Tony Windsor (New England, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

When I was first running for the seat of New England, one of my people suggested that a good bumper sticker might be, ‘The Windsors have done a great job in Old England; give a Windsor a go in New England.’ It was decided not to proceed with that bumper sticker. I support the Farm Household Support Amendment (Ancillary Benefits) Bill 2010. The trial that is being pursued in Western Australia is very significant. All of us, particularly those from country areas, should look closely at how this trial works. I have some concerns. I will not get into expressing too many of those today because I do not think that it pays to be negative when we are trying to assess a different way of looking at drought policy. It seems to me that both sides of parliament and, to a growing extent, the farm organisations are coming to recognise that the existing drought policy may not be the best way of addressing drought into the future. Particularly if climate change is a reality, there are going to be changed circumstances in some areas. So people are genuinely looking at various options in terms of drought policy.

I have been involved with the parliamentary committee that has been looking at some of these options and the potential impact of climate change on agriculture. Those who do not believe in climate change can substitute the word ‘drought’ and they will be able to make their own arrangements in terms of what sorts of policies should be occurring into the future. I think there are some significant things that do stand out, but before I get to those issues I would just like to reflect on the existing policy, which has been in place now for something like 18 years. I think it was the Keating government that put in place the arrangement where a drought that was greater than one in 25 years was deemed to require an exceptional circumstances response. Over time that has grown into what is called household support and also the EC interest rate subsidy assistance.

I have been in this parliament since 2001 and I have heard the previous government and the current government—I even heard it this morning from a country member of parliament—perpetuate a myth. I am not suggesting that the current system is correct, as we can always improve upon it, but a myth has developed in this parliament that somehow billions of dollars have been expended in country areas in relation to drought assistance. If you walked out into the street now people would say, ‘You cannot keep giving the farmers these vast amounts of money.’ The coalition did it brilliantly because they wanted to suggest that they were doing an enormous amount for the farm sector during the worst drought in living memory. The Labor Party did not do anything to fix the problem either. It seems to me that it has been in the interests of the major parties to paint the farm sector into a corner where it is seen to be in some sort of begging bowl arrangement, with the eventual goal of removing exceptional circumstances as a drought policy.

I would like to elaborate on that if I could. The exceptional circumstances arrangements are broken into two parts. The first part is household support, and the bill we are addressing today, the Farm Household Support Amendment (Ancillary Benefits) Bill 2010, is to do with the trial that is occurring in Western Australia. The household support is no different to Centrelink payments or unemployment benefits. The farmers who are getting that benefit are unemployed in the sense that they are not earning any income. They do not earn an income, but they are still working. They received the Centrelink payment because they needed to work to maintain the farm even though they were not earning any income. That is the same treatment that any unemployed person or any person who is not able to earn an income would receive.

The second part of the existing policy is the assistance to businesses through interest rate subsidy arrangements. There is a myth out there that this particular interest rate assistance has been propping up the broken-down farmer, that this has stopped a natural transition of people out of agriculture. There are viability requirements—the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry would be fully aware of them, and I thank him for being here—with exceptional circumstances interest rate assistance. If you are broke, you cannot get it. You have to show that during this exceptional circumstance you are viable enough that with some assistance you will tread water and, when the major event removes itself from the premises, you will be ready to produce again and be a productive contributor to the economy. I repeat: if you are a broken-down farmer, you cannot get assistance because the viability requirements disallow you from getting it. You might be able to get some household support, which any unemployed person who is not earning an income can avail themselves of.

The coalition perpetuated this myth—and I used to pick them up every time—that they were spending billions of dollars on propping up agriculture. That was the message and the farmers were all supposed to be out there saying, ‘Thank God you are here looking after us.’ When you look at the business assistance to agriculture over the first seven years of the drought—unfortunately I have left all my notes up in my office so I will operate on memory; I think you will find I am pretty close—the average assistance was $217 million a year. Two hundred and seventeen million dollars, in the worst drought in living memory, to one of the biggest contributors to our economy is a pittance, but this myth has developed that an enormous amount of money is being poured into agriculture and therefore we have got to look at different ways of doing it. I am not arguing about some of the other more positive things that the trial is looking at, but this myth annoys me because it puts the farming community in a position it should not be placed in. If you take it out to eight years, I think the average number went to about $250 million. If you bring in the last one or two years, the average over that period of time is about $280 million a year. The assistance that government gave to other industries during that period of time is somewhere between $11½ billion and $13 billion annually. There has been this mythology developed out there that you cannot help these people while they are going through one of the worst traumas from a climate event that we have ever seen, yet the money that has been presented out there is a pittance.

