Mark Baker (Braddon, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is addressed to the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry. Would the minister advise the House of recent developments in Australian agriculture following the government’s budget. Is the minister aware of any alternative approaches?

Peter McGauran (Gippsland, National Party, Deputy Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Braddon for his question and acknowledge his championing of all things agriculture. I have visited his electorate. I know how highly regarded he is by primary producers. He is an indefatigable champion on their part. The recent budget provided $2.4 billion in new funding for Australian agriculture. This funding built on the government’s strong record of policies and programs that help our farmers and rural industries manage the many complex issues they confront on a daily basis. In addition to providing funding for many successful quarantine, natural resource and food industry programs already in place, an additional $50 million was provided for the first ever Environmental Stewardship Program, which will establish contracts of up to 15 years with farmers and other landholders to preserve and restore high-value environmental assets.

The member for Braddon asked whether I was aware of alternative policies. As members of the government and indeed the farming community well know, the Labor Party is bereft of ideas, let alone policies different from the government’s when it comes to agriculture. You have to dig very deep to even find any reference, passing as it might be, to primary production. But I did find an interesting doorstop transcript on the ALP website. I went looking for it; it does not come out and hit you between the eyes. It was a doorstop interview, dated 15 May 2007, by the shadow minister, whose name I will reveal for the first time in this place and, I suspect, in rural Australia—Senator Kerry O’Brien. I read the transcript—

Government Members:

Government members interjecting—

Peter McGauran (Gippsland, National Party, Deputy Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Not the ABC’s The 7.30 Report; it is the politician Kerry O’Brien, who is in parliament. I read the doorstop interview. I was quite impressed, I have to confess, not by its content but by its fluency and its conciseness. But there was something else about it that rang a bell with me. It was eerily familiar. By the way, it is dated 15 May and it deals with the budget. It is the budget response given a week later. Leaving that aside, I return to the media statement that the same shadow minister issued on 9 May with regard to the budget. Remarkably, I find that the doorstop is almost identical to the media interview. In fact, the media statement is 329 words, and 300 of them are replicated exactly in the doorstop.

I know the experience of a doorstop is a very intimidating one. National correspondents representing the best and brightest of journalism are gathered around you, close up and personal, firing questions from all angles. You commit a few phrases to memory but you cannot commit whole sentences, whole paragraphs or whole pages to memory. I have highlighted the documents that I have here in colour code for the convenience of opposition members. Here is the media statement of 9 May—I feel like I am on Media Watch—and here is the doorstop interview. You can see that it is reproduced almost in whole.

The farmers of Australia want more than phantom doorstops. They want more than a shadow minister who plagiarises himself. They want considered policy, and they are not getting it from the Labor Party now, and nor will they get it in the future. I table the media statement and the subsequent doorstop.

John Howard (Bennelong, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Speaker, I ask that further questions be placed on the Notice Paper.