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

I thank the member for Paterson for reminding me that they rorted the water grants. But small businesses everywhere, including in my electorate, are telling me that more debt is not the answer to their problems. The Leader of the Opposition was down in Batemans Bay with my colleagues last week, and I could see that he came back shell-shocked by the impact on small business people who just completely lost their businesses. Their customers have just disappeared, or they have been without power for a week or two and just can't deliver for their customers. Telling them that they should go and get a loan is a slap in the face, and we have seen how good this government is at administering loans. I think the small business drought loans were announced in November and maybe opened in January—or, worse than that, it might have been late January. That's before small businesses could even make applications for the loans. And it will be interesting to see, when Senate estimates comes around, how popular they have been and how difficult people have found it to apply for them. I suspect that whatever's happened to the small business drought loans will be repeated with the small business bushfire loans. You can be pretty certain about that.

This failure to grow the agricultural sector is having impacts on our regional economies, because they are so dependent on them. Out there in the regions, two things are really important to us—lots of things are very important to us, the visitor economy amongst them, particularly in the Hunter region—the farm sector and the mining sector. I stand in this place as a proud supporter of both of them. I want both of those sectors to be very, very strong for many, many decades to come, as I know they will be, as Asia demands our food and fibre and our coal product. That will be a good thing for Australia. There doesn't have to be a clash between the two. We can have a grand compact to make sure they thrive alongside one another.

In Queensland, the gas companies have paid our farmers around $500 million in the last 10 years for the right to access their land to extract coal-seam gas. It's a good thing for the gas companies, it's a good thing for the economy, it's a good thing for consumers and it's a good thing for our farmers. So there are good things we can do together. But we need some strategic guidance from government. We need a plan from government. We need some leadership from government. We don't want a government that just constantly cites the plan of the National Farmers Federation.

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