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

The Export Control Bill 2019 is not a controversial bill, but it's an important bill because it goes very much to our capacity to access export markets. It's a great shame that it's taken the government about five years to get around to it—a point I might return to—but we welcome it just the same. To give members an opportunity to speak more broadly about agricultural issues, because there is lots to talk about, I take this opportunity to move the second reading amendment as circulated in my name:

That all words after "That" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:

"whilst not declining to give the bill a second reading, the House condemns the Government for its lack of a comprehensive plan for agricultural exports, including a plan for ensuring Australian agriculture will reach $100 billion in farm-gate value by 2030".

For those of us in positions of responsibility, as we all are in this place, there's a fine line between talking about the real challenges an industry faces without talking it down. It's always a very important balance. The recent bushfires provided us with a very real example of that. We don't want to be telling our markets, including our export markets, that we've lost our capacity to produce, because those markets might temporarily go elsewhere and never be secured again in the future, but it is necessary to say that the agriculture sector in Australia is in real trouble. In recent times, it's faced the worst drought in our history, and despite the very welcome recent drenching rains in many parts of our country that drought very much remains with us still.

The recent bushfires have had a devastating impact on so many on the land—our growers and producers. The bushfire season has not yet come to an end, and there is a significant risk that those events might not be over. We all hope and pray that they are, but we just don't know. Of course, there will be future bushfire seasons too, and we need to be alert to the need to better adapt to be ready for those fires. Certainly, my own electorate is an example of the impact on our growers, with vignerons having lost significant yield to smoke taint. I thank the minister at the table for engaging with me on this issue and assisting me as best he can to ensure that those vignerons are given every bit of government assistance that can be secured and that we can muster.

We're facing trade wars. We've grown the hope of our agriculture sector off the back of our export markets, and rightly so, but we're living in a very unusual—that might be a good way of putting it—world. Globally, politics have changed significantly. In fact, the shift has been tectonic, and it's going to impact on our major markets. We've seen the tensions between the United States and China on trade. I used to say that when the United States sneezes we catch a cold. I think, due now to the coronavirus, we're starting to learn just how dependent we are on the economy of China. They are changing times and they are all very challenging.

We live with ongoing biosecurity threats and, again, the coronavirus makes us more alert to that. That threat will continue to hang over the heads of our growers and producers. Volumes are down, yields are down and the national herd is at an historic low, and that will take a lengthy rebuilding phase to get us back on track. The sector is enormously challenged by a changing climate, not just drought but beyond that, and all the impacts that a changing climate is having and all the demands it will put on resource allocation.

We are the driest inhabited continent in the world, and we're becoming hotter and drier. Forget the argument about what's causing it. We have to accept that to be a fact, and we have to be ready for that and adapt to it. And our soil resources, while of high quality in expansive areas, are very limited. When you take it as a proportion of our total land mass, our natural soil resources are limited. We have to have a serious debate in this place, in the wake of recent events, about the misallocation of those resources and how we use market based mechanisms to ensure that those resources are allocated to the areas where they secure the highest value return, both for our producers and growers but also for the nation—the people who, in the end, own those natural resources.

Before all these calamities came belong, productivity had already flatlined for around a decade. Profitability has been patchy or, worse, low for a long, long time. According to the ABS, around 59 per cent of our farm entities have turnovers—not profit—of $200,000 or less. Still, 80 per cent of the production or output of our farm sector comes from 20 per cent of the firms. If that is not a sign that some significant restructuring is required in the sector, I don't know what is. Members should reflect on that: 80 per cent of the output from 20 per cent of the firms. It sounds somewhat inefficient, and it does have implications for a natural resource allocation.

Our rate of innovation is poor and has been for a long time. We can often prove ourselves to be quite good at research but we are very poor at both innovation and extension—that capacity to get innovation down onto the farm, inside the farm gate and into the production system. We desperately need to address that. We made it clear, on this side of the House, prior to the election that if we were to be elected we would be heavily revisiting the architecture around the rural RDCs, the research and development corporations. We're proud of the current architecture because it was a Labor initiative, under John Kerin, probably 30 years ago.

But that's the point; it was a long time ago. I've made the point that the world has changed significantly, the opportunities and challenges for the sector have changed significantly and so too should our approach to research and development. Research and development extension dollars are too finite, too scarce, to be wasting one dollar of any of it, and we need to make sure that that money is spent effectively and efficiently and in a way that provides outcomes for our farm sector.

We've got to start talking more about our forestry and fisheries industries. Fisheries, our seafood industry, are also impacted by drought. In the first instance, it sounds counterintuitive to people who might be listening to the debate, but drought has enormous impacts on the quality of our marine environment and our estuaries, and the flushing of the estuaries aren't present et cetera. You come to realise that the impact can be very, very significant. As I understand it, people in the fisheries sectors aren't eligible for the farm household allowance, for example.

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