Joel Fitzgibbon (Hunter, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture and Resources) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I begin my contribution by formally moving the second reading amendment which has been distributed in my name. I move:

That all words after 'That' be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:

'whilst not declining to give the bill a second reading, the House criticises the Government on its failed record in assisting drought affected farmers'

I rise to speak to the Farm Household Support Amendment (Relief Measures) Bill (No. 1) 2020. I can indicate, as does the second reading amendment, that Labor will be supporting the bill. I think this is the 14th bill since the introduction of the farm household allowance in 2014. That doesn't just mean the government has amended the legislation 14 times. There have been many more amendments than that, because of course each bill contains more than one amendment.

This time around the government is seeking to improve the bill from the perspective of farmers by removing the provisions enabling the reconciliation of income over the period for farmers. Basically it is so that if their income was higher than anticipated in that fiscal year, so it created an overpayment, they wouldn't have to repay that money. Labor supports that proposition, although I do note there are many on this side of the House who often become a little bit bewildered by the flexibility of the farm household allowance in so many areas that isn't available to other welfare recipients. I would like to make that point on behalf of a number of my colleagues here who might not be in a position to speak to this bill today. With each of the 14 bills and the original bill, we've consistently supported both the establishment of and changes to the farm household allowance. It is not just for farmers in drought but rather for farmers in any sort of hardship. Since its introduction, it has grown to be seen—as you would expect—as a measure to help farmers in drought.

I've been highly critical of the allowance since 2014. It has been the subject of much controversy in this place, including right back in about 2015, when the then minister, the member for New England, gave an incorrect answer in this place—one he still has not corrected, by the way—and then proceeded to cover his mislead by doctoring the Hansard. It was an event which triggered some horrible events in this town, including the sacking of the then secretary of the Department of Agriculture, a highly qualified, effective and respected public servant. So the farm household allowance has a chequered history.

It's now known as the payment that is very hard to get—the payment that is very hard to qualify for, despite all the changes made in this place. It is a payment well known for its very lengthy application form and the difficulty people face in negotiating that form. Most of all, it's now known as the payment farmers are cut from after receiving the payment for four years. And they continue to be cut from that payment. It must be up to 2,000 farming families by now, I suspect—I don't have any updated figures—that have been cut from the payment, despite the fact that they are still facing hardship and despite the fact that many of them, despite welcome torrential rains, remain very much in drought.

I lament the fact that the government hasn't agreed to change that and allow people who are still in drought to continue to receive the payment for as long as that is the case. These changes will be welcomed by some farmers, but they pale into insignificance when compared to what really needs to be done, and that is for the government to step in and stop cutting off drought-affected farming families, desperate families, from this payment.

I want to share a couple of quotes with the House. The first is from Adam Marshall, who is the minister for agriculture in New South Wales. He's referring to Minister Littleproud and his performance on drought. He says:

I've had a gutful of him mouthing off all of the time. He flies in on his big aeroplane out to regions like Inverell in my electorate, offers nothing, blames everyone, hops back on his plane and flies somewhere else.

I share that quote with the House because I think it's so typical of the performance of this government on the drought front over the course of the last six years. I very vividly remember, in February 2014, the then Prime Minister Tony Abbott going on a two-day drought tour. Ironically, it rained cats and dogs while he was visiting outback Queensland. What's interesting about that is that, since then, we've had a number of drought tours by various prime ministers and various ministers. In addition to that, of course, we've had the National Drought Summit, the Joint Agency Drought Taskforce, the Special Envoy for Drought Assistance and Recovery, the Coordinator-General for Drought and the National Drought and Flood Agency, but what we haven't had and continue not to have is a national, coordinated, comprehensive drought plan, something we should've had now for at least the last few years. The government, by then, certainly had the time to put in place what the COAG committee SCoPI had envisaged when the Intergovernmental Agreement on National Drought Program Reform was signed in 2013.

That plan, agreed by all the states, the Commonwealth, the National Farmers Federation and, I think, pretty much every farm organisation in the country, was to conclude that the old exceptional-circumstances measures weren't working and that we needed to start from scratch. SCoPI, a body that Tony Abbott and the member for New England abolished after the 2013 election, was charged with progressing the development of the new model. And, after all of this time, there is no model. We still have a grab bag of measures, the value of which has been massively overestimated by this government. We were highly critical of the government when it claimed it was spending $7 billion on drought assistance. Nothing could be further from the truth. And now those opposite say they are spending $8 billion. I challenge the minister at the table, when he sums up on this bill, to demonstrate to me—I won't even challenge him to demonstrate how they got to the $7 billion; I'm going to make it easy for him this evening and simply challenge him to show the House and farmers listening to this debate how he got from $7 billion to $8 billion.

But I will just quickly say this: going back to the period when the government was claiming $7 billion, we know with great certainty that $5 billion of that is the Future Drought Fund. The Future Drought Fund does not have $5 billion in it. It has $3.9 billion in it, but that doesn't mean there is $3.9 billion available for drought affected farmers. What will be available, sometime in the future, is a $100 million annual dividend from that fund and, because the dividend is lower than the earnings on the fund, it will grow to $5 billion. But it is totally and comprehensively misleading to count $5 billion as a contribution to the assistance being provided to drought affected farmers. It's just deceitful to count that $5 billion. And even the $100 million each year won't begin to be drawn down until after 30 June this year—not one cent of that will go to farmers. That's not what it's designed to do. It's designed to be invested in new and innovative programs to build drought resilience. The government has made that quite clear. I have no problem with that as a principle. We do need to be investing in drought resilience, but the government should not be claiming that $5 billion is going to farmers when clearly it is not, when clearly not one cent of that—when it grows to $5 billion, which it will not do for a number of years—will go to farmers. Sure, sometime in the future, if the $100 million each year is spent effectively, farmers might benefit from the innovation which flows from the fund in the out years, but it is misleading to suggest that farmers are now benefitting from that $5 billion fund.

RIC loans, Regional Investment Corporation loans: $1 billion. We are already at $6 billion. Everyone in this place knows that it is also deceitful to take the capital value of the loans, if let, if provided to farmers, remembering that they won't always be taken up by farmers. In fact, we know historically that the take-up rate has been very poor. But, even if they were all taken up by farmers, the cost to the government is not a billion dollars; the cost to the government is the administrative cost and whatever it is between the bond rate—that is, the government's borrowing rate—and what they lend the loans at. You could argue that, if the government is lending at one per cent or two per cent, which is higher than the bond rate, then the government is technically making money. So there is $6 billion straightaway that the government should not be claiming as drought assistance. This money is not going to farmers.

There are a whole range of expenditure measures, like the Joint Agency Drought Taskforce: $5.6 million. Do members really think that any farmer, adversely affected by drought, is benefitting from that $5.6 million? The Country Women's Association of Australia: $5 million. We all love our Country Women's Association; they do wonderful work and have done so for many decades—maybe more than a century. But we saw just this week the CWA heavily criticising the government for its latest little rort, expecting them to be handing out $500 vouchers at country shows to farmers. What sort of process is that? It's a wrong process and one which was called out by the Country Women's Association.

Bureau of Meteorology radars: $77.2 million. They're likely to be something that is going to help our farmers, but this is an investment by government which is necessary anyway. Surely the government's not trying to claim in this place that the only reason it's spending $77 million on BOM radars is the drought. That just doesn't make any sense. This would have been something in the capital program for a long, long time, I would expect.

The National Water Infrastructure Development Fund—we know all the problems with that. The DCP, Drought Communities Program extension: $116 million. We know how farcical that has been. While councils which have been able to qualify for the million dollars have welcomed it, we all know it's hardly making a big difference in those communities. We all know that a million dollars into a council's coffers will bring one capital program forward, maybe, but is not likely to create much economic activity in those communities.

This is massively inflated, and the minister continues to come to this dispatch box every day and claim that $8 billion figure. I don't know who he thinks he's talking to, or, more particularly, who he thinks he's misleading, because the farmers who rely most on the assistance know it's not true. They say to me all the time, 'Well, if he's spending $8 billion, where is it? Because I'm not seeing any of it.'