As I said, I agree with some of the changes. I agree with the trial. I think it is very worth while and we should look very closely at it. But I do not think we should use any financial argument to suggest that there are not circumstances where some direct assistance in terms of business assistance should be perpetuated. These are viable farmers who are becoming severely stretched. If you let them slip through the system, the productive activity that comes out the other end will be far less, and the investment of some money into the system to keep them ready to go, when eventually the drought breaks, would cost far less.

In my view, part of what the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry is trying to achieve—and I think it is a good idea—is to look at some of the ways in which we can pre-empt drought, remove drought. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that, particularly with the better soil types, there are ways and means of doing that. The minister spent a few days in my electorate, where one of the things that we looked at very early in the piece was the advent of no-till farming. That has been an extraordinary adaptation to climate change that has taken place in recent years. I was fortunate enough to be interested in that sort of technology many years ago, and we have a block of land that is currently one of the longest blocks of land that has been no-till farmed continuously. That is coming up to 33 years. So I have some idea about what that actually does in terms of drought—the member for Parkes, who is at the table, would have a lot of knowledge of that too—and removing from the scenery the potential downside of weather events or dry spells, from climate change or whatever else. With the better soils, it produces the equivalent of another six inches of rainfall. That is due to a change in technology that has occurred over time. In a theoretical sense at least, with the advent of that technology you could effectively have a reduction of six inches of rain through climate change and break even in terms of the moisture available to plant with nothing else happening, so we have got to encourage that. There are such technologies in farming, and in grazing as well, that we should look very closely at and encourage.

There are various other landscape technologies that the minister is aware of. A man called Peter Andrews and others are looking at variations on the theme of how we keep more of the water in the landscape rather than letting it rush out to sea. There are some conflicts there, particularly with the Murray-Darling Basin Authority and the inter-valley caps and things that are being produced at the moment through the accountancy process that is going on in relation to water. If you were to encourage technologies that retain water on the land, reduce erosion and increase infiltration—all these very positive things to produce food or fibre—what would happen to the accountancy process in terms of the water that used to run off through bad management? I do not think they have really come to grips with that in some of their accounting processes. Take plantation forestry, for instance, which will have a significant impact on the availability of water downstream when you remove land that would have allowed run-off so you can plant on it trees that do not allow run-off.

So there are these conflicting policy areas that are starting to develop. Maybe that will put pressure on the irrigation water that is available, particularly in the Murray-Darling system. So I would suggest that, as part of this policy—and I am sure that it is in place—we should really look at encouraging the technologies that remove moisture loss as being a problem. We will never negate drought totally—nor should we try, as we are in a dry nation—but there are technologies to which funding could be provided to encourage the people involved. It might be through machinery, or it might be through the investment allowance that is out there at the moment, or it might be through reducing certain taxation of the various chemicals that are particularly good for various agricultural systems, or there might be management techniques that suffer from various taxation issues and government could play a role by removing those issues—so not giving money but removing increases in variable costs.

The other thing that I would like to do is to briefly note, Minister, while you are at the table in the chamber, that you are fully aware of the Bundarra area exceptional circumstances arrangement. It highlights some of the great difficulties with the existing system as to where the rain falls, the rain gauges, the rain events and the lines on maps. The people in Bundarra are looking for some answer as quickly as possible so that they can have some certainty as to where they are actually going, so I would encourage you to take that on board. It is a pocket of land in my electorate that unfortunately has been dealt a fairly bad hand in recent years, whereas other areas around it have been doing quite well. This area of little doughnuts is not doing very well at all in terms of rainfall.

