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

You can snipe all you like, but the fact is that if you want to make a tangible difference to agriculture, if you want to help get the agriculture sector to $100 billion by 2030, you're going to have to change some of your policies. You can't just keep saying, 'The roof is going to fall in,' while you're pulling down all the bearers that are holding up the roof. This is what you're doing currently; you stand there and you snipe at every possible policy that might actually assist agriculture. You snipe at them. Then, all of a sudden, you say, 'Why aren't you doing such and such?'

One of the things that the member for Franklin spoke about early on was the lack of labourers and overseas workers to come in and help pick the fruit. In every committee that we sit on, whether it be the Migration Committee or the Regional Australia Committee, it was the Labor Party time after time after time that would be arguing against bringing overseas workers into Australia. It was the Victorian Labor Party that put a final kibosh on the whole program that David Littleproud had set forward. So what we have here again is opportunistic squawking that they want to help, and that we should do this and we should do that, but every chance we get to put forward policy that's going to help the people in regional Australia and help the people on the farms and in the agriculture sector, the Labor Party stands there and ensures that these assistance packages simply do not find their way onto the farms. So we need to be careful about opening up this chamber to talk about subjects like this when you are so far out of your depth and when so many of your policies run exactly contrary to the notion that you put forward today. (Time expired)

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