Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Might I say to the member for Riverina, 'Hear, hear!' This is a terrible policy being put forward by the Labor government. Despite its rhetoric, it's pretty clear that the current government has a pretty low regard for people in agriculture. I'm going to take you through a bit of list that I've compiled, Mr Deputy Speaker Wilkie.

Let me start with the abolition of the live sheep trade. Then there are the vehicle emissions standards, which are being spoken about in this place even today, which will add thousands of dollars to vehicles that farmers rely on. There's the recommencement of the indiscriminate water buybacks in the Murray-Darling Basin. Only a couple of months ago, I led the coalition agricultural policy committee up through the Murray-Darling Basin, and we went into communities and talked to them about what these indiscriminate water buybacks will mean. There's the closing of the fully sustainable Gulf of Carpentaria gillnet fishing industry, supposedly to protect the Great Barrier Reef, which is thousands of kilometres away. There's the building of transmission lines and renewable energy parks through high-value farming lands.

There's the abolition of the ag visa program, the reduction in the instant tax write-off for capital purchases and the abolition of the Native Title Respondents Funding Scheme, which was established to ensure that landholders would have equal representation when claims were made against their property. This is a very important policy that was put in place and a very important funding instrument to actually protect farmers, to give them the same kind of standing when they go into court and some native title group says, 'We're going to take our land off you,' or says that it will take their access to it or stop them doing something on their land.

There's the commitment to expand Australia's parks and reserves from 20 per cent to 30 per cent. I think a lot of people let this one slip past them at the last election. That's a 50 per cent increase, going from 20 per cent to 30 per cent. It is enormous. I know where the land's not going to come from. It's not going to come out of the electorate of Clark, I can assure you, Mr Deputy Speaker Wilkie. It'll be coming out of the farmlands and rangelands of Australia—that extra lock-up of land.

Then there's the commitment to strengthen the native heritage acts around Australia. There was the commitment to strengthen the native heritage acts around Australia—remember the debacle in Western Australia? There was the allowing of big emitters to buy up agricultural land to set aside and use to offset emissions in order to comply with the government's safeguard mechanism. I've barely started. I could keep adding topics: increasing fuel taxes, the lack of spending on infrastructure, reams of regulation, moves to make the labour market less flexible and stamp duties on GST and insurance. It goes on and on.

And here we are today, debating yet another attack on the ag sector: imposing a biosecurity levy on farmers to inspect imports brought into Australia by our competitors. This is for foreign food imports and even for non-agricultural businesses, with goods as diverse as televisions, washing machines and electronic games—anything at all. I am just dumbfounded. What a concept! We're actually going to charge farmers a levy to inspect television boxes coming into Australia. It is completely absurd. It's like a protection racket. I know I'm not very good at a Brooklyn accent, but just imagine this: 'It's funny how things burn, sonny! You're going to hand over the cash and I can stop the fires.' That's what this government is saying, 'Farmers, you hand over the cash and we won't let the beasties onto your properties.' It's just absolutely absurd. It's actually penalising the potential victim of a crime. Farmers are the victims of biosecurity breaches; they aren't the perpetrators.

Australian exporters, including agricultural exporters, pay the cost of biosecurity in the markets which their goods need access to. They pay for biosecurity checks in foreign ports in other countries. How can they be responsible here? How can we, as farmers, be responsible when importers are bringing things into our country? We need more resources for the biosecurity challenge in Australia, and I'm not arguing about that. There's a plethora of exotic pests, weeds and diseases which threaten our agricultural production. Top of the list would be foot-and-mouth disease, but the list of threats is almost endless. There are plant rusts, smuts, blotches, blots, viruses like swine fever, and encephalopathy—I knew I'd struggle with that one! There are bird, horse and cat flus and there are weeds from all over the world, all looking for a fertile place to put down their roots in Australia. There are bat viruses and mosquito-borne diseases, and I haven't even scratched the surface. Absolutely, we need good biosecurity. But it isn't farmers who are the actual threat here; it's the importers who run the risk of bringing those things in.

The agriculture sector is worth more than $100 billion a year, and it's about 12 per cent of gross domestic product, from the paddock to the market. I might suggest that if farmers are to pay this, well, it will be the Treasurer—government tax receipts—that will miss out in the long run because it'll drive people out of farming. If we drive people out of farming and keep driving the costs up then they will pay less tax.

So there's no argument: we need good—we even need better—biosecurity. But let's charge the sinner and not the victim. Let's charge the importer of the washing machines, the fridges, the honey, the toys, the pharmaceuticals, the cheese, the processed meat, the potatoes or whatever it is. Surely it's the importer's job to make sure that their container is clean, weed free and disease free. If you import a foodstuff—let's say it's truffles or cheese—the importer is absolutely responsible for the contents of the jar. Why then would they not be responsible for the container in which the jar is packed at the point of dispatch? They're responsible for what's in the jar, and they pack their jars inside the containers, so why aren't they responsible for those containers? It seems that the farmers here in Australia are responsible for those containers. It is just an absurd correlation and does not make any sense.