I want to return to the Future Drought Fund, because the Future Drought Fund was announced by the Prime Minister in October of 2018 at the now infamous drought summit. Why do I call it 'infamous'? Because everything that came from the drought summit, or the substantial things that came from the drought summit, were announced before the drought summit began that morning. That was 'Scotty from marketing' in full flight—a drought summit just for the six o'clock news that night. He turned up that morning, did a doorstop on the way in and announced the outcome of the summit before it even began. That was in October 2018. Here we are still contemplating, hopefully, $100 million coming from what he calls a $5 billion fund sometime after July this year. But one can't have a great deal of confidence that we're going to see much action soon after that.

I don't want to be critical of the advisory consultative committee doing the work for the government. It's headed by a friend of mine, Brent Finlay, the former chair of the NFF. I'm certainly sure he's consulting everywhere and doing a great job. But I just wonder whether he thinks, in his quieter times when he's alone, any of this money will ever be seen flowing to any worthwhile programs. What we've got now is we're inching towards a draft plan. Then, after a draft plan, we'll move to some funding programs, and then we will move to the budget processes, where the government, despite all the alleged rigour of the plan and the funding programs, will move to make some decisions about where the money is spent.

Given the recent performance of the government, whether it be sports programs or infrastructure programs, it's hard to have any confidence that those programs will be robust, well targeted and designed to produce the greatest return for that $100 million investment. I hope I am proven wrong, but I have very little confidence, given the government's record in the past—its ad hoc approach to drought funding more generally and the likelihood that that will be repeated the next time around.

On that same note, talking about funds to build resilience, the minister regularly likes to crow about the stewardship program. Some way back he made an announcement that it would spend $34 million on a stewardship program. This is, in effect, designed to do the same things that the drought fund is designed to do with its $100 million. But, alas, we haven't seen much action from that either. Now we have the National Farmers Federation being given $4 million to trial the scheme. Since the government announced that $4 million to the National Farmers Federation to help it along with its cashflow, I've not heard a thing. Maybe I've missed it. Maybe the trial is well in advance. I invite the minister, when he sums up the bill, to tell me that I'm wrong if I am wrong and, if I am wrong, to give me some detail about how that $4 million—it's a lot of money to a farming organisation—is being spent, because I suspect that not much is happening with that at all.

This is getting interesting now because this, of course, takes us to the debate of the week, and that is the opposition's pledge to aspire to zero net emissions by 2050. That is something that's been pilloried by members in this House. Zero net emissions for the agriculture sector is absolutely about resilience. The NFF, in its 2030 Roadmap, talks about the $40 billion that might be available to the land sector if we can put in place an architecture which allows them to participate in the carbon economy.

The government says that Labor's plans will hurt the farm sector. No—they will be of assistance, properly designed, to the ag sector, and of course to the forestry sector. We desperately need trees in the ground in this country, and the best way to get trees into the ground is to incentivise the private sector to plant those trees. And, since the devastating bushfires of this summer, that's something that is needed more now than ever before.

Some of the things that need to be done are so simple, like the changes to the water rule, which was put in place in a way which effectively knocked out those seeking to plant softwood timber, because the carbon credit is only available to them effectively if they're planting in places where it doesn't rain sufficiently to grow the trees. That could be fixed tomorrow with one stroke of the legislative pen, but this government is unprepared to do it. In fact, Minister Littleproud, during the election campaign, when I committed the Labor Party to doing it, described it as 'reckless'. So, again, I invite the minister to respond to that when he gets to his feet.

But the NFF is saying it. Meat and Livestock Australia is saying it. The grains industry is saying it. They're all saying, right across the ag sector, that there are amazing opportunities for the sector. In fact, the NFF says that participation in the carbon economy will lift productivity and profitability. That's what they're saying. They are saying they have an ambition to be well advanced to zero net emissions by 2030. Yet the government says that the Labor Party, by embracing an ambition of zero net emissions by 2050, is going to 'kill' the agriculture sector. Well, they should hang their heads in shame because it's not true. The sector knows it. We know it. And I suspect the majority of producers and growers know it too. But they will continue to weaponise climate change as an issue because they see economic advantage in doing so.

That takes me to my second quote, which is from Niall Blair. I quoted earlier from Adam Marshall, the previous minister in New South Wales. Now I am quoting from Niall Blair, the person he replaced. He is now Professor Niall Blair at Charles Sturt University. This is his area of expertise. And he's very honest, because he told Fairfax papers, today, this:

Farming is hard enough and becoming harder with more droughts, severe storms and unreliable weather patterns. Ultimately, this will have an impact—

on the food security of our nation. He goes on:

A net zero emissions future—

in Australia—

provides nothing but opportunities—

nothing but opportunities, he says, for our farmers. And, with 30 years to get there, they are ready, willing and able. Those opposite might say: 'Niall Blair doesn't speak for farmers.' But I know he has got a deep background in the sector. I know he has been their minister. I know he knows a lot of them. So it's a pretty courageous contribution to come to this dispatch box or to stand in this place and to say that Niall Blair doesn't know what farmers are thinking.

So, rather than making farmers feel less secure by barking in this place, every day, that a policy construction is going to 'kill' them, the minister at the table and his colleagues, those on the benches on the other side, should be going to their farm communities and saying: 'We want to work with the Labor Party on this. We think there are opportunities in this. You shouldn't be worried about this because this is going to be good for you.' And why wouldn't they be prepared to say that? The New South Wales Premier, Gladys Berejiklian, is saying it. Every state and territory leader is saying it. The National Farmers Federation is saying it. Meat and Livestock Australia is saying it. The grains industry was saying it just today in the Western Australian papers. The BCA and Santos, BP, BHP—they're all saying it. Those last three companies I named aren't saying it specifically as to the agriculture sector, although I am sure they'd believe it, but they are saying it's good for the economy. It's good for our natural environment, but it's good for our economy and jobs. So it shouldn't be so hard for those opposite to recognise that the majority of the community wants us to act on our natural environment. They want us to address the challenges of a changing climate, but they want us to do it in a way that doesn't do harm to our economy or to local jobs. We can give them that guarantee, but, no, those opposite don't want to do that. They see political opportunity. They have been weaponising this issue for political gain for up to two decades.

The great tragedy is that if the legislative architecture put in place by the Gillard government was still in place, we wouldn't even know it, except for the fact that farmers would have been taking advantage of that carbon economy for the past 10 years. We wouldn't even know it was there. It was the case that for the six years we were in office greenhouse gas emissions were falling. In the six years since we lost government, greenhouse gas emissions have been rising until recently, when they flatlined—more from luck than from any work of this government. If we had kept Labor's legislative architecture, we would have been applauded when we went to global forums. We would have been seen as the leaders on this front. And to those who are not doing enough, those who are not meeting their Paris commitments—or worse, those who have withdrawn from Paris—we would have been able to say, with great credibility, 'You need to do more,' and acknowledging that only by acting as a collective globally can we make a real difference. We can't say that now. We can't go to those international forums and tell people they need to do more. How can we when we are not doing anything ourselves? In recent years, our carbon emissions have been growing not falling—although now they are, at best, flatlining. People at those international forums all know that our current Prime Minister is intent on using Kyoto credits to fudge his figures. They think that's an outrage, and so they should.

Just like the country's coalminers, who will not be adversely affected by whatever Labor produces in the fullness of time, our farmers do not need to fear the aspiration of zero net emissions. Indeed, there is opportunity for them here. We've had six years of dithering, six years of inaction, six years of committee after committee, review after review, summit after summit, a drought summit, a bush summit, a drought coordinator, a drought envoy—we've had it all—and now we've got a drought minister. But we haven't seen any results—it has all been fluff—and the symbol of it all is an $8 billion figure that is simply untrue. The minister, when he summarises, will want to get up and defend that $8 billion. He needs to explain to the Australian people how it is credible to claim it—the money would be very, very welcome—but he won't be able to do so.

