Fiona Phillips (Gilmore, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

[by video link] I want to thank the member for Franklin for bringing forward this matter of public importance today: the government's failure to adequately support the urgent needs of the agricultural sector. Take a look along the New South Wales south coast in the electorate of Gilmore. It's easy to see our farmers and farm workers there working day in, day out; night in, night out through bushfires, floods and even the howling and dangerous winds last night. Farmers work in difficult conditions outside, working to put food on the table, ensuring that our communities that we all live in have the fresh produce we need to live and survive: milk, eggs, fruit, vegetables, meat, seafood, cheese, wine and more.

The truth is farmers feed cities. This has been drummed into me all my life. I have lived, breathed and felt that every day, growing up on a dairy farm myself and seeing firsthand what farmers and farm workers do at any time of the day or night in whatever conditions. It does not matter if it is Christmas Day or Easter or a Sunday or a Tuesday. The sacrifices our farmers and farm workers make to ensure there is an adequate supply of produce for people locally and across Australia should be respected. In fact, our farmers, I am sure, could teach the government opposite a thing or two about ensuring adequate supply. If the government had done its job and ensured an adequate supply of vaccines in the first place, then our local businesses, workers and communities would not be in the Morrison-Joyce lockdown mess that we are now in. As for workforce shortage and ag visas, where's the federal government 's national quarantine system? They had two jobs: the vaccine rollout and quarantine. They failed both. It's all very well having ag visas, but if you've got no national quarantine system in place it's not going to work. It's another epic failure of the Morrison-Joyce government.

The National Agricultural Workforce Strategy recommendations were handed down in October 2020, and the government still has yet to respond. That says it all, really. I'll tell you what my local farmers and communities have been through during that time: drought, raging bushfires, floods and more floods after that and now the pandemic. The government can't even get its act together and actually do something to help address workforce shortages.

Many people in my family went to TAFE. My husband went to TAFE; my mum went to TAFE; my son went to TAFE; and I taught at TAFE. When I talk with people in my community, people overwhelmingly get the importance of TAFE. It is an institution. It is trusted. It has trained generations of tradies who went on to create their own businesses. Many of these workers and businesses support our farmers locally and across Australia. Recently, I met with local TAFE teachers. Again, it is incomprehensible what the Morrison government is doing to TAFE. The $3 billion cut from public TAFE and vocational training is slowly killing my local TAFE campuses with cuts to courses, fewer subjects on offer, cuts to course hours, no free apprenticeships and jobs axed. What is so wrong with and why does the government just not get the importance of guaranteeing the public funding of TAFE? It's fair to say I am seething mad about this. Where are our agriculture courses? Where are our dairying courses locally? It's beyond time for the government to guarantee the public funding of TAFE and put TAFE back to where it deserves to be—that is, leading the COVID jobs and training recovery that our community so desperately needs and also helping our farmers and every business locally that depends on our farmers.

The Morrison-Joyce government is so caught up in its own spin that it can't even come up with a plan to help our farmers. They've ignored the workforce shortage for far too long. They don't have a plan. Farmers feed cities. It's about time those opposite get with the program.

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