Damian Drum (Nicholls, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's always tremendous to follow on from the member for Barker who understands what it's like to be part of a family that arrived from Europe. With his father and family farms, it's a great story that is replicated tens of thousands of times around Australia.

Talking about the Farm Household Support Amendment (Debt Waiver) Bill, the farm household allowance has been a hallmark addition from this government that's been able to be on hand, ready to assist, in those times when our farming community simply has had no control over the outcome of the weather, whether it be drought, floods or storms, or a downturn in the milk price, which happened in 2016 when there was a serious misappropriation of the milk price. The dairy industry entered into one of these very rare situations where they had been, in fact, over quoting the price that they were paying the farmers over a period of some six to nine months and then, all of a sudden, these dairy companies effectively made the decision that they wanted their money back. This put hundreds and hundreds of farmers, right throughout Victoria and Australia, into a situation where they had all of a sudden accrued debts of many hundreds of thousands of dollars. This was something where our dairy farmers, producing all of these amazing dairy products, simply had nowhere to go; they were simply in a situation where they needed assistance. So, at that stage, the government was able to roll out the farm household allowance. It was a little bit over $20,000-odd for a couple, but it was effectively based around the concept that at least it could put food on the table and pay a few of those critical bills that needed to be paid.

We are incredibly proud of our agricultural sector here in Australia. As we've entered the pandemic we've had many things to worry about, but we haven't had to worry about food always finding its way onto the shelves of our supermarkets. Somehow, mysteriously, it's just magically happened. Even in the absolute depths of the pandemic when we had all the lockdowns, we still had an agricultural sector and a processing sector that were continually able to put food on the shelves of our supermarkets for Australian families. That's something that we should never ever take for granted. So we have to look at this industry, our agricultural sector, and our manufacturing and processing sector. We have to value it and guard it with a genuine intent. That's what this bill does.

This bill is all about making sure that we can put a value on agriculture that understands the sector, understands that every now and again it is going to need a little bit of a help, a little bit of a hand up. We were able to put around 16,000 people on the farm household allowance. The vast majority of those 16,000 farmers are still operating their farms today in better times, when we've had some fantastic rainfall over the last couple of years and where we've had higher commodity prices, where we've had a big demand for our grain, and great sheepmeat and beef prices. So it's been a bit of a help all the way through. But, now that we've arrived at the time our farmers are being even more productive and actually paying down further debt, there is a small cohort that is being left with debts associated with farm household allowance. What this bill does is effectively waive those debts. If those debts were accrued by mistakes in relation to overestimating off-farm and other farm incomes, all of a sudden farmers have been receiving some farm household allowance that they may not have been entitled to, therefore amassing a debt. What we are doing here is finding the neatest, easiest way to effectively waive that debt to enable the farmers to get on with what they are doing so well here in Australia.

I think, when you look at and compare Australia's opportunity to grow so much produce—to produce so much milk and dairy produce and also to grow so much fibre and to create some of the world's highest-quality wool—all of these attributes that we have in the agricultural sector are things that make Australia very, very strong and robust. Even though we've had all of these incredible setbacks recently, with drought, fires, floods and COVID, we still have this agricultural sector that is continuing to grow, and the outlook for our agricultural sector is still very, very positive. We have a $66 billion economy at the moment. A large chunk of that is based around our capacity to trade. The fact is that we've only just landed a new trading arrangement with Britain and the UK. That's going to be of amazing benefit and we'll continue to see this strong growth in the agricultural sector.

Australia, many, many years ago, effectively did what was called a bit of a handshake agreement, which let New Zealand find its way into England to help supply our mother country, as it was back then, with a whole raft of dairy products. That arrangement has seen New Zealand be the beneficiary of those 70-odd million people who live in Britain. But now Australia has the opportunity to join in this market, and it also puts further pressure on the EU to secure that free trade agreement that we've been negotiating with them for many, many years. If in six months or 12 months we are able to finalise that trading arrangement with the EU, we are going to see so many of these farmers who have received the farm household allowance take their farming business to another level as well, with increased markets right around the world. I think the concept of forgiving these debts and enabling the recipients of farm household allowance to pay off these debts with future farm household payments is a commonsense move. It's going to enable these people to fix all this up without any major shocks to their businesses.

I think that we need to look at this in its entirety and just be very, very proud of the fact that whenever there have been floods, fires, droughts, COVID or whatever and whenever a downturn in a commodity price has hit our markets and our farming industries it has always been this government that has been there to support them. This is a commonsense piece of legislation. We've now made a slight change to a change that we made a few years ago, where we put a limit on how much assistance you could have. We've taken that out to any four years in any 10. That has also given our farming sector a little bit more flexibility, when you consider that some of these shocks come and go in a very short and sharp manner. That's also why we've made that change.

This bill is going to help many of those people within the farming sector, as have some of the other changes that we've made along the way. We've actually increased the value that you are able to have tied up within your farming asset. That has gone out to $5 million, because, as we now know, many of these farms that are struggling to be economically viable in a given year are still incredibly valuable pieces of land, and we don't want to penalise people simply because they're sitting on an expensive asset. We don't want to effectively take away the support they need to operate and live their lives on a daily basis. As I say, this is not a lot of money but it is an incredibly important little bit of assistance that we can give our agricultural sector when they have issues that they have no control over. This is something that we need to be very, very clear about.

I'm glad that the opposition are not going to oppose this bill. I'm glad that the farm household allowance has general support right around Australia. I'm glad that it is seen as a hand-up every now and again when our farmers have issues happen to them that they have no control over. I'm glad it is not seen as some lurk. I'm glad that it is quite a pure operation. I wish the bill a speedy passage through the House and I certainly hope that our farming communities continue to go from strength to strength.

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