I close my contribution by appealing to those who sit opposite to stop weaponising the issue of climate change, to come with the majority of the parliament in reaching a political settlement on these issues and, for the first time, make a genuine commitment to making a difference. For the first time, commit to meeting the commitments Malcolm Turnbull made on our behalf in Paris—not the Labor Party, but Malcolm Turnbull. Start being honest with the Australian people by first admitting you're not spending $8 billion on drought and then by admitting you have been completely incompetent in your response to the drought. Tell farmers that they will not be disadvantaged but in fact advantaged by zero net emissions by 2050.

Most important of all, tell your constituency that the climate wars are over, that you're tired of weaponising this issue; rather, for the first time, you've come to the conclusion that it's time to do something meaningful—to work in a bipartisan manner so that we can produce some architecture that will be overwhelmingly beneficial to our natural environment and, just as importantly, overwhelmingly beneficial to all of the Australian community, including those who work in the agriculture sector, those who work in the forestry sector and those who work in the fisheries sector. It doesn't always seem obvious, but the fisheries sector is dramatically impacted by drought and it is dramatically impacted by the terrible bushfires we have had over this summer.

It's time for those opposite to end the political games and to work in the interest of the Australian community.

Ross Vasta (Bonner, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is the amendment seconded?

Mark Butler (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the amendment and reserve my right to speak.

Ross Vasta (Bonner, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The original question was that this bill be now read a second time. To this the honourable member for Hunter has moved as amendment that all words after 'That' be omitted with a view to substituting other words. The question now is that the amendment be agreed to.

Damian Drum (Nicholls, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We've heard the member for Hunter try to appeal to his coalminers from the Hunter region, saying the Labor Party isn't going to take your job; the Labor Party isn't going to put up prices. I think his speech was more about making a plea to people to believe him than about making any legitimate point.

This bill, the Farm Household Support Amendment (Relief Measures) Bill (No. 1) 2020, is about this government, a government I'm very proud to be a part of, giving a hand-up to people that are in a really, really tough bind—people working on farms who find themselves in drought.

I first became associated at a federal level with the farm household allowance when the milk crisis hit in May 2016. Murray Goulburn, as they were back then, realised they'd been paying their farmers a price they couldn't afford to continue to pay, so they said to their dairy farmers, 'We've been paying you over the odds for the last six to 12 months; we want all that money back.' Then we had others like Fonterra say, 'Yes, us too. We want our money back as well.' So they set a much lower price and then demanded hundreds of thousands of dollars. These farmers, who had obviously been meeting their commitments, needed to somehow or other find hundreds of thousands of dollars to repay that money. It put our dairy farmers in an incredibly tough position, and many farmers simply got out. They simply couldn't repay this money. That was my first taste of that, seeing the dire situation that so many of our farmers had been put in through no fault of their own but simply the mismanagement of the processors. And the processors were all playing dumb, saying, 'It's the fault of the CEO.' The CEO was telling them that they could afford a certain price that they couldn't.

So we had a whole dairy industry that went into freefall. All of a sudden, prices were slashed, and farmers that had built in a much higher return on their produce were trying to work out how their business model for the farm was going to work with literally hundreds of thousands of dollars slashed from their income. The need for farm household allowance absolutely spiked as we went through those months of the milk crisis.

There were a whole range of meetings that were held around the Goulburn Murray and through northern Victoria about how we needed to simplify the application process that was put in place—and it was quite a strenuous and arduous process to be able to get farm household allowance. It took on board your assets. So many farms are tied up in trusts, tied up in family businesses, and so many farmers have off-farm assets and they have very complicated business models. When you have such a complicated business model it's difficult to actually be able to receive a type of government assistance that, in many instances, very much rivals and looks like Newstart allowance. It's a very similar type of commitment that the Australian government want and demand on behalf of their taxpayers. These farmers have to supply an incredible amount of detail and really do have to open up their books to ensure that they're able to get the assistance that we are able to offer.

It's also been refreshing that the government has listened to so many of these farmers' concerns. We've had issues about the protracted and prolonged application process. Many of the farmers are in quite a sustained and prolonged state of stress when they actually get to the stage when they need to apply for farmer household assistance and support. That puts them in a difficult situation when it comes to filling out so many forms. We have simplified this process dramatically.

Prime Minister Morrison and Deputy Prime Minister McCormack have had a lead role, along with the various agricultural ministers, in simplifying this process. The bills that we passed late last year and the bills that we are now moving to get through today are more attuned to making this process simpler. We've made sure that people who have been on the farmer household allowance for four years out of ten were going to be able to exit off it with a lump sum payment. We put that through, and that had the broad support of the advocacy groups. I know people would like to be on it forever; however, that's not the intent. What we've been able to do is find some middle ground here. As I say, for those with four years out of ten we have been able to exit over 1,000 farmers off, and that has effectively given them the opportunity to have that once-off lump sum payment as they exit the program.

We've also needed to have the asset value of the farms increased; we've been able to capture more farmers by taking the asset threshold up to $5.5 million. That's had a significant impact as farmers realise that they may have a significant asset in the shape of their farm. However, what we also realise is that sometimes that doesn't equate to their ability to get through a drought, to get through natural disasters and to work their way through, back to profitability. What they need is a little bit of help that puts some food on the table and maintains that dignity that farmer household allowance enables them to maintain.

When we think about the tough road that many of our farmers are treading at the moment, it's somewhat worrying when you compare what could have been had the election on 18 May last year produced a different result. Many of the farmers in my electorate of Nicholls are facing ridiculously high water charges. The pressure that has been put on the irrigation sector by the Murray-Darling Basin Plan was going to be made worse by an incoming Labor government when you looked at their policies in relation to water and what they planned to do with water if they were to assume government in May 2019. They made it very clear that they were going to go after 450 gigalitres of water from the Murray-Darling Basin, water that currently has a social and economic neutrality test around it, which means taking more water out of the agriculture sector simply cannot be done if you're going to cause social and economic detriment to the community surrounding those water projects. The shadow water minister, Mr Burke, said, 'No, we're going to squash that. We're going to go back and get rid of that definition. We are going to make sure if anyone wants to sell their water they can. If anybody wants to get involved in any water delivery program, they can do that.' This is going to take even more water out of the consumptive pool. The Labor Party were very bullish and very up front about this policy. They wanted to take more water out of agriculture. And the more water you take out of agriculture, the quicker that water spikes in price every time you go through a dry spell. So it was very clear in the lead-up to the election where the Labor Party sat when it came to water policy.

We heard the previous member's brazen attitude towards the price of electricity. Electricity forms one of the key costs of many farming businesses. To think you can effectively throw in an energy policy that is not costed and doesn't have the impacts for Australian farmers and simply say, 'We don't care about the impacts of our zero emissions by 2050. We're heading down this path and whatever will be will be,' just puts more pressure on our farmers as they look towards their future, and the future of farming is tough at the moment. There are many young farmers out there who are looking at their farming practice, their farming business, and they're running the ruler over it. They're saying, 'Do I really want to commit the next 20 to 30 years of my life to agriculture?' Whilst there are some incredible opportunities, there are also some incredible challenges—namely drought, ridiculously high water prices and uncertainty around water policy—and all of these make a future in agriculture a little less certain. That's why, again, we have to be very careful when we are helping our farmers through these natural disasters in the form of bushfires, in the form of drought, in the form of an incredible turmoil such as the dairy industry did in 2016.

One of the components of the legislation we're debating today is the enabling of more flexibility in what the farmer has to do to receive an on-farm assessment. We had a very strict 28-day time limit on that assessment and, while these assessments will still need to be completed, we have actually expanded the group of personnel that will be able to conduct an on-farm assessment and we have slightly relaxed the stringent 28-day time limit. I think that will help in a certain way. It has also made it a little bit easier for a farmer to calculate whether or not they are likely to continue to qualify for the farm household allowance. Your income will be based on your current income.

The previous system did create the situation where as people earned a little too much, they found they had to pay back money because at that time their income went over the threshold. So if that can be also slightly relaxed, that will make it easier for our farmers to move on to farm household allowance, stay on it for the right amount of time, receive the right amount of support and then also remove themselves from the fund once their income goes over a certain amount.

