Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

These also give so much opportunity. I remember talking to another senior Aboriginal person up in the Cape, and he said: 'We, for the first time, have got on our feet. We're actually making a serious dollar. We're actually making money. And then, for once in our lives when we're getting ahead, you shut us down.' It was wrong. I'd like to also now commend the Labor Party for seeing around that corner. That's important. But the next step is the live sheep trade. We can't close the live sheep trade down. It's the same thing. It's just—

An opposition member: It's not the same.

It is exactly the same thing. You can't just arbitrarily go and decide to shut down sections of regional Australia because you have some sort of philosophical problem with them. The issues with the live sheep trade are just another permeation and combination of what you wish to do to with the live cattle trade, and then you'll go on to the transport industry and others, and we just can't do that.

Our greatest advantage in Australia is in agriculture. That is where we can really get ahead. It's not just farmers on farms; it's all the people associated with it. In the myriad of industries, from computer programmers to biomathematicians, to vets, to mechanics, to everything that goes with it—the construction and development of abattoirs, all this—you need an industry that is making money across every section of it. There's always going to be a place for processed beef, processed lamb and processed mutton, and there's always going to be a place for the live cattle and sheep trades. They work hand in glove, and if you try to force an industry to go in a certain direction that it can't go then it's clumsy and it doesn't work.

AACo—God bless their cotton socks—spent a huge amount of money building an abattoir in the north, and it fell over. It just didn't work. That's been the case so many times, but people have always thought the great opportunity for an abattoir in the north is going to work. It doesn't work. You can't get consistency of supply and you can't get the finished product in the form that's required to make it stack up financially. They just put them into mothballs. So you need the live cattle and sheep trades.

I remember once with the live sheep trade you got three bucks for wethers, maybe—the ones that are called broken mouth or cast for age. You bring them in for three bucks or two bucks. They basically give them away. The price of their skins is what they're worth. Now, they're $100, $120, $80. There's real money. What that's doing is bringing people back onto the farm, bringing farm workers back, giving you the capacity to pay a wage to someone that you mightn't have had the capacity to pay for before, and that's actually allowing people on the land to go and do the things that other people do—to make some money so they can renovate their kitchen and buy a new car, not a second-hand car, and go on holidays. You say it's glib. It's not. It's the reality. That's the sort of quality of life that people want, and now they're getting it. So this export control amendment is vitally important in making sure that we continue on. It's great to see the new shadow minister for agriculture here: congratulations, it's an incredibly important portfolio. I hope that if this is possibly an election year that we see the structure of an agricultural policy that you can actually go out into the country and give us curry about, so people go: 'Oh, I don't know. Labor Party policy—probably. It's a good policy. It's worthwhile considering it.' I actually want that. I actually want the shadow minister for agriculture to be asking us umpteen questions about agriculture and to be absolutely strident and absolutely acerbic across the details, because that makes agriculture in our nation better. It makes it better.

An opposition member interjecting—

Yes, but we don't want just a free ride in the park. We want to make sure we have a real debate. And I want to see the Labor members from regional areas asking the hard questions on agriculture, because that is good for our nation. So often, for us, agriculture is just seen as a free kick. It's like you're never going to get a question on it. They don't really care about it. And, when you do hear from them, it'll be more driven from the philosophical views of an inner-urban electorate than from the views of regional Australia. Maybe the new shadow minister will turn that around, and I hope that she does. I wish her many, many questions in question time.

If we go back to what we're actually doing, we're investing about $330 million in agricultural export systems to modernise Australia's trading environment and lead a strong economic recovery. About $222 million of these is to transform our export systems, including contributing to a single digital one-stop shop fast tracking goods for international markets. When working in international markets, there's got to be that capacity to work quickly and be able to deliver to your destination without an excessive bureaucracy. That's both on our side and their side.

What we have to do in Australia is also make sure that we build up our trading relationships with our old customers but our good customers in the Middle East. If you're in agriculture, you're going to learn a lot about the Middle East. If you're in agriculture, you're going to learn about Saudi Arabia and you're going to learn about Kuwait and Bahrain and Jordan, because that's where a lot of our product goes, and you're going to see how important they feel we are in their lives. It's going to be important when dealing with that.

