Tony Pasin (Barker, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Infrastructure and Transport) Share this | Hansard source

I stand to confirm the federal coalition's opposition to Labor's biosecurity protection levy. Let's call it for what it is. It's a tax on fresh food. I've been sitting and listening to the debate, and I'm thinking to myself, 'In what parallel universe do those opposite think that a tax should be imposed on the farmers of our country to pay for the risks associated with foreign farmers bringing their product onto our shores?' You have to be wrongheaded to come up with an idea like that. I called it a very unparliamentary term on ABC radio, and my staff said, 'You can't say that on radio,' and I said, 'Well, I just did.' The reality is that I can't repeat that phrase here, but it describes it perfectly. The best I can say here is that it's simply wrongheaded. And my colleague is right. Those opposite have come to this place with the intention, I'm sure, of bettering the lives of every Australian they represent. Sometimes I wonder whether I can maintain that view, but I still do. I just don't think they spend enough time in the regions to understand the impacts of something like this.

But it's not just this. I'll get more specific on the Agriculture (Biosecurity Protection) Levies Bill 2024 and related bills in a minute. Before I do, let me agree with my colleagues. This is not the only attack that those opposite are perpetrating today or right now on the Australian agricultural sector. There are a multitude. In my own electorate, there is a plan to acquire gargantuan amounts of water entitlements from farmers, meaning that farmers will be pushed off the land and that fresh food will be more expensive. We'll get to the cost-of-living impacts of this decision. It seems that those opposite think you can remove water from productive irrigation systems and not impact those communities, nor will you drive the cost of food up. Well, you will.

There is, of course, the abomination of a decision impacting the sheepmeat industry, where live export will be phased out over a period we're told will be in this term of government. Having spent considerable time in the last fortnight in regional Western Australia talking to farmers impacted, I can assure the Federation Chamber that they regard that decision as an attack on farmers. And having spoken, even today, to producers in my own electorate about the price of sheepmeat in South Australia, many thousands of kilometres away from Western Australia, I can assure those opposite that my producers know why they're not getting paid a fair quid for their prime lamb, and it's because of a decision made in this place.

This is what drives farmers spare. We're happy to deal with commodity price fluctuations—that's farming. We're happy to deal with the vicissitudes of the weather—that's farming. We're happy to pour our hearts and souls into our properties and work every hour God made—that's farming. I'll tell you what we're not happy with. We're not happy when decisions made by people who should be acting in the national interest cause that harm, and that's exactly what we have here. We're in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis, which thankfully those opposite are now cognisant of—almost as if they've been mugged by reality, bearing in mind we spent a long period of time with their focus being on anything but the cost of living. Their focus was principally on an ill-fated attempt to alter meaninglessly the Australian Constitution. But, now that they've got their focus on the cost of living, surely they must understand that asking Australian farmers to pay a fresh food tax will do nothing but drive the cost of fresh food up. It stands to reason, doesn't it?

While I'm on the topic of the cost of living, it would be nice if their energy policy, industrial relations policy, transport policy and environmental policy did something to drive down the cost of living, but of course none of that is happening. In fact, you'd be forgiven, Mr Deputy Speaker, for thinking that their objective in many of these policies is quite the opposite—to deliberately drive up the cost of living. Otherwise why would you have an energy policy that is determined to drive the cost of electricity up? Why would you have an industrial relations policy which drives the cost of everything up?

While we're dealing with fresh food and horticultural products—although this fresh food tax in not limited to horticultural products—I can tell you that horticultural products use a disproportionate amount of labour. The impacts of an industrial relations policy fall sharply on the horticulture sector within agriculture more generally. Why would you have a transport policy that's putting the cost of freight up? Obviously, everything we grow or raise needs to be transported to market. We've also got environmental policies like the one I mentioned earlier, with water buybacks becoming a feature of the Murray-Darling Basin once again, after they were thankfully off the table under a coalition government, for nine years or so.

So it's little wonder that there has been widespread opposition to this proposal from the agricultural sector. Whilst that sector and everyone in it understands the importance of biosecurity, they also understand who poses the risk. In any measured consideration, the entity that creates the risk should be the entity that meets the costs of managing that risk. That's why our position couldn't be more different than the position adopted by those opposite.