Another issue I would like to raise is in conjunction with land use. We have developed this theme in Australian agriculture and in our parliaments that all land should be used for food production, that the world needs our food and that if we do not use that land for food production our own food security will slip. Anybody who is involved in agriculture realises that the world might need our food but it will not pay anything for it. Society has downgraded the value of food. Those who really need it have not got any money. Sudan is a classic case. Sudan has magnificent black soils. It has a dry land, like Australia’s, but it has the capacity with our technology to produce six times what Australia produces in grain. Moving into a carbon economy when there is the carting of grain all over the world to those who need the food, when in fact they could produce their own, inadvertently or deliberately corrupts some of the cost structures that have developed in relation to international trade.

When we talk about land use and carbon, we get this mixed message. I am not having a go at New South Wales farmers, but agriculture is all about food production. They are also talking about property rights. If I have the right to a thousand acres of land, why can’t I grow trees on it? Why can’t I grow second generation biofuels? That would have a more positive impact on the carbon economy, though it does not help the food economy. One of our great problems with drought policy—and this completes the circle in a sense—is that when the good years are on there is not enough money being made. We have to look at these technologies that are out there. There is this devotion to using all land for food production, but our problem is that we produce too much of the stuff. We have to find markets. We bribe Arabs occasionally to buy the stuff from us. Then we go down and buy a boatload of oil and so we have this carbon footprint coming across the ocean, whereas in a lot of ways we could use some of that food production land for agroforestry or biofuels—second generation ethanol or sugar for fuel. The sugar industry was nearly destroyed a few years ago, until the Brazilians decided to take enormous amounts of sugar off the world market and grow their own renewable energy instead. Suddenly our sugar producers were saved—not by our policy, but by the Brazilians saying, ‘We’re sick of this; we are not going to accept this global market; what else can we do?’ The world price went up, and our sugar producers were saved. There are enormous opportunities.

Today the shadow minister was talking about renewable energy targets—but nothing about agriculture, nothing about land use. It was all about solar, wind and waves. The coalition put in place some renewable energy targets back in 2001, but there is less renewable energy produced now than there was nine years ago, before they established the target. We have to get serious about this, and if we are serious about drought we will acknowledge that you can afford to grow a quarter of a tonne of wheat to the acre if you are getting paid big prices for it. It is payment for food that is the issue. We can fix it with technology, and I think this bill will go some way towards doing that. If people are not prepared to pay for our food products, we have to look at alternative land uses—whether it be trees or biofuels or whatever—to produce energy for us. We need energy. At the moment we ship our food overseas, cash the cheque, buy energy and bring it all the way back again. In a carbon economy that is going to be terribly detrimental to a country like Australia with its geographical location.

I encourage the minister to look at some of these issues and particularly to look very closely at the Bundarra issue. (Time expired)

Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am pleased to speak on the Farm Household Support Amendment (Ancillary Benefits) Bill 2010, and I appreciate the presence of the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry at the table. I give him permission to leave—he must have a lot to do back in his office! He can read my remarks in Hansard later. I am sure he will. I want to acknowledge the efforts of the minister and the government. We in the opposition do not think they are quite there yet in terms of drought support, but we also recognise that drought support, exceptional circumstances relief payments and, more importantly, the interest rate subsidy are enormous costs on the budget and if we can work out a way to support our farmers financially and in other ways we should do so.

This bill facilitates the trial in Western Australia, and I look forward to seeing the outcomes of that trial. I recognise that we might learn valuable things, particularly as it will be conducted in an area that is not actually under exceptional circumstances declaration. It will be good to see what comes out of the trial. Clearly not enough money has been allocated. There are some confusing reports in the media that the dollars are uncapped, but it does appear that only $12 million has been allocated in the budget. If every farmer in the area took up the trial to its fullest extent, there maybe a potential government liability of much more than that—even up to $400 million. That is a problem.

