Damian Drum (Nicholls, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm not going to take questions while I'm in my presentation. But I'm happy to sit down with the Labor Party at any stage and put forward changes to make agriculture the beneficiary of some of the environmental water we have.

We have 450 gigalitres, still hanging around the necks of our farmers, referred to as the '450 upwater'. We have dodgy science based around the Lower Lakes of South Australia. We have a whole range of opportunities for changes to improve the lot of our farmers. At the moment, our farmers are being asked to carry the losses associated with the running of the rivers. They're commonly referred to as conveyancing losses. This is coming out of the allocation that is annually available to our farmers. But the environment bears none of these conveyancing losses. When the environment is asked to help agriculture, their answer is generally a flat no.

We have to look at this in a serious manner. This is a Labor Party in opposition calling for a floor price in the dairy industry as a way of helping those farmers who are going through very tough times, when they know in their heart of hearts that a floor price in the dairy industry cannot work, when they know that the dairy industry itself is not calling for a floor price—because the dairy industry itself knows that a floor price in the dairy industry cannot work.

This is what the Labor Party are doing, with a whole series of what we would generally refer to as hoaxes, right throughout the whole industry. How can you set a floor price in the dairy industry that is above the cost of milk production? How can you do that? It's impossible to do it because every farming business produces milk at a different cost. They have different levels of debt. They have different access to water. They have different sized herds. They have different feed systems. And on it goes. From farmer 1 to farmer 2 to farmer 3 to farmer 4, they will all be producing milk at a different price. They'll be producing different-quality milk and getting different prices for their milk throughout the sector. The Labor Party, with this hoax, are effectively saying that they're going to fix this with the flick of a wrist—they're going to put in place a floor price that's going to be across the price of production. They know it is wrong. They know it is false. They know it simply cannot work. But they're happy to keep perpetuating this throughout the whole sector. They must understand that the dairy industry are not calling for this.

However, what we're here today to talk about is the farm household allowance. My first intensive look at this was after the milk price collapsed in 2016 and many farmers were being asked by their processors to go into a repayment plan of anywhere from $50,000 to several hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay back what were called clawbacks once the floor price crashed—on the back of, firstly, Murray Goulburn and, secondly, Fonterra following them. There was a collapse in the price of milk, one of only three times in the history of milk pricing when the price actually went backwards, and it went dramatically backwards. That caused an enormous amount of pain and anguish throughout the dairy industry, and many farmers have been on the back foot ever since then.

This is a really, really tough time, and many of the farmers who went through that clawback process had not got their heads above water when they were hit with this drought. Prices for water are spiking up to $600 and beyond on the temporary market, and many farmers are simply not able to compete at that price. Dairy farmers have always had to be in a market against horticulture and fruit, and now they're finding themselves in a market against other commodities that can pay considerably more.

This is a very, very serious issue. The government is doing whatever it can to help in relation to putting food on the table for our families, ensuring that they can pay a few household bills, trying to give them the dignity of an existence. It is not enabling them to supplement their farming business in any way, but it is at least enabling them to put some food on the table, pay some household bills, get the kids off to school and make sure that they can live that modest life around the household while they go through the trials and tribulations of their farming business as the drought worsens. I think the government is acting in a very responsible manner. These changes will enable these farming families to stay in the industry at a greater rate. They will ensure that the farmers coming off farm household allowance can receive this once-off supplementary payment on the way out in a timely fashion. We get whingeing, complaining and bellyaching from the opposition. Sometimes they just need to come along and say: 'We support these measures. The government is doing the right thing with this, and we all support this.'

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