I think in general we have seen that the farm household support is at the right level for those farmers and families receiving it. It's not meant to be able to sustain a poor operating farmer; it's meant to be able to give those farmers going through a really tough situation on a temporary basis that little extra support they need so they can withstand these droughts, floods, bushfires and downturns in various sectors and still have a vibrant, economically viable business at the other end.

This is why I believe the farm household allowance is achieving the ends that it was meant to achieve in the first place. It has helped more than 13,000 farmers and their partners throughout the entirety of the program. Over $400 million has been given out over the last six years and it really has improved the financial circumstances of so many of our people that have been going through a very tough time. I hope it continues to fulfil this role. Legislation like that which we are talking about today will continue to make this process simpler, more practical, and more easily and better able to fit the needs of our farmers. I certainly hope that it continues to create the results that have been created in the past. I want to thank the various ministers who had input into making sure this fund was amended to make these important changes.

Bob Katter (Kennedy, Katter's Australian Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Speaker, in rising to speak on the Farm Household Support Amendment (Relief Measures) Bill (No. 1) 2020, I am very intrigued by the federal government claiming credit for the financial household package. In fact, it was the party I belong to, the KAP, that initiated the drought summit down here, the roundtable. It was chaired by Rowell Walton, the president of our party. Out of it Wayne Swan, the ALP Treasurer, to the shame of the government, gave us these financial assistance grants. If you were not getting welfare payments, the government gave you a top-up to enable you to have at least a welfare income for your family.

All of the credit goes to the Rural Action Council of Far North Queensland: the president, Johnny Gambino; the secretary, Bernie O'Shea; and Makse Srhoj. I won't name all of them, but Johnny Mete and Scotty Dixon have to be named. Those people were determined to get a number of changes through, and that was one of those changes. They also secured from the LNP an agreement that, if they were elected, there would be a mandatory code of conduct to answer the power of Woolworths and Coles—a promise that was flagrantly breached and almost led to the sacking of one of the McGauran brothers as the minister because he just couldn't live with the shame of going to an election promising we would do something about Woolworths and Coles with a mandatory code of conduct, and all they were asking for was a sales dock. Is this a big thing to ask—that Woolworths and Coles gives a sales docket? There is a necessity for that if you are a mango farmer—and I was a tiny mango farmer. You send your mangoes in, if you've got an early season, and you get $25 a box. Next week, when all the other mango farmers come on, it will be $16 a box. The big supermarket chains returned the mangoes, saying: 'Oh well, there were some problems with the mangoes. If you don't like it, too bad'. Now the mangos have lost two weeks of their shelf life and you can't sell them. Of course, in the meantime the farmer has been bankrupted. He got $25 a box and now he can't get anything for a box that is over-ripe. Any of the fruit and vegetables would fall into that category. All they were asking for was a sales docket.

At Mareeba, the Deputy Prime Minister of Australia stood in front of a meeting of 800 people called by the Rural Action Council and promised them they would get a mandatory code of conduct, which was just a sales docket. Woolworths and Coles said, 'We didn't actually buy them off you; we just took them on consignment. Now we've looked at them and we're returning them to you.' But, if there was a sales docket, they couldn't do that; they couldn't pull that trick. Is this an unreasonable thing to ask for? Peter McGauran just couldn't do it. So they replaced him with a germ from the Liberal Party, who had no difficulty whatsoever in doing it. I won't mention his name.

You have been in power for 26 of the last 32 years, and how's agriculture faring? Our cattle numbers are down from 33 million to 22 million. Did the free markets help the cattle industry? Not bloody likely. We're down from 33 million head to 22 million head, one of the lowest figures ever in my lifetime. Did they help the wool industry? Well, alright: the ALP deregulated wool—they can take the full blame for that one—but did you put it back? No. You didn't put it back. So how's wool faring? It's the biggest industry this country has had since its inception as a country in the 1890s. Right through to 1980, it was bigger than coal. What did you do? The ALP deregulated; you blokes never reregulated.

So let's see how the wool industry is faring under your great free-market system. We had 172 million sheep; now we have 66 million. Oh, jeez, they've done really well under your free market system! Let's move on to the sugar industry. I'm not using grain as an example because grain really depends on seasons. Its income is very seasonal, so I'll leave that out. The other one of the big four is the sugar cane industry. Every town in Queensland north of Nambour, including Nambour, is a sugar cane town or a sugar cane city, such as Townsville and Cairns. Not Rockhampton, not Gladstone and not Bowen, but, outside of those three, the other 30 are all sugar towns. They've been created by the sugar industry; their industry is sugar. This is one of the biggest industries in Australia. How are they faring? They're down 15 per cent. The reality is that they're closing a mill every two or three years. Now there are only about 21 or 22 mills left in Australia, so they're on doomsday road. How's the dairy industry going—the other one of the big five? It's down 50 per cent. Here's your scorecard on wool: from 172 million sheep down to 66 million sheep. Here's your scorecard on cattle: from 33 million down to 22 million. Here's your scorecard on dairy: down 50 per cent. Here's your scorecard on sugar: down 15 per cent, and a sugar mill closes every three years. There are only 21 or 22 sugar mills left in Australia. There's your scorecard.

Why have your policies been so absolutely disastrous? It's because of the destruction of my party, the Country Party. Doug Anthony was a very young man and I wasn't in the parliament at the time. He got me aside. He's six foot six and he's of Sicilian descent, so you listen to him. You wouldn't do much else! He looked at me with his blue eyes and he said, 'Don't worry about subsidies or tariffs. Our party's never worried about subsidies or tariffs. This party dies in the ditches over the value of the dollar.' All we're asking, if you're fair dinkum about free markets, is: why don't you let the dollar free-float? Why don't you let that happen? 'Oh, no, that's different. We might lose some votes there.' So we have free markets while we drive our agriculture to extinction, but, when it comes to buying votes in the cities, 'Oh no, we're not free marketing then. Oh, no way.' Those of you who are much older than most here will remember Billy McMahon announcing a revaluation of the dollar. Doug Anthony, three months out from an election, took great delight in announcing a devaluation the next day. If you knew Doug Anthony, you knew what the outcome would be. Nine days later, we had a devaluation and a towering humiliation for the Prime Minister of Australia. He deserved it and he had it coming, and didn't I enjoy watching him cop it!

'Jack' McEwen talked about protection. I had dinner with the great man. Before I was a member of parliament, he had me to dinner. He said, 'There is no such thing as protection. There is only nursery protection to enable an industry to get going.' I think he was stretching things a little bit there—as much as I love the great man, and I sit under a picture of him in my office. Secondly, he said our rural industries must ride the roller-coaster of the world market prices, which are very, very cyclical. When prices go up, tax takes the top off the up curve. When the price goes down, the banks elongate the bottom curve. What we do with protection is try to even that out. The wool scheme was a classic case in point: when the price went through the roof we dumped wool on the market, and when the price went down we bought—a classic example of McEwenism. We moved onto the free market.

I never make assertions without backing them up. Keating, when he came in, did the right thing; he allowed the dollar to free float. If you're fair dinkum free market then you allow the dollar to float. The essence of free-market economics is probably the dollar. He allowed it to free float. He was a good guy—fancy me saying Keating was a good guy! But then he wet his pants, to put it crudely, and raced off and propped it back up over 96c. He did the right thing but then he went to water, became a dingo, dogged it and propped it back up at 96c. Then Costello came in and allowed it to free float. Good on you, Pete! Then he got terrified when it went down to 49c. I make the point that when it was allowed to free float I knew one bloke who went to 49c. I dare say there's no doubt that that's where it should have been, at 49c. He propped it up over 95c because he wet his pants and dogged it as well. Both of them dogged it. They said they were free market but, when they really had to wear the tough side of it, like Doug Anthony had to, they were dogs.

