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

I shouldn't be calling him Dr Leigh; I should be calling him by his seat, but I wasn't sure that it was Fenner. According to the ABS, about 59 per cent of entities have a turnover of $200,000 or less. That's not a profit, that's a turnover of $200,000 or less. The member for New England might say there might be some clever accounting in that. I would never say that. I think the point is well made. It's a sector, more than any other, that's been impacted by a changing climate. People think we are a land of abundant water and soil resources. Well, the opposite is true: we are the driest inhabited continent in the world. We have some very good soils, but they are largely limited to certain pockets in the country. Most of the continent is not blessed with good, healthy, productive soils. On that count, we've got a massive misallocation of resources where too many of our national resources are going to places where they produce a low-value product, rather than a high-value product that would give a better return for the growers, for the producers and, indeed, for the economy and the nation. The sector has a huge workforce issue, as I pointed out, now made worse by COVID-19. It's a workforce challenge that's been with the sector for a long, long time. And the sector has been a bit of an underperformer in the commercialisation of innovation.

So it's a sector ripe for reform, but a sector that's had no meaningful reform in the last seven years. There were big promises about an agriculture white paper in the lead-up to the 2013 election. We waited until 2015 to finally receive the agriculture white paper. You don't have to listen to me. Talk to anyone in the industry: it was a dud. It was hailed as a $4 billion agriculture white paper, by the way. I won't waste too much time tonight explaining how the government managed to get it to that number, but they certainly are not fooling our growers and producers. No-one believed there was $4 billion of investment in that white paper back in 2015. I'm just thinking about the member for Nicholls, and I'm about to tell him that I won't give him an opportunity to speak tonight, because if I sit down I won't have an opportunity to revisit my speech, sorry. So you'll have to wait till tomorrow. The agriculture white paper was very disappointing. It's just on the shelves now gathering dust. I challenge the member for Nicholls or anyone else in this place to name one initiative in the agriculture white paper that is operating today for the benefit of our farmers, or to demonstrate where $4 billion was spent. That just didn't happen. It showed some promise in a couple of areas. We're all interested in the concept of multiperil crop insurance, for example, to give growers greater protection from natural challenges, but it was a failure as well. In fact, the government spent more money marketing the multiperil crop insurance initiative than it spent assisting farmers in trying to get better value or to lower the cost of taking out that insurance.

So that was the agricultural white paper. There was a big build-up to it, both before the 2013 election and then as we waited for it to be delivered in 2015, but of course there was nothing. And we're still waiting for the government to tackle some of these reform issues I've spoken about and listed this evening. They love to spin, they love to talk and they love to put the headline numbers on it, but there is never any follow-through.

There could be no better example of that than drought. Madam Deputy Speaker Wicks, do you remember the government's response to the drought? It started right back in 2014, when they finally got onto legislating the farm household allowance. That was a process which had begun under the former Labor government but was not completed before the 2013 election. As members in this place know, the farm household allowance was a disaster. The paperwork was a nightmare, people couldn't qualify and it got so bad that the then minister, the member for New England, misled the House by embellishing the capacity of farmers to access the scheme. This event, sadly, led eventually to the dismissal of a highly respected public servant in the then secretary of the Department of Agriculture. This was simply because that secretary stood up for his Public Service workforce, who he felt were being dragged into the mud by the member for New England's attempts to bully his way through and his refusal to recognise his misleading of parliament and, of course, to cover up his doctoring of the Hansard. That was an extraordinary set of events, the likes of which I've never seen in this place.

But then, as the drought grew worse, the government turned, as it always does, to concessional loans. This is how the government claims to be spending $8 billion on drought. It does so by taking account of the capital cost of all loans, lent or not lent, rather than the actual cost of delivering the loans which, of course, is at best the difference between the government's current borrowing rate and the interest rate attached to the loans. It seems that every time this government has a problem it turns to this concessional loans idea, because it allows the government to talk about big numbers while at the same time spending very little money.

We had a drought coordinator, we had a drought envoy, we had a National Drought Summit and we had the Future Drought Fund, which was supposed to be a creature of the Drought Summit but was announced on the morning of the Drought Summit. The government claimed that $5 billion would be spent for our farmers, helping them in drought. But we knew the reality was that there was no $5 billion. What the government was doing was transferring $3.9 billion out of a former Labor government initiative called the Building Australia Fund, designed to fund regional infrastructure projects—important road, bridge and rail projects in our regions—to this new drought fund. So how did they get $5 billion? Well, they say that because they're going to spend very little out of it that it's going to grow to $5 billion in 2026, or something like that—I forget the year now. So they're only going to draw $100 million every year. Let's think about that. I think the National Drought Summit was in October 2019. How much money do you think has been drawn now, Mr Speaker, up until this date, and spent on drought measures? The answer is zero. They got the headlines—a $5 billion drought fund—but not one cent has been spent to assist farmers in drought. I will point out again: the drought remains very, very real for many of our producers and growers.

But the other point is this: not one cent of the drought fund will ever be spent on our farmers, because that's not the idea of the drought fund. The drought fund is designed to be invested in programs that help build resilience in our agriculture sector—not to go to farmers but to go to research bodies and others that might roll out these programs to farming communities, whether it be for soil health, water efficiency, training, innovation or breeding that makes crops more drought-resistant. The list can be very, very long. I seek leave to continue my remarks.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.

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