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

I rise to speak to the Primary Industries (Customs) Charges Amendment (Dairy Cattle Export Charge) Bill 2020, and I move the 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:

(1)notes the Government's commitment to a $100 billion agriculture industry; and

(2)condemns the Government for its failure to develop a comprehensive plan to achieve the National Farmers' Federation's vision for agriculture to be a $100 billion industry by 2030".

This is a fairly straightforward bill and the opposition will be supporting it. It imposes a compulsory $6 per head levy on the export of live dairy cattle. It is a levy which currently exists, although it has been suspended. The industry has asked that it be made mandatory. That's basically the issue under debate this evening.

We are told the money will be used to extend marketing and research and development in this area of industry, including, very importantly, the dairy cattle export program, which helps farmers in underdeveloped countries, in particular, build the infrastructure, the skills and the animal welfare architecture they need to make their enterprises a viable proposition. Most Australians, I suspect, would be surprised to learn that we send dairy cattle to these countries. They're quite familiar with the concept of live sheep, as controversial as that is, and live cattle exports for beef purposes and, therefore, in both cases, meat processing. But I think most would be surprised to know that we export live dairy cattle as well. There are two reasons we do so. The first is that it's an additional form of income for dairy farmers, who typically sell older heifers, and it's very helpful to them in difficult times such as drought. Something like 90,000 head went in the last calendar year, if I remember correctly, valued at about $200 million. So you can see that, for a dairy farmer, it's an opportunity to sell cattle, particularly in times of hardship. It's also no doubt a form of development assistance for countries still going through their development phase, enabling them to build their own herds and, therefore, self-sufficiency in dairy products. I think the industry would say it likes to consider it a win-win in that sense.

Having said that, I note that it's a curious bill in many ways. Where the initiative comes from to make the levy mandatory is a little bit unclear to me. We did hold a Senate inquiry and no real objections were raised on that basis. The opposition is willing to support the bill. Industry seems to favour the mandatory levy, although there was criticism from some dairy groups that insufficient consultation had been undertaken before the government brought this proposition to the House.

The other point to be made is that we know that back in 2011 the amount of money raised with the voluntary levy, as a proportion of the amount of money that would be raised by a compulsory levy now, was around 92 per cent. In other words, many dairy farmers were participating in the scheme and making it a voluntary contribution. By 2018 that had dropped to 14 per cent, and by 2019 to three per cent. You can see that those who are very keen to have the levy in place for marketing purposes et cetera want the levy to become mandatory, because dairy farmers have ceased to take up the voluntary opportunity. There could be two reasons for that: either they don't see the value in the contribution or, as numbers declined, they felt that very few were paying an amount of money that wasn't going to achieve anything anyway, because it's too small an amount of money to fund significant programs—a point that's been made by LiveCorp in respect of this bill. Having said that, I say that it's hardly a vote of confidence in the levy that so few dairy farmers were voluntarily making a contribution. It doesn't leave one with the impression that dairy farmers thought the contribution was a worthy one. But I will let the industry speak for itself in that sense. Certainly, as I said, farmers have been expressing concern that they haven't been properly consulted on the matter. Those things have been canvassed in the Senate report.

There are a number of other reasons that the bill is somewhat curious to me. The first is that it's a little bit of cart before the horse, from my perspective. The Labor Party made clear in the lead-up to the last election that, while we were very proud of the research and development architecture used in the agriculture sector, having established it around 30 years ago under then Minister John Kerin, it was a very old architecture that hadn't kept pace with rapidly changing times and one that, we believed, was very much in need of review. There was and is a need to look at that architecture and reconstruct it to ensure that farmers are getting maximum value from their levy contributions and that the industry is getting sufficient return on investment through R&D and extension programs.

Yet here we are introducing a new levy without looking at the architecture. The government spent $2.7 million with EY, not long before the election, asking it to look at the architecture of this R&D system. EY delivered a report and the government promised it would implement the recommendations of the report. It did so both pre-election and on many occasions post-election, particularly through former minister Senator McKenzie, it expressed a determination to pursue reform in this area, and yet nothing was done. So it is the cart before the horse: new levies without thinking about the system itself.

The second reason is that this is an animal welfare opportunity. We know that there is growing concern about animal welfare in the live export industry. Labor, when last in office, demonstrated that those concerns can be addressed through ESCAS, the auditing trail we put in place to ensure that cattle are treated well all the way from the port here to slaughter in places like Indonesia. That system has never picked up dairy cattle. I accept there are some good arguments for not picking up dairy cattle, because they don't go to slaughter in the importing country. So the question then is at what point you stop auditing them, because they may be with the farmer in a developing country for many years after they are imported. How do you extend the auditing trail without making it ad infinitum? It is a challenge, but I think we should be having a conversation about it. It's worthy of debate. Maybe there can be a point that determines when the supply chain auditing system comes to an end. I think the government lost an opportunity here to have that debate within the context of this bill, because I don't know how that debate comes forward otherwise, other than, God forbid, another incident in the live cattle trade, which none of us want. So it's a missed opportunity.