If you're a farmer in Australia, you enjoy six per cent of your income from the government—these are the OECD figures, not my figures. I always average it over the last three years, so these figures are averaged over three years. If you're an Australian farmer, you get under six per cent of your income from the government. If you're a farmer on earth, you get 41 per cent. Every farmer on earth gets 41 per cent of his income from the government, except if you live in Australia. The only other idiot nation is New Zealand—well, we understand about the Kiwis! Forty-one per cent versus six per cent. That's like running a 100-metre race and giving your opponent a 35-metre head start. How are you going to win a 100-metre race? I could beat Linford Christie over the 100 metres—I must admit, I was pretty fast in my day—by gaining that sort of start.

We get preached to about free markets. I did go to university and I did do economics—I did until I left, anyway! I was taught that when two people have 90 per cent of the market it is called an oligopoly, or some might even go so far as to say duopoly. When Coles and Woolworths had 50.1 per cent of the market, their mark-up that I recorded was 126 per cent. When they got over 80 per cent of the market—arguably over 90 per cent of the market—their mark-up went to 276 per cent. Nick Xenophon did the same, and he used a much bigger basket of goods than I did. For him, the mark-up was 326 per cent. The difference between what the poor old farmer gets and what the poor old consumer has to pay has gone from 126 per cent to somewhere between 276 and 326 per cent. Was it good for the consumers? No! It was no good for the farmers and it was no good for the consumers, yet you people persist. There is not a single person that I know on either side of the parliament who is game to get up and breathe a word against the free market ideology.

We have a saying in the bush, 'When your neighbour starts preaching religion, reach for your branding iron,' and I've found it to be pretty true, even though I'm a churchgoer myself. So when I hear politicians start talking ideology—as one of my old cow-cocky mates put it, he said, 'Mate, when I hear politicians start spruiking about ideology and their beliefs, I start reaching not for my branding iron, mate, but for my shooting iron,' and I think he had it right.

We're talking about how the government is dealing with the drought, but it's not really the drought; we all know that every farmer is going broke. I've given you the figures. How you can stand up in front of farmers and seriously say to them, 'I'm looking after you,' I do not know. I couldn't do it. I reached the stage where I couldn't do it and I got out. Mr Deputy Speaker McVeigh, you're from Queensland; you would be aware of my background. In surveys that were done in Queensland before the fall of the Bjelke-Petersen government, if you said 'National Party', what was the first word to come into your head? It was 'Bjelke-Petersen'. If you said 'National Party' again, what's the second word? The second word was 'Katter'. I had an identification rating the same as Prime Minister Bob Hawke. I was the National Party in Queensland, along with Bjelke-Petersen— (Time expired)

Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Farm Household Support Amendment (Relief Measures) Bill (No.1) 2020. This is the latest set in a group of modifications that the government has made in recent times to farm household assistance. While I fully accept that some parts of Australia have had good rain—in fact, more than ample in some places—there are a lot that are still pretty dry. We had a recent rainfall event not far from me. About 10 kilometres up the road there was 50 or 60 millimetres of rain, and we managed nine on my property, so it's still pretty dry around there. Through South Australia we had some moderate rains, but they were a while ago now, and through much of eastern Australia, and even Western Australia now, the drought has still got a firm grip. We hope it's loosening, but until that time the government needs to remain strong, support communities and support farmers to help them stay on their properties so they're there when the rains do return.

What happens here is we've got this farm household allowance payment. As people access it, they come to people like me and other members of parliament, and to the rural councillors, and say, 'It's really difficult to fill out this paperwork; it's really difficult to tick all the boxes.' So we've gone along a path of simplification. These amendments are the next step in some of this simplification. We're trying to remove some of the pitfalls and traps for people who aren't necessarily used to dealing with copious paperwork. Even where they are, it is difficult enough. Even farm business advisers tell me this is a difficult path to access this support measure.

The first set of amendments remove the provisions that have given rise to income reconciliation. Rather than the person having to report what their income has been over the last fortnight, they make an estimate of what their income will be over the next 12 months. If they underestimate that amount and they receive too much income then they have to send payments back to Centrelink. What we're doing now is just basing those payments on current income. It simplifies it greatly. They don't have to worry about what's going to happen next year or indeed what happened two years ago. Now they merely have to focus on the amount of money they are earning at the moment. They will report that, and that will be the simple reporting process.

The other thing we are doing is providing for a single rate of the farm household allowance. For those that don't readily understand what happens, it's a bit like with the pension; there's a taper in there. If your income goes up a bit, you lose some of the farm household allowance. If your income goes up a bit more, you lose a bit more, and eventually you reach a threshold where it disappears altogether. And obviously the opposite is also true. This means that as a person's income that they have been reporting every fortnight goes up or down—depending maybe on what off-farm income they have earned or sales from the farm—their taper rate has been adjusting as well. It's been a pitfall for people. They are really concerned that they are going to get a bill at the end of the year for having accepted too much money in the first place. So we are removing that taper, we are flattening it out. There will be one payment for all people. If you qualify you qualify, and you'll get paid. If your income is too high, you will not get paid. It's quite simple. That should provide some real relief to people.

We need to put our head in the space of people who are facing drought. I'd been through a few tough ones before I got to this place. I can remember sending my wife off farm in the mid-eighties to go to Whyalla, which is 170 kilometres away. She was pregnant. I had the slightly under two-year-old in my care as I wandered around the farm making sure the jobs were done. It was a tough time. We've been challenged through our farming life; it was not the only time, but that is a graphic example.

And, in amongst all that, it's not easy to actually go and ask someone for some help. And then, when you are asking for their help, you've got to bare your soul to get the payment. So the government is recognising that. We can't go recklessly throwing taxpayers' money around. We have a responsibility to the taxpayer to ensure that the money is going to the right people. In this case, by this simplification process, we are removing some of those obstacles and making it easier for people, but we are certainly not removing the rigour altogether.

One of the other amendments is to remove the 28-day time limit for a farm financial assessment—the assessment which clarifies whether you are eligible for the payment in the first place and have a viable ongoing concern. One of those very interesting things about drought support of any kind is that somebody has to make an assessment—whether you are just prolonging the agony for somebody trying to hold onto an almost extinct farming enterprise or whether they've got a real future if you get them through a tough patch. So it's important that we don't give money to people who have an underlying unviability; we need to actually support those who have an opportunity to press on and be viable farming families in the future. So instead of having a really tight time frame of 28 days, which is very difficult for people to meet—they are not always able to get the right person to make the assessment in that time—we are providing individual flexibility to meet those arrangements and of course find the person to make the relevant assessment. Those are the points I wanted to make in connection with this legislation.

It is worth also going back over some of the changes we have made in recent times. It was back in 2019 that we made the decision to lift to $5 million the maximum net worth of properties eligible for farm household assistance. Some still argue that that's not enough. I think it is substantial. You would have to be a very big farming property indeed if you had $5 million of equity left and a banking institution would not advance you enough money to put food on your table. If you have a $100 million farm and you are only worth $5 million, that's the least of your problems; by the time you've got to that point, you need to be making those tough decisions about your future anyhow. I think that was a very good change and it enabled people with moderately sized farms and moderately sized debts to get some assistance.

One of the other changes made in the second instalment was a change in eligibility to access this assistance from four years in each specified 10-year period instead of four years in the lifetime of the farmer. It means that, if another brace of droughts comes around in the next decade, these people are not automatically excluded from any kind of assistance that might have been around at that time. And these droughts are periodic, and cyclical. It seems not so long ago that we had the Millennium Drought but of course there was a decade between the Millennium Drought and this current drought. So it was quite a while, but for those who are in the game it seems to come often enough. And while different assistance was offered back in the Millennium Drought, it could well be that the same arrangements are in place the next time this level of drought comes around.

The other one was for the simplified assets test, for couples to be able to report their assets as one entity rather than dual entities. Once again, it is about clearing up paperwork and trying to make life easier for those who need the support at this time. But it does give me an opportunity to talk about some of the other very positive things that are happening around supporting farming communities in drought. There are 20 councils, I think, in the electorate of Grey that now have the Drought Communities Program operating, so those million-dollar payments are coming through those councils.