The trial itself I believe is coming at the issue with the right perspective. Farmers might receive $7,500 for farm planning, and if they undertake those farm plans they could then be eligible for $60,000 to put in, for example, better integrated water infrastructure or some other technological investments on their farm—maybe lock-up paddocks for sustainable grazing systems. So the door to another $60,000 would be opened, and then I understand there would also be a further $20,000 for environmental benefits for farms. So it is quite modest. If you compare it with what is available now, sure, the household support, which is the fortnightly payment from Centrelink, is still there, and that is a good thing. We all appreciate the way that that continues to put food on the table for our farming families, but I can certainly say that were it not for the exceptional circumstances interest rate subsidy almost the entire western division of New South Wales would be on its knees right now.

That is the constant feedback I get from every rural financial counsellor, both at state level and at federal level, as I travel in the western part of my electorate. I do acknowledge that these are large sums of money, and that if you have received as a farming enterprise $300,000 of interest rate subsidy from the federal government, even $500,000 in some cases, then that is significant support. We have to look at a policy purpose that is more than just allocating dollars to individual businesses; it has to recognise the vital nature of our farm sector and the need for it to continue. If these farms go under, and frequently they do, they often do not get resumed as working, productive properties. I guess the good thing about those who have gone broke in western New South Wales is that they have been able to sell to businessmen in many cases, and occasionally overseas buyers—people from outside the area who have paid a good price but have not necessarily farmed the land. In many cases they may visit only at weekends, and that becomes a problem for neighbours when they have to deal with an absentee neighbour and feral animals and pests et cetera. We know, and I know, that the productivity of this land is the most important thing that governments should be recognising and facilitating to the greatest extent that they can.

In conversations I have had with our rural financial counsellors, they have acknowledged that a better system needs to be found. They are frustrated by the seeming endlessness of the drought, though in many areas in the west it is now looking pretty good, and it is terrific to see that. However, one hazard gives way to another. We now have plague locusts, and when they hatch in spring and summer they will be extremely problematic. I appreciated the briefing we had last week from the Australian Plague Locust Commission. I recall that outfit from when I was involved in the agriculture portfolio in the last government. It is a bit clumsy because it only has a mandate to deal with plague locusts when they cross state boundaries and therefore has to work in conjunction with the state bodies that do the same thing, and clearly that is messy. What is needed is a national plan and something that gives effect to that national plan while recognising that state and federal funding should be included in it. So now drought has given way, unfortunately, to plague locusts.

I remember having been involved in exceptional circumstances declarations across my electorate. Sadly, most of my electorate is still in exceptional circumstances, although I expect that much of it will come out of exceptional circumstances when those declarations are lifted towards the end of this year or early next year. I can remember having long, intense discussions with the National Rural Advisory Council, which is the independent body that makes the recommendations to government. I do not mind the process, although it did sometimes get unnecessarily complicated. You cannot expect a federal government bureaucracy to understand the lie of the land in terms of rainfall history, drought prospects, stock-carrying numbers and all the other statistics that make up a case for drought relief, but one of the biggest battles that we had as members in this place was to convince the National Rural Advisory Council that low irrigation allocations actually warranted drought support. The criteria had been set for grazing and pastoral enterprises, but what we were seeing in the New South Wales and Victorian Murray in the early years—2003 and 2004—was extreme no-water and low-water allocations. So there were irrigators who were receiving the notionally normal rainfall for their areas but were not able to access any irrigation water because their general security allocation was zero.

I give credit to Wendy Craik, who was the head of NRAC in those days, because she accepted the message and pushed hard, and we had a change of policy in that area which has seen irrigators receive EC relief. I have already talked about the pastoralists being on their knees, but I assure everybody in this House that the irrigators would have been decimated if they had not received that EC relief. I know that water policy, while it has an influence on agriculture policy, does not come under this particular area of government, but it clearly intersects with it, and we are crying out for a better water policy for farmers. Farmers are desperately unhappy with the current government’s approach, and as they are beginning to face the sustainable diversion limits that will come with the draft basin plan due out in a few weeks time I am getting a lot of desperate calls from people who feel that they are being ignored by the hierarchy. Towns will get all the water they need and should get, the environment will get all the water it needs—although, while we want the environment to be well catered for, I am not certain that I would put it above the needs of irrigated agriculture in every case and on every day—but farmers are saying, ‘Okay, so you have towns getting their water, you have the environment getting its water and, if there is any left, we get it; so we are the ones who have to give up the most.’