We need to make sure these markets are strong—China's an incredibly important market for us, vitally important—but we've got to have a contingency plan in case things don't go as well as we wish. That contingency plan, of course, goes back to other solid markets, such as Indonesia. As we know, we supply Indonesia with so much of the protein content for the sustenance of people, especially those in Jakarta. They have bakso balls—the meatball in their standard dish—and we supply the meat. Of course, when the live cattle trade shut down, the meat went, and they were not happy. We created a really bad name for ourselves when we did that. We've got to make sure we don't do that again. There were some suggestions that they, a Muslim country, replaced some of the meat with pork—not consciously by a producer of pork, but people were ripping them off by creating substitutes that were going into that marketplace. We have got to be the great, strong, diligent and reliable supplier of protein into these markets. A piece of legislation like this is not going to get the ratings tonight; they're not going to be playing it. But it's vitally important to the job we need to do.

Australia, by reason of COVID and the financial liabilities we now have before us, is going to need to make every post a winner to try and make this economy hum in such a way that we can start getting on top of the debt. It won't matter who's in power, whether it's us or the Labor Party; we're going to have to target balancing the books because that means repaying the debt. Therefore, every opportunity you get to make a buck, you've got to take it, and you've got to grab it with both hands and run as hard as you can. Agriculture is one of the areas where you're going to do it. What we've got to remove from agriculture are some of these nonsensical, inept value statements that there are moral crops and immoral crops. Somehow, cotton is an immoral crop. Ridiculous! It's a crop that makes money. If they made money out of asparagus, they'd grow asparagus. Somehow, there's something is wrong with rice. It's ridiculous. We're going to somehow moralise ourselves out of the live sheep and cattle market. It's ridiculous. You can't do that. You've got to make a dollar wherever you can find it and run as hard as you can to do it. One of the interesting things we might be able to create in our nation, and this should be a goal for all of us—

An honourable member interjecting—

I'm trying to help you out with some ideas! We should have a massive, internationally based agricultural company. We don't have one. We've got BHP, which is one of the big miners. We've even got Atlassian, which is not bad, obviously, in the software area. The United States has Apple and Google. Apple's size is about $2 trillion, but, in historical terms, it's not even nearly as big as the Dutch East India Company, which, in today's terms, was about $8 trillion and had its own army. But, in Australia, and this is odd, we don't have a massive agricultural player, like JBS from Brazil or Conagra from the United States. We should have one. We should be working out how—

An honourable member interjecting—

This is for you, shadow minister, to take up. This is where you challenge us in question time. Where you come forward and say, 'How are you going to do it?' You create the debate and make us sweat.

It would be a shame, if this is an election year, for us not to have a strong debate on agriculture. We want it as much as you, especially me and the member for Boothby because we come from agricultural families and we want to make sure that this is right at the front. I can see the member for Wright there—you've still got yourself a little block, haven't you? Yes, there you go. This is important. So this Export Control Amendment (Miscellaneous Measures) Bill 2020 gives us capacity to also talk about agriculture in general—to talk about how important the live cattle and sheep trade is and how important it is to make sure we streamline our export opportunities, and to show that the government is fair dinkum about this with substantial investment in this space, and to challenge the Labor Party, with the best intentions at heart, that we should have, in this chamber, serious debate about our agriculture and what the next step is, to lay down some ideas as to our policy objectives and to see that one of the ways you could judge that is in such things as making sure that Australia is the seedbed of a major international agricultural company, like other nations have—even New Zealand, God bless their cotton socks! They've got Fonterra, a major player, and I know the good members from Tasmania would understand all about that and how that works, because they're a big player, obviously, in Australian agriculture, especially in the dairy game.

An honourable member interjecting—

But Gunns wasn't quite big enough, mate. It wasn't a big player—not like the multiple-hundred-billion-dollar space where they've got to be. Maybe in the future, as we go forward in this year of the parliament, we can see that debate and, if we have that debate, in that section you're going to get an awful lot of interest from regional people, and they're going to tune into question time in a way that will probably be a lot more engaged than in the past.

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