One of the most important forms of assistance that has ever been offered to Australian farmers and one that I made use of when I was farming was farm management deposits. I think they are the single most helpful thing that governments can do to help farmers. Recently, about two years ago, we lifted those cap limits, so each person could have up to $800,000 in farm management deposits. We made changes so it enabled banks to use the farm management deposits to offset borrowings. A farmer might, let's say, have an overdraft with a bank that might be $800,000. They might be paying an interest rate of somewhere around five per cent. They might only be earning two per cent on their farm management deposit and that difference is quite significant. So if the farm management deposit was, say, $500,000, effectively the overdraft they would pay the interest on would only be $300,000. Banks were a little reluctant to take this up in the first instance, but I understand now a number of them have and I congratulate them for that. I think we should all be working together to make sure that we do have productive enterprises out there to capitalise on rain when it arrives.

It makes sense to me that we provide encouragement to governments for farmers to actually make preparation for the inevitable droughts and that's what farm management deposits do. I'm given to reflect that even now, after the droughts we have had, there is over $5 billion held in farm management deposits around Australia. While I can't categorically rule it out, I would suggest that if anyone has significant amounts in their farm management deposits, it probably means they're not drawing on farm household assistance and they're probably not drawing on farm loans. It is like superannuation. You can see the benefit of actually providing the incentive for farmers to put aside this financial haystack for the tough times ahead because that enables them to be completely in control of their future, make their own decisions and not have to rely on the taxpayer to come along and bail them out.

All in all, I thank the government for these latest changes. They are not earth-shaking but they are a significant improvement and a significant relief to those people who need to fill out that paperwork—tick the boxes, cross the other boxes, make sure they say the right words in the right place—and it takes a bit of pressure off people who are under a lot of pressure already.

Brian Mitchell (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to add my support to this Farm Household Support Amendment (Relief Measures) Bill (No. 1) 2020, one of a series of bills we have seen introduced to the House expanding government assistance to our farmers who are undoubtedly doing it tough and to also add my support to the amendment of the shadow minister. Across my electorate of Lyons, particularly the east coast and Southern Midlands, farmers are struggling to feed livestock let alone make a living because of the lack of rain. Earlier this month, farmers in the Baghdad Valley publicly called for a new irrigation scheme which has been long planned, long promised and long delayed by the Tasmanian state Liberal government.

John Medhurst, a farmer, has six tractors and a harvester sitting idle because it so dry. Normally, he would be flat chat this time of year. The drought across the Southern Midlands has been the worst he has seen since 1966. I might add that the Southern Midlands has not been drought-declared by the government, unlike Glamorgan-Spring Bay and Break O'Day on the east coast. I don't know what is needed for a drought declaration from the government to free up $1 million in assistance—perhaps the imminence of an election! The fact is the Southern Midlands is very dry and it needs that money. John says that all the water holes on his property are dry. Nearby sheep farmer Edwin Batt, who used to swim and fish in the creek on his family property, says that the lake is long gone and the creek is bone-dry. He wants the Tasmanian government and Tasmanian Irrigation to get serious about a Southern Midlands irrigation scheme which will provide water security for the region's farmers.

That's what this is all about: providing water security to the region's farmers, which provides an income for farmers. TI has made it clear the scheme is not on its list of high priorities, and it is focusing on delivering schemes elsewhere in the state that are easier and quicker to deliver. But we won't give up. The fact is water security is top of mind for farmers across my electorate. With water security, farmers will have less need to rely on measures such as farm household assistance. But water security in Tasmania is hampered by a lack of a statewide water strategy and the existence of a grab bag of entities and authorities that are each accountable for their own narrow areas of interest but are not accountable for delivering water in any holistic way. Essentially, we have Tasmanian Irrigation, or TI, which enters into partnerships with farmers and the federal and state governments to deliver water for crops and grazing. We have TasWater, an entity owned by the state's councils but runs independently from them, to manage and build infrastructure and deliver drinking water supply. We have the Hydro, a state government GBE, which manages water resources for its electricity generation. They each stick to their own knitting, with none taking a holistic review of water resources for the state.

I've made it clear that it's in farmers' best interests and the interests of Tasmanians as a whole for a statewide water strategy to be developed that examines how much water we have and where it is; how much water is falling from the sky and where; how much of it can be harvested and how; and how feasible it is to move it from where it is not needed to where it is needed. It staggers me that this work has not been done already. I'm sure there are valuable bits of information squirrelled away in various reports. TI will have some information, Hydro will have some and TasWater will have some, but, as far as I've been able to determine, no-one has taken a look at our state as a whole. No-one has taken a look at Tasmania's water resources as a whole—about how we could manage those resources and what we need to do to get best use of them while, of course, maintaining environmental flow. This may all seem a bit off the beaten track when it comes to the specifics of this debate, but I'll say this: if we get water security right, then we provide economic security for farmers, and that is very much at the heart of this bill.

As to the specifics of the bill before us, because of the capital tied up in farms and equipment and because of the importance of primary production to our economy and because we need food and fibre to live, farmers simply cannot walk off the land and seek another job when their income dries up along with the rain. It's for these reasons it has been entirely appropriate that government assists farmers to stay on the land during the lean times in the expectation that, when conditions improve, we are all better off for them having toughed it out. We are talking relatively modest assistance, with payments akin to what people are provided on Newstart. The assistance helps, but every farmer would prefer rain to earn their own income again and not have to receive it. This bill aims to provide relief to farmers by essentially calling off the collection dogs in the event of 'overpayment of assistance'.

Farmers rightly have a special place in our collective national heart. They encapsulate so much of what we like to think of as our national character: resilience, good humour, a no-nonsense work ethic and zero tolerance for airs, graces and bull. But farmers are not the only people in Australia who are struggling. It is important that, while assisting farmers, we do not forget other Australians who also need assistance. If only the government had shown the same empathy for the thousands of Australians formerly receiving Centrelink payments: the victims of the robodebt scandal, who have been chased down with demands for repayment of so-called overpayments. They were overpayments that, in many cases, did not exist, because they had been calculated using a dodgy formula—an illegal, unethical and disgraceful process that this government continues to refuse to apologise for. If only the government had shown those many Australians the same sympathy it shows farmers. It seems, though, that for this government some Australians are more worthy of its attention than others.

More and more Australians, whether they are pensioners, farmers, jobless, students, casually employed or even employed full time in a low-wage job, are struggling with the basic cost of living. Interest rates may be low, but mortgage payments are high. Those who can't afford a deposit have to rent, but rents are skyrocketing. In a regional town in my electorate, just last week I saw a three-bedroom weatherboard house for rent for $500 a week—in a regional town. Public housing lists are a year long for high-priority people. Electricity prices are up, despite promises from the government to get them down. Wages are flat, underemployment is rife and wage theft is rampant. Private health insurance is increasingly out of reach, while public health queues are at record highs.

We all know that poverty is rising in Australia. The latest Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey found that there was an increase in the number of people living below the poverty line. ACOSS's 2020 report Poverty in Australia 2020 found that there were 3.24 million people living below the poverty line, including 423,800 young people. This means that more than one in eight and more than one in six children in our country are living in poverty. The poverty line in Australia is $457 a week for a single adult living alone, or $960 for a couple with two children. Australia has the 16th highest poverty rate out of the 34 wealthiest countries in the OECD—higher than the UK, Germany and New Zealand. Most people living below the poverty line are renting. Almost half of all renters who are 65 and over are in poverty. If you're in poverty, you earn less than $457 a week, and yet Newstart, of course, is around $279 a week. The median rental price in Hobart is $450 a week. Once you've paid the rent, there's nothing left. Don't get sick and visit your GP in Tasmania. We've got the lowest bulk-billing rates in Australia. In my electorate, most of it regional, which includes, of course, farmers, a visit to your GP is likely to result in an almost $40 out-of-pocket cost. That's up 30 per cent since 2013. If you see a specialist, it's going to cost you almost $70, an increase of $22 since 2012-13.