Opinion is divided on whether we are facing climate change in the Murray-Darling Basin. Some farmers say they do not believe that we are, but some will quite freely admit that the circumstances that they see on their farms every day strongly indicate that something is changing permanently. But, if we are facing climate change, we have to manage irrigated agriculture with less water, and we are doing that. Previously, there was up to $6 billion allocated to a fund directed towards farmers to enable them to update their own infrastructure on-farm. So a farmer could update their water delivery system receiving a grant by the government—doing that is so capital intensive that you could never do afford to do it on your own—and then give the government back a proportion of the water saved. The disappointing feature of the current government’s policy is that the current Minister for Climate Change, Energy Efficiency and Water has made it very clear that she does not believe that taxpayers’ money should be allocated on-farm to people’s individual farm infrastructure. I think that is a huge mistake, because if you want to achieve the outcome you have to recognise that the main actors in the scheme are the farmers and they really do have to embrace the change and want to make it happen.

The policy currently in place buys back water—at the moment I think about 700 gigalitres of water have been bought back from the Murray Darling Basin—but there has not been the commitment by farmers to see it through. There has not been a recognition of the need for it, and the government certainly has not spelled out a real plan for that 700 gigalitres of water. It is fine to embark on a water buyback and—although I do not agree with this—say, ‘We have to take this out of the system; the system has been overallocated,’ but that is no use unless there is a sensible and comprehensive plan.

I know that an environmental watering plan is being developed which is going to be released with the basin plan and the sustainable diversion limit, but I am not confident that there is sufficient understanding in that plan of how to get the water to all the environmental sites. For example, there are certain wetlands that you can only flood when you have a king tide. So water is needed in order to carry water to a place to produce an environmental outcome, and if there is not enough water to create conditions that are completely counterseasonal—though there should not be, and I can see no reason why you would want to do that—delivery of the water is impossible. There is the Barmah Choke on the way, which has a constraint on the number of megalitres it can pass each day. There is also the interaction between the Menindee Lakes and the Darling River as well as that between the Murrumbidgee River and the Lachlan Catchment, out of which a significant amount of water has been bought. We know that the Lachlan has not flowed into the Murray for at least a hundred years, so it is clear that that water is not going to find its way down the river very easily.

My main concern, as it always tends to be when I am talking on agricultural matters, is the lack of water for irrigated agriculture. It is continually exacerbated by low storages in the Murray-Darling. The Hume Dam is currently only at 22 per cent of capacity; Dartmouth Dam is at 31.9 per cent. The Menindee Lakes, and this is absolutely fabulous, are at 85 percent. A few weeks ago, on a visit to Broken Hill, I travelled out to Menindee and watched the regulators being opened to move water from Lake Pamamaroo into Lake Menindee at, I think, a rate of 15,000 megs a day. It was an absolutely magnificent sight.

I am always so disappointed when the water in Menindee Lakes becomes a political football and various people decide that it is their water and that there are wetlands or Lower Lakes or storages upstream that deserve that water more. Although there is some man-made aspect to Menindee, Menindee itself is a world-class wetland and should be recognised as such. So for the water to be flowing into the fourth lake in the Menindee Lakes system and for some people to describe it as wasted because there is no outlet—well there is a very small outlet, but its carrying capacity is quite limited—is very disappointing to me. I would encourage people to go out there and have a look. Everyone should try to journey into inland Australia and look at the water at Cooper Creek and Innamincka and Birdsville and all the way down the Darling. There are arguments that you can see it better from the air, but it is pretty good from the ground as well.

So it is terrific to see Menindee Lakes at 85 per cent capacity. Lake Victoria further down the system is, at 56 per cent, reflecting better inflows from the Darling River. But it is distressing to see Hume Dam still only at 22 per cent. Until we get really good rains in the upper Murray catchment, we are not going to have the confidence return to the irrigation sector or the feeling that they can cope with government buybacks of water.

