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

I'm honoured today to support this amendment moved by Mr Littleproud in relation to the Agriculture (Biosecurity Protection) Levies Bill 2024. In doing so, unlike many of our bureaucrats and politicians who seem to sit around a shiny table in their nicely pressed shirts and suits and make decisions that affect the agricultural sector within this country, I'll come from a very real place. In fact, I'm a farmer from the north-west coast of Tasmania, and I grow beef cattle down there, as well as spuds, peas, beans, broccoli, carrots, onions and opium poppies.

So I know what it's like to borrow money. I know what it's like to employ people. I know what it's like to take risks. I know what it's like to work in a buoyant international and domestic commodity-price market. I know what it's like to work with the myriad of compliance issues that we're continually bombarded with as an industry and that inhibit our growth. I know what it's like to deal with bureaucrats that have absolutely no idea. I know what it's like to deal with politicians who don't understand the fact that people on the land are growing food that feeds our nation and our world. I understand the very real risk that exists completely across our agricultural sector. To that end, I want to talk from that perspective today in relation to this proposed bill.

It has obviously been outlined that the Albanese Labor government will now set the tax rate of the biosecurity protection levy as a proportion of the industry's average gross value of production over a three-year period instead of the former rate of 10 per cent on industry-led agricultural levies. Effectively, what that means to me and my cohort of farmers right across the country is that we're now being asked to fund a biosecurity levy to have our competitors from overseas import products that compete against us in our domestic market. It makes absolutely no sense. In what parallel universe does anyone expect a farmer to pay for their competitors to operate on the same playing field as them? It's daft at best.

Farmers have got enough to put up with, and I'm going to cite a few facts. These are not speculative, anecdotal numbers; these are facts. The first thing that they have to deal with is the cost of farming. In my state of Tasmania, the average cost of an acre of land—that's an acre, not a hectare—is between $15,000 and $25,000. That's just to start off with. So you're already operating in an inflationary type market where you are borrowing that money at an interest rate. We know that, over the last two years, interest rates have gone up, up and up, and—guess where the cost of doing business has gone?—the cost has gone up, up and up.

The cost has gone up for fertiliser, like nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and sulphur—NPKS—which are the building blocks for growing food. The price of fertiliser has increased by 153 per cent in the last two years. When it comes to 'N'—that's the first letter in the NPKS—the price of any nitrogenous fertiliser has increased in excess of 170 per cent. The reason for that is it's driven by the petrochemical gas industry. Urea, or nitrogen, is basically solid natural gas. Guess what Mr Bowen's done to the price of natural gas? It has gone—that's right—up, up and up. Consequently, that's been borne by the farmer who has to put that on to his land.

We can look at phosphates, which used to come out of Ukraine and Russia. They no longer do. We're now having to go to Morocco and other places, and the price has gone up by 300 per cent. We can look at potash, the price of which has, again, gone through the roof. The price of sulphur has gone through the roof. My colleague who spoke previously talked about the cost of water infrastructure and irrigation for our farmers. Without water, plants and animals don't grow. How can we restrict the amount of water that our agricultural sector is using, up the price of fertiliser and up the price of interest rates when it comes to borrowing money to buy the land? That's without even stocking and planting the land. I'll talk about that briefly.

We can talk about the scale at which we need to operate nowadays. No longer can you have 100 acres, 70-odd hectares, and expect to make a living out of that. Now it's big, big, big, in order to get enough scale so that we can make a reasonable living. When you start doing that, you need bigger machinery. We've got tractors down there that cost in excess of $300,000. At the moment, they're digging spuds on my place with a $300,000 tractor and a $600,000 spud harvester. The people on the back of that spud harvester—there are half a dozen of them—are seasonal workers. There's another problem. All of a sudden, the price of employing labour, particularly seasonal labour, has gone through the roof. Farmers have to bear that. Farmers have to cop that. Farmers are expected to absorb that. Well, they can't. They've absorbed enough, and enough is enough.

There is the cost of diesel, the cost of energy, the cost of pumping water onto paddocks, the cost of irrigation, the cost of operating machinery. I've got tractors on my place now using 500 litres a day, and in the state of Tasmania we're paying $2.17 per litre. That's just to run a tractor. Then that product has to go on a truck, and of course that runs on diesel. So far as I'm concerned, we're a long way off coming up with a beautiful EV solution when it comes to tractors and trucks. That is the simple fact, the reality. The point I'm making is that the cost of getting your product to market, to the factory, has increased exponentially as well.

There are more insurance costs, because the risk involved with farming has increased because of seasonal variability. Farmers are expected to pay that. Farmers are expected to insure their crops and to take that risk. Farming is about mitigating risk, and that costs money. At the end of the day, that costs dollars and cents, and that's something that people in Canberra here who are making these daft decisions simply don't understand—the amount of risk that that farmer has to take every day just to make that crop grow or make that pen of animals grow to trade weight. They don't understand.

Shipping costs in the great state of Tasmania, and international shipping costs, have increased, and the time lag involved in getting empty containers, empty trailers, back into the state so that we can reload them and fulfil that logistics chain has been stretched out. Time is money, and that's something that people in this place need to get. Every day that that farm isn't operational, every delay that we place on the agricultural sector—or any industry, for that matter—costs someone, somewhere, money. Time is money in business, and I wish, I pray, that more people in this bloody place would realise that. I withdraw that.

The risk with production of a crop, and the risk with just being in agriculture more generally, when it comes to international commodity markets is exponential when it comes to securing your price for your product. On top of all of that risk, all those costs, all those delays and all that compliance that I talk about, we are now expecting our farmers to pay a levy on spuds from Europe being imported into Tasmania to be sold on our domestic market. We are expecting our farmers to pay for it! It doesn't make sense.

What should a farmer do—jump in their ute? They'd say, 'Oh, no, we can't jump in that, because the price of that is just about to go through the roof.' They won't be able to afford utes before long. This is just another indictment of attitudes to our industry. People in Canberra, people in the bureaucratic system, have got to realise that outside this place there's actually a real world where people take risks, and it's their own money that's involved. People have got to realise that. I wish that more thought was put into the person on the ground in our agricultural sector who is doing nothing but the right thing. Spare a thought for them. As far as I'm concerned, not much thought for them has gone into this particular piece of legislation. For the life of me, I can't understand why it would even be drafted in the first place.

I am vehemently against this. I support our agricultural sector. I believe strongly in biosecurity measures; don't get wrong. One infestation of a foreign product, pest, disease or pathogen in our ag sector could bring it down. I get that. We need to protect that. But it's not the responsibility of our domestic Australian farmers, the people doing the right thing, to pay to protect against foreign pests coming into Australia; it should be the responsibility of the person importing that. When it comes to the international playing field, we're expected to pay a levy as we export into foreign countries. Why shouldn't it be the same way in the opposite direction, for those importing? There should be user-pay arrangements whereby the person, business or country that's bringing those products in is responsible. And, quite frankly, they expect to pay.

In conclusion, you can close your eyes, Deputy Speaker, and imagine how disgusted I am with these proposed changes and how emotional I am about protecting the viability of our most precious resource: our farming industry. The government need to remember that they are biting the hand that feeds them and that eventually it's going to bite them back—enough said.

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