While the federal government has turned its back on struggling Tasmanians, offering limited support by way of critical emergency accommodation, it's even withdrawn support for crucial food relief providers like Loaves and Fishes. This organisation provides 70 per cent of emergency food in Tasmania, preparing up to 5,000 meals per week, servicing 220 community food programs and 38 school breakfast clubs with produce and healthy, nutritious meals. And I say all this because farmers deserve our sympathy, deserve our support and deserve our assistance, but there are so many thousands of Tasmanians and Australians who do too. It's not just farmers who are struggling. The Morrison government's withdrawal of support for Loaves and Fishes places it at dire risk of closing. It had some interim funding support, but that expires next month, and there has been no promise that it will be renewed.

Those opposite will say that the best form of welfare is a job—an effective catchphrase which simply means nothing to the people in my electorate who can't afford to feed or house themselves, or indeed the 50,000 Tasmanians who need more work. Data from the ABS shows that more Tasmanians than ever are finding it harder to get enough work to make ends meet, with 70 per cent of new jobs created since 2014 being part time. Underemployment is the worst it has ever been in my state. 'The best form of welfare is to get a job. Give it a go and you get a go.' That's the catchphrase; that's the slogan. I'm sure it offers comfort to the tens of thousands of Tasmanians who can't get a job because there simply aren't enough vacancies. Statistics show that there are 27 Tasmanians competing for every single job available. Maths tells you that it doesn't work. It's a real crisis, but instead of policy and action, this government is content to use slogans to address the entrenchment and growth of poverty that it not only oversees but also causes.

Just before I finish up I will come to the issue of Labor's policy on net zero emissions, which of course will provide significant opportunities in the agricultural sector. The subject of this bill is farm income and farmers' income security, and there are great opportunities here with Labor's net zero emissions policy—moved of course and administered by the shadow minister at the table, Mark Butler. And it's not just Labor saying this. Professor of Food Sustainability at Charles Sturt University, the Hon. Niall Blair, who is a former New South Wales Nationals agriculture minister and primary productions minister, says this is a good policy, and he says that the opportunities are great for the agricultural sector. He says:

… investing in research and helping farmers change some agricultural practices will not only reduce CO2 and greenhouse gas emissions but sequestering carbon can reverse some of the damage. Additionally it makes farmers more resilient to climate change.

He goes on to say:

We could unlock billions of dollars from government and industry funds, paid directly to farmers to help improve their natural capital, their soil, vegetation and farming practices—

not to mention innovation and research—

which, in turn, will reverse the effects of climate change. This will also ensure our commodities are acceptable to eco-wise consumers in a competitive market where already 70 countries have committed to the net zero target.

Labor's not alone on this. It's those opposite who are standing alone. They're standing in the past. They're standing in history on this issue. Labor is on one side with the New South Wales government and other state governments and more than 70 countries, and former agriculture ministers in coalition governments, who say this is a good policy, it's a good plan, and the opportunities are great for the agricultural sector. The opportunities are great for farmers to be able to diversify their income streams so that, when drought and other disasters come along, they've got a diversification-of-income ability. That's what the net zero carbon emissions policy unlocks. It unlocks opportunity for the regions and the agricultural sector. And that opportunity should be recognised by those opposite, particularly those who represent agricultural and regional seats, because there is a real opportunity here to unlock billions of dollars in investment and opportunity.

We do support the bill, because the shadow minister has moved the second reading amendment. We all support our farmers, particularly those who are still doing it tough. Of course the shadow minister has made reference to those farmers who are still at risk of being cut off from assistance, and he has called on the government to reverse that, and I stand with him on that. But I commend the bill to the House.

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

I'd like to commend the member for Lyons for bringing a whole range of issues into that debate, and I'm trying to work out how I can get my support for a proper legal process surrounding Julian Assange into this debate on the farm household support bill! I'll have to consider that for a while! But I'll get to it.

Honourable Member:

An honourable member interjecting—

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

They actually do.

The farm household allowance is incredibly important. I was the minister—and there is nothing more ex than an ex! But I was the minister. On the history of this: there was this belief, a consensus, from the Labor Party, but agreed to by the coalition, that droughts were kind of not going to be supported anymore, and that farm household allowance was the final stop and that was it. It was basically a temporary unemployment benefit. Even when I became the minister, that was definitely in the zeitgeist of the department and everywhere else: 'Don't go back into drought policy because we're not going to have a drought policy again.' Luckily, that has changed, and I would suggest it has changed on both sides of the House, which is good.

As to the numbers that were getting farm household allowance at the start when I became the minister, there were 367 in Australia—367. Now we have about 13,000 people getting it, and that has happened because we've streamlined it and we've changed the threshold levels, because there were more than 367 people in Australia who needed it, and we had to make sure that we had a proper process that provided dignity for people in their lives.

You have got to remember—I know you do, Mr Deputy Speaker McVeigh, because you are closely associated, being a former agriculture minister in Queensland—that farmers weren't allowed to get the dole, weren't allowed to get social security, so for them it was destitution when things went bad. They literally had no money—nothing—and they couldn't afford to go to the chemist. They couldn't afford groceries, couldn't afford to put fuel in their car. They lived in absolute destitution, and I found that a complete affront. You always find the poorest in regional areas, especially in the towns that people have forgotten about. Of course, as they went downhill, all the people, like the itinerate labourers who lived in the small villages, suffered as well.

But now the government has changed the process for farm household allowance. I know there are still problems out there. We need to streamline it but we've made huge changes from where it was. I want to commend a few people. I commend the Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, who's part of the McCormack-Morrison government, for making sure he put at the top of his agenda drought, because farm household allowance by itself in its former iteration was not enough, more had to be done and this issue had to be taken seriously. The member for Lyons brought up other issues of assistance to people in regional areas. Because he brought them up, I would like to agree with him on some of them.

He talked about water assets and the proper studies about where water is and where it should go in Tasmania. I would suggest that we take the next step. I've always believed that Australia needs a vision for the movement of water from the wet north, where even now in Townsville they're saying there are areas they won't insure unless they get proper flood mitigation, to the areas where there is no water. This drought in many instances has probably come to a conclusion, with big floods going through Charleville at the moment and through St George. But don't think there is not another drought coming. What we shouldn't be doing now is taking our eyes off the ball. We should be devising a vision of a water scheme for our nation that moves water from the northern rivers between Townsville and Cairns to a dam on the Burdekin, move it into the Flinders, from the Flinders into the Thompson, from the Thompson into the Warrego, from the Warrego into the Darling, from the Darling into the Murray and from the Murray into the Lower Lakes. But it would only get to the Lower Lakes on rare occasions from North Queensland as required. The vast majority of the time, the water collected would be utilised for the economic benefit of the western districts of Queensland, the most approximate area to that. That is something this nation should look at doing as this would also help people on the land.

Twenty-five per cent of bonds that are now issued globally are issued at negative interest rates. If you give them $100, they will give you back $95—negative interest rates—so there is money out there looking for a home. If we created an infrastructure bond scheme, the role of government would be to underwrite the coupon rate—that is, the interest rate return, not the face value of the bond—which would be very low because money is looking for a home then we would be able to attract the funds to start this process. The guarantee would be paid by people so they could get access to water down the track as the program was built, and that would pay for the interest on the bonds. Then as you were able to deliver the water, they would pay for the licence and then pay for the actual water itself and this would allow us to pay for this scheme, very similar to the Snowy Mountains Corporation and how it built the Snowy Mountains scheme.

I now go back to the Farm Household allowance. These amendments will further streamline this process and give another significant step towards giving people dignity in their lives by keeping groceries on their table, by giving them access to money. We have simplified the assets test. It's now $5.5 million and it's a total of all assets, so I have read. This is important because I go back to so many people who ring up my office and say to them: 'Please, do not self-assess.' People come and tell me they can't get access to farm household allowance. It worries me because I'm saying, 'From what you told me, I think you certainly can.' They say, 'No, I can't.' When I make the inquiries, I find out they have never actually gone for a proper assessment. They have made their own decision.

In so doing, they cut themselves off from access to funds that will not float your boat as far as keeping the farm flush with fuel or paying the lease payments—and they can't; you won't have enough money for that—but they will allow you to have some dignity and make sure that your partner or your wife is not freaking out because there is no prospect of any money coming in and they don't know how on earth they're going to pay the grocery bill or go to the chemist or have any sense of dignity around other people when they can't afford fuel for the car. That's what the farm household allowance is there to do. It's not to finance the farm; it's to keep dignity in the house, especially in a house with kids, in a remote area, which most farms are—vastly more remote, obviously, than people in town.