The third reason is that the proposition put forward in the bill fails to tell us how this new initiative fits into the government's overall strategy for the agriculture sector. How does it fit in with the government's plan? How big an issue is it within the government's plan? How important is it within the government's guidance? People need to understand that the government is not capable of telling us where it fits into its plan because it doesn't have a plan for the Australian agriculture sector. It says it matches or supports the National Farmers Federation's ambition to grow the farmgate value of the sector to $100 billion by 2030, as do we, but it doesn't have a plan to demonstrate how it's going to help the agriculture sector to arrive there. I've been saying for more than six years now that there is a lack of such a plan. We had a national food plan, just before we lost government. The member for New England has been pretty unkind about that national food plan, but I disagree with him; I think it was a quality plan. But it was a precursor, a building block, to something much larger. But since this government won office, in 2013, there has been no development of any plan. The member for New England might say that his 2015 white paper represented such a plan. I would beg to differ. I think that was a disappointing document. But, even if he were able to successfully argue that that was a plan, it does not change the fact that the government hasn't embraced his plan. The 2015 white paper has basically been shelved by the member for New England's own government, since then gathering dust, and nothing has been put in place to replace it.

Those listening to the debate don't have to take my word on that point. They only need to look at the words of the Prime Minister. Just over a year ago now, the Prime Minister attended the bush summit held in Dubbo, sponsored by The Daily Telegraph newspaper—a summit that, by coincidence, is being held again this coming weekend. I'll certainly be there making a contribution, as will the Prime Minister, I understand; the Leader of the Opposition; certainly, the energy minister; and maybe others. And I think it will be a worthy event. To my joy, and I'm sure to the joy of many in the agriculture sector, including those at the National Farmers Federation, the Prime Minister finally came good at the Dubbo Bush Summit. He talked about the National Farmers Federation's ambition to grow the industry to a $100 billion industry by 2030. On that day he charged Senator McKenzie, the then agriculture minister, with the job of developing the plan. With so many others, I said, 'Hallelujah!' After six or seven years the government had finally come to the conclusion that we needed an overarching plan for the agriculture sector, a plan which, among other things, offered guidance for investors and farmers about where the government believed the industry was heading and what it believed was the best course for achieving those ambitions—whether it be natural resource allocation, the challenge of drought or building resilience. It focused just as much on value in our product as on volume in commodity markets. I could talk about those things all night, but we needed a plan and I was delighted that the Prime Minister, after all that time, said we would have a plan.

Alas, here we are, more than 12 months on from the Bush Summit in Dubbo, and we've heard no more about the plan. Not only do we still not have a plan; we haven't even had any mention of a plan. It is extraordinary for the Prime Minister to stand at a public event like that—in front of so many farmers, in front of the media and in front of the Leader of the Opposition—and declare that he was now charging his agriculture minister with developing a plan and then to go 12 months without even mentioning the plan. I can hear others saying that we then had COVID come along. But COVID came along in substantial terms in about March this year, and the Prime Minister made this commitment in, I think, July last year. So it's a long time, and they've had a lot of opportunity to do something.

In the past, the government might have been able to argue that there was no need for an overarching strategic plan. I would say that that was a silly thing to argue, but I can see why a government, particularly this one, might try to argue that case. But the Prime Minister himself said in Dubbo that we needed such a plan and that we were going to have such a plan—and there still is no plan. So everything that comes before us in an almost ad hoc basis, like this bill tonight, is in a sense out of turn, because we really should be debating these things in the context of what we believe to be the pathway to our aspirations in agriculture and the path to tackling the many, many challenges we have in the agriculture sector.

I can't let this opportunity pass without talking about the government's Future Drought Fund. This was announced with great fanfare by the Prime Minister at yet another drought event. This time it was not the Bush Summit but the Drought Summit, which we had at Old Parliament House in latish 2018. Having announced the Drought Summit, again with great fanfare, the Prime Minister made an announcement about how he was going to fix the drought, prior to a word being spoken at Old Parliament House that day. He announced that he was going to have a $5 billion drought fund. This government loves the big-dollar headline but doesn't like the follow-through. It overreaches and then doesn't deliver. It talks about headline numbers but then spends little. Of course, there never was going to be a $5 billion drought fund—at least, not anytime soon. What the government did was rob $3.7 or $3.9 billion—I'm not sure which—out of the existing Building Australia Fund, a fund largely designed to finance road, rail and bridge infrastructure in the regions, and move it across to the drought fund. How did it get to $5 billion? It said that if it only takes $100 million out of it each year it will grow to $5 billion by, I think, 2027. There was never $5 billion and there still is no $5 billion, but there is $100 million to be drawn out every year. If the government said, 'We're going to spend $100 million every year on building this new drought resilience program,' then the Prime Minister wouldn't have received much of a headline, but $5 billion gave him a great headline.

Now we ask ourselves: where will the first $100 million be spent? I don't have time to go into it tonight but, suffice to say, as I predicted, industry is not very impressed with the government's intentions. We need a serious approach to future drought and resilience building, giving people the opportunity to diversify income. From what I've seen of where the government intends to spend that money, it's not going to deliver that coherent plan. That will be a great disappointment to many in the agriculture sector, including most of the leaders in the agriculture sector.

Talking about leaders, of course, just last week the National Farmers Federation committed itself to net zero emissions by 2050, making the list of organisations and companies, including those in the resources sector, a very, very long one indeed. If we are to be serious about the future of the agriculture sector, a more challenging climate and the difficulties that throws up for farmers, we again need to give investors guidance. I think all of us banding together, as have industry and farm leadership groups and every premier in the country, to agree on that target, that aspiration, would be a really good thing for investors in terms of investor certainty but it would be a very good thing for farmers as well. It could then act as guidance for some of those strategic plans I'm talking about in the agriculture sector.

Sadly, it doesn't look like that's going to happen. With so many companies and groups, including the BCA and others, signing up to zero net emissions, surely the government must be now starting to think: 'Well, we're trailing behind others here, and having that aspiration guiding our strategic plans makes common sense and would be a good thing for the agriculture sector.' The opposition, as I said, will be supporting the bill, and I look forward to the contribution of others.

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