Michelle Landry (Capricornia, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Agriculture and Water Resources. Will the minister update the House on how the agriculture sector is contributing to jobs for hardworking Australians and growth in the Australian economy? Is the minister aware of any alternative approaches?

Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for her question and note the work that she has done towards making sure that we build Rookwood Weir—the $130 million that the federal government has put towards it, to be matched by the state government whenever we hear from the Labor Party state government. We look forward to actually getting that built because that, of course, is jobs. There are an extra 2,000 jobs that would be attributable to that infrastructure—an extra billion dollars a year for the people of Central Queensland.

I also note the work that the honourable member has done for Beef Australia, where we secured an extra $3 million to go to the 2018 beef week in Rocky. She also talked about the work that agriculture has done. Agriculture is more than carrying its weight. In fact, in our nation, agricultural exports are now our second biggest export after iron ore. It comes on the back of the work that was done on the free trade agreements with China, Korea and Japan. I note that in our relationship with the United States it is one area where we have a trade surplus. We send them about $5 billion worth of exports and we import about $2 billion worth of imports. We actually have a trade surplus in agriculture with the United States. The work that we are doing in improving beef roads is also very important: the $100 million to beef roads and the $594 million that we put into inland rail so that we can create a corridor of commerce from Melbourne up to Brisbane through the inland. We put $100 million on the table for the Outback Way because we believe in the vision of sealing the third road across our nation through the Alice: from Winton through to Laverton.

But there are alternative policies, and the alternative policies are no better seen than in the previous Labor government, which more than halved the budget in agriculture. That is what the Labor Party think of agriculture. By the time we came in we had to refurbish all the requirements, whether for biosecurity or for research and development, because the Labor Party have no vision in agriculture. That continues to be the case, because the biggest threat to agriculture is the fact that they have weakness in the agriculture portfolio—a person who cannot even stand up for the dams portfolio and who has rolled over and offered up $235.2 million from the dams portfolio. It is a shame that they do not actually take it seriously. It is a shame that that they had the same weakness when they closed down the live cattle trade and created massive problems through the north of Australia. It is the same type of weakness they showed when they bought all the water back from Collarenebri and put 58 people out of work in a town of 700. That is the sort of decimation you get with the Labor Party: a party who do not believe in jobs in regional areas, a party who do not take agriculture seriously and a party who would put at risk our agricultural future in this nation.