Gavin Pearce (Braddon, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Health, Aged Care and Indigenous Health Services) Share this | Hansard source

I withdraw. The point I make—and it's a passionate one—is that the farming communities we have right across this nation live in a very different place to those that live and operate in this place. This is a sterile place. This is a place where decisions are made on numbers. However, the risks that are encountered by the farming community are immense.

All across the electorate of Braddon this morning, before four o'clock, farmers got up and milked their cows. One employee would go out on an ATV or a UTV and get the herd of 300 or 400 cows into the dairy, and a crew would come in to milk the cows. There would be a team to wash the teats of those animals, there would be another team to put the teat cups on, there would be another team to take the teat cups off, there would be another person there to apply Redene disinfectant to the animal. Then another person would take that herd back out to the paddock and another employee would get on a tractor with a fertiliser applicator to fertilise the pasture. After that, someone would come along and grab the spray rig and they'd go out to apply spray to that piece of pasture. But the point I make is that each part of that labour chain requires a person, and the total number of these casual employees doing very specific work adds up to an aggregate, which is exactly, I think, where the member for Kennedy is going with his point about the peculiarities of farming.

The corporatisation of farming means that we need a more specialised labour force. It means that we need to have casual labour coming in from time to time, depending on the weather, depending on the season. Again, that's peculiar to farming. We're coming in to harvest time in the state of Tasmania.

See this speech in context