Pat Conaghan (Cowper, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Social Services) Share this | Hansard source

This motion moved by the member for Hunter would be comical but for the damage that this Labor government has done to the agriculture, fishing and forestry sector over the last two years and nine months. Now, that's not me saying that; that's the industry saying that. We are so lucky that the ag industry has been strong enough to weather this assault. It has been an all-out assault on those sectors.

Let me start with a handful of policy changes they've made that have impacted on our farmers across the board. Firstly, they tore up the dedicated ag visa, which was the biggest structural reform to the ag workforce in our nation. I know. I have the PALM scheme, and we had the ag visa workers, in my electorate. Now we have problems with being able to pick the blueberries, the bananas and the avocados. They just don't understand the damage that they do, because they don't understand the industry.

They attempted to slug farmers with a new $150 million biosecurity protection levy which would force farmers to pay for the biosecurity risks of international competitors. For those of you at home who might not have understood, our farmers are having to pay a biosecurity levy here for what people overseas are sending here. How is that fair? They're already paying over half a billion dollars in biosecurity anyway through other programs, and this is a cash grab by this government because it doesn't care about farmers. 'We're just going to reap the rewards. We'll just bring that money in on another $150 million biosecurity levy.'

One of the most disgusting things I've seen in this term is also the shutting down of the live sheep industry. They brought it forward. They had no consultation with the community. It's a $100 million industry, and they say: 'We've got $160 million to cover that. You'll be right. Go on and do something else. Find another industry.'

These are generational farmers, generational families who have had their legs cut out from underneath them because of ideology. We have the best animal practices in the world.

I'll take the interjection from the member for McEwen, because the next thing I was going to talk about was a new truckie and ute tax on diesel vehicles. Hang on—what do you think the member for McEwen did between 1998 and 2002? Guess what he did. He sold truck parts for diesel trucks. The chameleon! Yet he is servicing his paymasters and putting a diesel tax—a carbon tax—on four-wheel-drives, mum-and-dad SUVs. You're going to see an increase of about $25,000 on one of the most popular vehicles, the Toyota Hi-Lux.

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