The exceptional circumstances regime has served our farmers very well. I would simply ask the government to take really great care in designing its replacement and to recognise that one of the main beneficiaries of the schemes has been the banks. The banks received 50 per cent of farm interest payments and that has enabled banks to, in their words, ‘lend with confidence’, carry on supporting farm businesses and maybe not take the action that they might have considered had that interest rates subsidy not been there.

But it is also incumbent on the banks to recognise the great benefits they have received from the exceptional circumstances interest rate subsidy. There has been a solid and sound transfer of taxpayers’ money to the banking sector to enable rural Australia to stay afloat, and I expect the banking sector to give as good as we gave them. When I talk to the economists for our major banks, I hear that in terms of liquidity requirements after the Basel III discussions that are happening in Europe at the moment that banks may find they have to carry more cash reserves. That will of course affect the amount of money they can lend. I sometimes pick up the sense that the rural sector needs to watch out. Of course, that means it might not be so simple and so on and so on. There is no reason, whatever the liquidity constraints are, for the rural sector to not be looked after by the banks. We know that, whenever there is a rural upturn, banks that have kept quiet in the marketplace—I am not naming names—leap out of the blocks and they are out there starting up a new agribusiness, knocking on farm doors and being aggressive in that marketplace. They need very much to plan for the long term and they need very much to recognise the great benefits they get. If you look at the standard mortgage rate and the margin that some farmers are paying, particularly if you are with one of our pastoral lending houses, those margins are significant.

The member for Mallee mentioned in this place last week his great concern about behaviour of banks. It does concern me when somebody running a farm business has their finances, their livestock and their merchandise all tied up with one lender. Sometimes that is the only lender they are able to access, but it is not a good situation for any business to be in. It gives the lender an unreasonable ability to control the farm operation and it really disturbs me. I have heard of situations where that lender suggests to a farmer: ‘You need cash flow, so you need to buy sheep; you need to restock. The stock price is sky high but we’ll advance you the money.’ And everything that the farmer’s better judgment is telling them is that they should just hold back, just wait, just see what the price for livestock does. Maybe the paddocks need to recover more and they are not confident that the rainfall is where it needs to be, but they are pushed into this. That is the situation that the member for Mallee and all of us who represent these pastoral areas of western New South Wales and South Australia are aware of. We are monitoring the situation carefully and closely and we are very keen always to hear about individual circumstances that we feel might be translating into unacceptable banking practices.

I would like to conclude my remarks today by recognising the death of Rob Seekamp on a pastoral property near Broken Hill earlier this week. The minister may have met him. He was the chair of the Pastoralists Association of West Darling. He was lost in his Cessna 172 mustering aeroplane on Monday. He was found yesterday. Tributes are flowing in. The people of Broken Hill and the people of the far west are shattered at the loss of this great fighter for their region. I can remember the pastoralists association, led by Rob Seekamp, coming to Canberra when the dust storms hit the western division. They had a great response from the minister and they appreciated that. We had several meetings in this place and we facilitated not the greatest help that perhaps could have been made, but I am not suggesting that had we been in government we could have done any better. There were state responsibilities there as well. We rely a lot on people who selflessly work to make their areas better places to live and who go through the trying and sometimes difficult and expensive representations they constantly have to make to government. To Rob’s family—Vicki and his children and his adopted children—I pass on my heartfelt condolences and say that he will be remembered in Broken Hill by those of those of us who knew him.

I commend the bill to the House.

Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

in reply—I thank all members who contributed to the debate on the Farm Household Support Amendment (Ancillary Benefits) Bill 2010. I particularly thank the member for Farrer for the comments at the end of her contribution. I was unaware of the tragic circumstances that befell Rob Seekamp. It is an appropriate thing to bring to the attention of the House, and on behalf of the government I also extend our deepest sympathies. As soon as it was mentioned, I remembered the meeting I had with Rob to discuss the dust storms. Not only was he a thoroughly decent man who was so clearly connected with his community but he had very cleverly brought photographs of properties in the area that he knew I had visited so that I could completely understand the extent of the devastation that the dust storms had caused. So I thank the member for Farrer for making us aware of that, and I extend to Mr Seekamp’s family the deepest sympathies of the government and, I am sure, all members of the House of Representatives.