The government hasn't even shared any detail on how this tax collection would work. It's much like their concept of the Voice, Mr Deputy Speaker—I'm sure you recall that well. Basically it's just, 'Let's vote for it, let's get it into place and then trust us.' That's the last call of the most corrupt businessman in town, isn't it? 'Just trust me and it'll all be alright.'

My information is that the biosecurity protection levy will be calculated by the proportion of the nation's GDP that an industry is responsible for, with the gross value of the production average over a three-year period levied at a rate that is not specified—wow! What on earth does that mean? I haven't got a PhD, but I can't work out what that means, and I'm doubtful that too many people could. It is just complete babble. It sounds like it was invented in Canberra!

It is clear the government have no idea what it means either. And who determines what proportion? Who polices the average? Or who sets the levy? Presumably, it's an already existing levy on an industry which may or may not exist. And at what rate will it be in order to meet the budget objectives of the government? I used to be a farmer—I still own a farm—and we would say that is as clear as mud in the bottom of the dam. You've got no idea what's going on here. It's been roundly opposed by farmers, producers, industry groups and stakeholders, including the National Farmers Federation and their state equivalents. The member for Riverina just listed a number of grower organisations that are opposed to this proposal.

A tax on farmers eventually becomes a tax on fresh food. The cost, we presume—and the government even suggests so—will be passed on to the consumer, even though, as we're finding now with the ACCC and Senate inquiries into supermarkets, farmers often struggle to pass on their costs and are instead expected to absorb them. We've known forever that farmers are price takers, not price setters, in the market, so they can't really pass those costs on easily. Farmers are expected to absorb those increased costs. How do they do that? By increasing efficiency to meet the financial challenge. Given the enormous advances in computing power, electronic monitoring and remote surveillance, it's a pity that government departments don't seem to be able to do the same and meet the same criteria of improving efficiency. I would have thought there are myriad tools available for biosecurity at the moment that weren't available, say, 20 years ago. But instead it seems to require more and more money all the time. The fact that it requires that means we should be questioning the measures. And the money shouldn't be coming out of the farmers' pockets.

There has been little, in fact pretty much no, consultation with the industry. There's been no modelling on the impact and certainly no consideration of the range of pressures coming from other sources. At the beginning of this speech I detailed what those other sources are, and I gave a whole list of attacks on agriculture and the accumulated impacts across the board of these attacks on agriculture. What is the government thinking? Why attack farmers? How on earth will it work?

The opposition has made a clear decision. We will scrap the levy if it should get through the parliament. We will scrap the levy and replace it with an incoming levy on containers. Costs will be met by the importers and rightly passed along to the terminal purchaser. The last person in the chain, the one that actually wants that bottle of truffles, should be the one paying the biosecurity levy. That's as it should be. It's simple, transparent—the user pays—and perfect. That's what the coalition will do, should we get into government.

In the ALP's defence, I don't actually think they hate farmers, even though I've got to give myself a good talking to every couple of days. I don't think they do, but I do think they think that farmers' interests are totally expendable and totally tradable. If the government are under pressure from the Left, from the inner-city Greens—they know they are; just look at the recent Brisbane council elections—they've got to give a bit of ground, and they're thinking: 'The farmers have plenty of money. They're always complaining. They own big properties worth millions of dollars, and we'll just kick them. That'll be alright. They don't vote for us anyhow.' I don't think they hate farmers. I think they actually understand that we do have to have a farming sector, but they don't think that any of these blows will actually make any difference. I listed at least 10 things at the beginning of this speech. The accumulated impacts do make a difference, and it's getting tougher and tougher to be a farmer.

I'll get on to a little bit more about that in a moment if I've got time, but I'll move on to Western Australia. I've just come back from there, and the live-sheep export ban is totally demoralising the industry there and driving people out of livestock. In some of these areas, if you're not in livestock you probably won't be in farming long. That's the simple fact of it.

The black clouds over the WA sheep industry at the moment are incredible. I could not believe the amount of anguish. We held seven different forums over there, and one in Adelaide, in South Australia. The impact of the looming ban in Western Australia is driving people out of sheep. Over 25,000 sheep a week are coming over the border into South Australia at the moment, and our market is running at about 30 per cent of what it was a couple of years ago. We heard from a small grower in Adelaide, and she said: 'I have a thousand ewes. The income from my turn-off two years ago was $144,000, and this year it's $44,000.'

South Australia is not even in the eye of the storm. In Western Australia, in Katanning, 200 sheep didn't get a bid or an offer on the day they were there, but the farmer certainly got a freight bill for them. They'll have to freight them back home again and perhaps put them in paddocks.

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