting Deputy Speaker. The member for Hunter knows full well that he is doing nothing more than providing a cruel hoax and playing on the misery of Australian dairy farmers. I thought he was bigger than that but unfortunately not. We will continue on. We will continue on on the pathway to resetting the dairy industry. I say right here now to the supermarkets—

Mr Fitzgibbon interjecting—

I'll take the interjection from the member for Hunter, because I have a strong record of standing up to them. I say to them again, as I said when I was agriculture minister: you have a role to play. If these reforms come in, you need to work with an industry that will be there and be sustainable, so you have an opportunity to prove what you did last time and support dairy industries now and provide that mechanism that you did. I broke that $1-a-litre milk and made sure that that money went back to them. They created the mechanism. They can do it tomorrow.

We understand the drought. There is a drought on. Unfortunately, when we talk about a national strategic plan the member for Hunter, again, wants to play politics on the misery of Australian farmers, not just dairy farmers. We are the first government that is not only dealing with the here and now of the drought but looking at the next drought. For the first time, we've said, as a government, that we are going to tackle future droughts while we're in the middle of one. A three-pillar stimulus of putting money back in farmers' pockets now, keeping them there. There is the Regional Investment Corporation that dairy farmers can take up, refinancing up to $2 million of an existing debt from a bank. They can put it in the Regional Investment Corporation—no principal and no interest for two years. If you had a rate of 6½ per cent you would be saving over $150,000 a year. We're taking that out of the big banks' pockets and putting it back into the farmers' pockets. We're making sure they have the cash flow to survive.

There's the farm household allowance—over $120,000 that will be put in their pockets to give them the dignity and respect they need to put bread and butter on their tables. We're supporting the communities, because the drought extends past the farm gate to the communities that support them. There are hundreds of millions of dollars in stimulus to keep them going—to keep small towns moving as we go through this.

As I said, we're the first government to look to the future with a Future Fund giving a dividend of $100 million a year to provide programs that will build the resilience that we need to stave off future droughts. We have come a long way. I used to be a bank manager. I used to sit around farmers' kitchen tables. I remember the days when we used to take out cheques for $250,000 in interest rate subsidies. Those days have gone because the farming industry has moved away from it, and so we should because we wouldn't have the trade agreements we have got in place now. Farmers have prepared themselves for these droughts, but we're going to give them the tools they need to go further.

Finally, we're going to put over $3 billion out there and hope that a state will take our hand and build some dams—some water infrastructure—to harvest the water to build the resilience to grow regional Australia. Unfortunately since 2003 only 20 dams have been built—16 of those have been in Tasmania—because we have state governments who are inept. Unfortunately, the states have the responsibility to build the water infrastructure. We're prepared to pay for it. Come and take our hand. When the member for Hunter sits here and feigns concern about the dairy industry, because of his near-death political experience on 18 May and the deep-seated impacts One Nation had on him at a local level—and now he takes the advice of One Nation in how he would run Australian agriculture and dairy—then I say to the Australian dairy industry: you are better off without the member for Hunter.

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