If I can turn to one other issue, Mr Deputy Speaker, that does not relate to the bill but was referred to in debate by the member for New England, there is an understandable frustration for people in the Bundarra region that there has been such a long wait to get certainty as to whether they would get an exceptional circumstances declaration. A number of issues have contributed to this challenge. One of them has been that state governments, understandably, always want to apply for the biggest possible area they can for exceptional circumstances declarations. Because the National Rural Advisory Council has to do an averaging across the region, if the region applied for is big, it is harder to get the approval. Bundarra has been going back and forth over a number of applications. With the latest one, the advice from NRAC is with government. I am working to get that through the processes of government as quickly as possible so we can make an announcement and provide certainty. The people of Bundarra should be well assured that the member for New England has been consistent in making their case known to government, and I certainly do hope it is not too much longer before we are able to provide them with an answer.

Turning to the contributions on the bill, first of all, there are occasions when different members of the House, including different members of the opposition, provide very different perspectives. There are times when politically it works and can be convenient to try to drive some sort of wedge and say, ‘There’s a split—there’s a difference of opinion between the Liberal and National parties.’ On this occasion, I can say that the differences that have been expressed in this debate about the future of the trial are, I think, a great example of members of parliament understanding the particular circumstances of their regions. This goes to one of the reasons why we have decided to embark on a trial rather than go immediately to a national rollout of a new drought policy. Getting this right is difficult and incredibly complex. It affects different parts of our nation in very different ways. That is why we have found some members of parliament to be highly supportive of aspects of the trial and some members of parliament to be sceptical, not about whether the program is worth taking forward but about whether it could appropriately be a replacement in the future for the current drought policy settings that we have. I commend all members of parliament on the issues that they have raised—I do think it reflects the complexity of this.

A number of members of the opposition, though, have raised a concern about why the money which has been allocated is not nearly enough to allow all the 6,000 farmers within the Western Australian trial region to be able to apply for and receive the on-farm grants. There is a very good reason why a smaller amount of money has been allocated, and that is: we are embarking on a trial. I do not want to pretend that in a trial we can immediately roll out enough support for 6,000 farmers to develop strategic plans. I do not want to pretend that we can do that in 12 months. I do not believe we can and I want to have the benefit of assisting a much smaller group—I mentioned in the second reading speech that it would probably be in the order of 150—where we can work on the strategies with the farmers, with them having control of it, and get plans together that actually make a difference for those properties into the future and co-invest with them. Doing that with smaller numbers will mean we will iron out the problems and work out how, if we go to a larger rollout, the strategic plans can be made in the most effective way. If you rolled out all 6,000 during a 12-month trial, you would necessarily create a situation where your best quality consultants were being spread too thinly, which would run the very real risk of paying people to assist farmers to put together a strategic plan where the quality of what resulted would not be part of the long-term vision for Australian agriculture that this trial hopes we can get to.

If we take this in a methodical way and are careful initially as to how many farms are involved in the planning process, while making sure that the food on the table money is available for the entire region, as it ought to be—but we are careful with the rollout of anything connected to the strategic plans—I do believe we will land in a much better policy zone and the trial will be used for the actual purposes that you would want a trial to be used for: to test different methods so that whoever is in government when the trial period concludes can look at the results and say, ‘Okay, if we’re going to roll this out nationally, these are the bits we would want to change.’ I think that serves the parliament very well.

To those members of parliament who have expressed concern about the trial, I want to express my deep gratitude that nobody has sought to prevent passage of the legislation. The legislation itself simply provides for extra benefits, such as the healthcare card, to be made available to recipients of support. Had the opposition sought to they could have blocked it. I appreciate that the opposition have not sought to do that.

Bob Baldwin (Paterson, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Defence Science and Personnel) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Baldwin interjecting

Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That is right. There is still time if you wish to, Member for Paterson! But, in anticipation, I convey my thanks to those senators from the opposition who I understand have indicated that they will try to ensure speedy passage of this legislation when it is sent to the other place in the coming hours. I commend the bill to the House.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.

Message from the Governor-General recommending appropriation announced.