Sophie Mirabella (Indi, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Innovation, Industry and Science) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak about a very important sector in my electorate—that is, the agricultural sector. After so many years of droughts and difficulties, we have had good winter rains, the dams are full, water allocations are up and yield prospects are looking better than they have for many years. You ask: what could possibly be wrong with that? The problem that my communities, who have waited for so long for such good environmental and weather conditions, are facing is a crisis of confidence in the government. We have seen this in recent surveys. A rural confidence survey conducted by Rabobank that was released only the other week shows farmers have registered a large decline in confidence, and it is largely attributable to Labor's carbon tax and live export ban—and no doubt they are also extraordinarily distressed at the misuse and waste of the hard earned taxes that they and other hardworking Australians pay.

This report shows that the current government is crushing confidence in the agricultural sector and doing significant damage to rural communities and rural economies, including mine in north-east Victoria in the electorate of Indi. Usually the results of these sorts of reports are a reflection of seasonal factors, but this particular decline in confidence is purely attributable to external factors outside the farm gate. These figures are startling because the huge drop in confidence has occurred over such a short period of time. It is not just the carbon tax and the live animal exports disaster; it is also the complete confusion over the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. We see only today the sneaky, underhanded shadow-boxing: releasing a few figures, trying to test the waters and trying to test public reaction. Water is a very significant policy area for the federal government. They should come clean and release the details so that they can be assessed by various communities, states and stakeholders. This very sneaky approach of releasing a few figures and saying they are not official is really shadow-boxing and quite cruel because what investors in agriculture need is certainty. What communities need is an understanding of what the government wants to do and be able to assess whether that is accurate and fair and how that impacts across all communities across the basin. There is a lack of confidence in the government's management of funds and a lack of confidence in the government's poor policy proposals, such as the carbon tax and the live animal export knee-jerk reaction, which was a diplomatic and economic disaster, and now we even have areas such as water policy being utterly mismanaged in a very unprofessional way, in an unseemly way, by a national government.

Farmers want a return to certainty. As decent Australians, they want to have respect for their national government, but respect is not given as a right; it is earned. They want an end to this chaotic, shambolic, embarrassing, unprofessional government. What they say to me is not so much that this is a bad government but that they often get a sad, sinking feeling that there is no government—that no-one is driving the agenda. The person they see most clearly driving the agenda, particularly in policy areas that concern them, is the alliance partner of the Labor Party, the Greens.

I see the member for Melbourne Ports across the table. He, like so many other decent members of the Labor Party, is concerned that they have sold their soul and are in alliance with the Australian Greens. (Time expired)

Peter Slipper (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Before calling the honourable member for Melbourne Ports, I will advise him that he will get his full five minutes. The honourable member for Melbourne Ports has the call.