When our leadership team got together and considered the need for greater investment in biosecurity, under the guise of the former government, we embarked upon a process that would bring about a container levy on the people who want to bring product into this country and, with it, the potential biosecurity risks that put Australia's agricultural sector—a sector that's growing strongly towards $100 billion by 2040, we hope—at risk. It should be those people who pay the levy that allows that risk to be managed.

The tacticians amongst those opposite thought, 'No, that's not the right approach.' I wonder if that's just how you transition from opposition into government. You just oppose everything and then, when you get there, you're stuck with that position of opposition. But the reality is that their decision was to slug Australian farmers in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis. I've got to repeat it, because most people in my electorate can't believe it. Having spent some time at the Lucindale field day on the weekend, I've got to tell you that, like we heard earlier from my colleagues, people were simply raising this policy unprompted. They were also raising the muddle-headed idea that you would ask regional Australians to pay more for their vehicles and subsidise EVs for people who are living in metropolitan centres. They were raising that disproportionately as well. Just a word to those opposite: they might want to be careful about both of those policies.

You'd think we'd have the detail by now. The problem is that the legislation has been introduced to the parliament but it lacks detail about the cost to farmers and how the levy will be collected. It also stipulates that the biosecurity protection levy can be set to nil in the case of some sectors, where the cost of collecting the levy exceeds the revenue raised from it. It sounds to me a lot like those opposite who are proposing this approach are a little confused, or at least uncertain, about how they may go about it. I'm sure that they've had some feedback from those that manage the collections—I've certainly had that feedback. It was clear that it would be shambolic. The plan now is to create a whole new collection mechanism.

The former prime minister Tony Abbott once described government to me as a massive ship. I was asking for relatively small change, and he said, 'Tony, what you need to understand about government is that it's a very big ship and it takes a very long time to turn around.' I've got to say that whoever has designed this has no idea of the cost of collecting a levy or a tax like this. We're talking about what are reasonable sums of money but which in the scheme of government—that very big ship—are relatively small sums. And we're talking about collecting it from literally tens of thousands of producers who produce tens of thousands of different products. My family produces prime lambs, but I represent people who grow citrus, avocado, watermelon, cattle, grain, wine grapes, forestry and fishing. How is it going to be structured? This is a levy, a fresh food tax, which I hasten to suggest will end up costing more money to collect than it delivers. We've been there before, of course; when those opposite last had the great privilege of being in government, they were going to raise a mining tax. People may remember that but, ultimately, it cost more money to levy it than it raised. I would have thought that those opposite would still be suffering from PTSD about that. But it seems that we're back right where we started.

The coalition strongly opposes this bill, and I support the Leader of the National Party's amendments. In my final contribution—and my apologies to the member who has attended—I'll say this: could those opposite please think about the farming sector? The continual attacks on them and the failure to support them has them exasperated right now. They feel like there's a very limited future for them. I'll use my wine-grape growers as an example. They're beyond anxious about where they find themselves. There's a three billion litre oversupply of red wine in this country, with a sales to stock ratio of 2.77. That means that if we don't pick another grape for the next two years we'll still have three-quarters of a year's supply for sales of red wine. That's not just domestic; it's total sales. These people are desperate, and they want to know they have a government that has their back. They cannot ask for help from the weather gods, although they do, and they deal with commodity price fluctuations borne of changing attitudes to products. They just want to know that the people who get the great privilege of getting into the Comcars and flying business class to Canberra stand up for them, govern in the national interest and have their interests at heart.

I've got to tell you that, for almost everything that emanates from this building courtesy of those opposite, people are left with a sense that nobody in Canberra cares. I can't even get the minister for agriculture to come to the Riverland and eyeball the very people he won't stand up and support. I can't even get him to come to a meeting. He said: 'Get them to come to Canberra. I can meet with them in Canberra.' These are people who are about to lose their farms and he says, 'Come to Canberra.' They feel desperate. Stop attacking them.

Debate adjourned.

Federation Chamber adjourned at 19:3 0

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