David Littleproud (Maranoa, National Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture) Share this | Hansard source

On 21 May the Prime Minister made a statement that no-one would be left behind. It took less than six months to see that the cruel decisions of this government have left 30 per cent of Australians that live outside a capital city behind. In fact, it actually started before the election when they made a commitment to end the live export of sheep. Unfortunately, what this means for the people of Western Australia, the 3,000 men and women who work in the live sheep export industry, is that they have no future. They have no future when this new government says that it predicated this decision on science. The new agriculture minister says that we are shutting this industry down because the science tells us so. Explain the science and actually table the science because the science says that Australia does it better than anyone else.

We have moved from a mortality methodology to an animal welfare methodology. We're the best in the world in an industry that's continuing to increase, so why take away the livelihoods of 3,000 Western Australians at the stroke of a pen? For what? To export our animal welfare standards to another country that doesn't do it as well as us? That's not common sense. But then they go further. They went further with taking away the opportunity for Australian farmers to produce. The NFF at the jobs summit identified 172,000 workers are required to get food from a paddock to your plate. The best that those opposite are prepared to provide is through the PALM scheme, and that equates to 42,000 workers. You don't need a maths degree to understand the sheer shortage that is out there across regional and rural Australia.

There's no solution, just another working group with the AWU, just another talkfest without the action on an ag visa, which we signed with Vietnam. In fact, we had the opportunity to sign other countries up to give them the pathway to permanent residency, to move in what was the biggest structural adjustment in the agricultural workforce in our nation's history, one that we provided under the ag visa. We as a nation were prepared to also provide the greatest gift this country can provide to anyone around the world, a pathway to permanent residency. This pathway would bring the next generation of migrants to regional and rural Australia, to grow regional Australia and grow agriculture. But this was ripped away with the stroke of one pen, which now means that farmers and even processors right across this country are working at around 60 per cent capacity. You don't invest to plant a crop if you can't pick it.

I met a farmer in Carnarvon in Western Australia. He walked away from his property because it was all too hard. He didn't have the trust and faith to put his capital out to plant a crop. He handed over his property to someone that could afford to do it, but only at 60 per cent. It was a property he was born on, a property that he had a connection to, and it was lost. It was lost in that moment because we didn't provide our farmers with the tools. That's not common sense. Every time you go to the supermarket, it's not just the natural disasters that have caused the cost-of-living pressures at the grocery store; it's man-made. It's Labor made, because of their cruel decision to rip away the ag visa and the opportunity for our farmers to have the tools to produce the food and fibre they want.

But it gets worse. We've got a new water minister, and she has decided to reopen their plan, the plan that they put through this parliament. We're 80 per cent of the way through the first stage of the plan, the 2,750 gigs. The last 20 per cent of that plan can be achieved through infrastructure, so that farmers and communities don't have go through buybacks, because buybacks don't necessarily hurt farmers; they hurt the small communities that support them: the machinery dealer, the pump shop, the agronomist—

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