We also have to look at the other actions we have taken to help people on the land, and I want to give two examples. The Regional Investment Corporation, which was set up by the coalition, with the assistance of Malcolm Turnbull and, to be honest, me, is now being widely utilised for the assistance of people in droughts and bushfires and floods, to give them access to concessional loans. This was something that was disregarded at the start; they said it would have no use. I have to say the Labor Party said that, if they got into government, they'd immediately remove it. I implore them to make a statement that they are not going to do that and that this organisation will continue its role, because it is so vitally important now to so many people on the land. I suppose that's a challenge to the member for Grayndler and the member for Hunter to make the statement that this organisation would be secure if there was a change in government. People need to know that.

The other example, of course, was that we brought forward the Inland Rail to try and broaden the economic base in regional areas, fighting for and achieving close to $10 billion worth of investment so that we could develop the Parkeses, the Narrabris, the Toowoombas—all the towns, basically, between Melbourne and Brisbane on an inland route. Your own seat of Groom, Mr Deputy Speaker McVeigh, will obviously be a huge beneficiary of that capital investment. It's something that so many people have spoken about in the past. They just never did it. It was the great dream—doorstops with people carrying spikes and carrying rails, but never actually building the railway line. It was something that, at the start of this term of the coalition government, we actually fought for and we achieved, and it's great to see it starting to roll out now.

The member for Lyons also brought up net zero emissions. This is not going to be a help to regional Australia; this is going to be an incredible encumbrance—because we've dealt with this. To be quite frank, we've had the experience of having our private assets inflicted on by both sides of government. Vegetation management laws, which were the first iteration to help Australia comply with its international agreements, came off people on the land, because, basically, in collusion with state governments, the federal government met their international agreements by bringing in tree-clearing laws. They said it was for a whole range of reasons, but that it would allow them to meet that carbon equation. But for us on the land—and I'm on the land and we had to deal with it—it meant that we were divested of an asset, an asset that was formally privately owned by me and my family, and it became invested in the state without payment. 'Divesting an individual of a private asset to be vested in the state without payment for the communal ownership' are the words: communism. And we hate it in country areas. We couldn't believe that there was this collusion.

Seeing the Treasurer of Australia at that point in time, Mr Peter Costello, go on the 7.30 Report and say it was his coordination that had brought this about really offended us. It deeply offended us, because we thought that our side of the political fence believed in the primacy of private ownership and private property, not having the government take it. The government can acquire it if it wishes, but that's the word, 'acquire'—pay for it on fair and just terms, not just take it for nothing. So we've had to deal with this climate issue, this carbon equation, in the past. So we're well alive to what's coming towards us again.

Then we had the next issue, when, in dealing with the Democrats to get the GST through, we had the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act foisted on us, yet another environmental caveat, another environmental impost, on our capacity to manage our land by reason of an agreement made in this building, by hook or by crook, probably in this chamber. And we've been inflicted with that ever since.

Now we see the next statement—that we're going to go to zero carbon emissions by 2050. That means that some people will increase their carbon emissions, but it has to be paid for by someone for this equation to equal zero. We know where that will be; it will be rural Australia. It will be people on the land. They will pay for it. They're the ones who won't be allowed to manage the vegetation. They'll be the ones who have to have trees grow on their place to make this equation work. One of the gentlemen from some environment unit at ANU—part of the Crawford School of Public Policy—was saying we have to let shrubs grow back on marginal land! Just the terminology 'shrubs' means he probably doesn't know what he's talking about, and he probably doesn't know what that actual effect is. It sounds like something from Monty Python—a 'shrubbery'!

Andrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

A shrubbery!

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

A shrubbery! It worries us, because we see this coming down. I was having my discussion with the member for Hunter at that so-called press conference the other day, which he decided to crash. He said that we can fix the methane emissions from cattle by some magical process. I tell you what the IPCC have said in their latest meeting in Korea—that they're going to do it by a global reduction in the cattle herd. That's us again. It'll be inflicted on us. I know how they'll do it. They'll have a licence agreement of how many cattle you can run on your place. They won't be taking the load off you; they'll just have a licence agreement, and you'll have to comply with that licence and over time that licence be will be reduced. That will be yet another infliction on regional people on our capacity to carry on our life to get ahead, for money for our communities, for money for people in the weatherboard and iron house, because we've seen this movie before. We know where it ends up. That is why it's so important that we put down a marker, quite clearly, and say: 'Not on. Just not on. We're not doing this, because it's not merely our concern for what might happen in the future, it's our very clear memory of what has happened in the past.'

The farm household allowance is a good idea. Net zero emissions is another infliction on our rights, our property rights and income rights, in regional Australia, which we will fight tooth and claw against. The Regional Investment Corporation is something that everyone poo-pooed and thought was ridiculous, and now we've created it. We need the Labor Party to come out, even now, and say they support it and that they won't get rid of it after the next election. Inland Rail is a massive investment that's going to be hugely important. And for water security—and I'll close on this—as a nation let's start on a nation-building project: the movement of water from the wet areas of the tropics to the parched areas of the south.

Fiona Phillips (Gilmore, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This government is a desperate government. The government doesn't stand up for farmers, even though they like to say they do. Right here in this House in question time today, the minister for agriculture said they were helping farmers with the drought and bushfires, but I know what my farmers are telling me and that's just not the case. Time and time again the Morrison government has turned its back on local farmers. Farmers have endured six years of ad hoc responses to the drought from this government. Promises have been made, platitudes have been said, but confusion and chaos have reigned.

The farm household allowance is just another case on an ever-growing list, another ad hoc policy by a government with no comprehensive drought policy and no plan to help farmers. To be eligible for the farm household allowance you need to meet various criteria—fair enough. But what many farmers have been saying is the paperwork is too much and it takes too long to process the claims, and many simply don't fit the criteria. This is an all-too-familiar story with the government: farmers being made to jump through the hoops only to find they can't get help.

I've written countless times to the minister asking for my council areas, Shoalhaven, the Eurobodalla and Kiama, to be eligible for drought assistance. You would think that would be a simple thing. The New South Wales government has declared those areas in drought. Farmers certainly have been saying they are in drought; they have been suffering from it. But the Morrison government keeps denying this reality, on so many occasions, despite the evidence, despite the calls.

In the middle of the recent bushfire crisis, when the majority of my electorate was on fire, the drought minister announced the new Drought Communities Program extension eligibility criteria. I have been asking the minister for months to review this program, to admit that we are in fact in drought. We have seen several versions of the eligible list of councils, but never with my council areas. Instead, on 28 January this year, while bushfires raged in my electorate, the minister again told local farmers they were not in drought. He had not been listening. He had raised hopes of farmers once again, only to dash them. He told them they could still not access help under the Drought Communities Program—because, according to the minister, they are not in drought. But over the summer we've seen that drought in action, with the driest of conditions and the worst, raging bushfires imaginable.

On Friday just gone, I met with bee farmers Vince and Maria at Pointer Mountain, Yatte Yattah, on the New South Wales South Coast just outside Milton. Going up Pointer Mountain, I was gobsmacked at the destruction I saw. It is perhaps not in the news, but it should never be forgotten—the destruction, the barren, blackened land, and the brave, brave stories of so many in a bid to save homes, animals, farmland, businesses and memories. Vince and Maria told me their harrowing story to save their place. Vince and Maria fought the fires. I saw how close the fire was, the different directions it was coming from. Look across this chamber and imagine a 70-metre wall of flames. That's right—where you are, the flames. Vince and Maria had moved some of their beehives to where they thought was safe, but it wasn't so. Although their shed was saved, many beehives were sadly lost.

But the devastation across so much of south-east New South Wales poses a new threat to Vince and Maria and fellow beekeepers. No bush equals no food for bees. No food means bees starve, and when bees starve there's no honey. So, when Vince went to the local recovery centre to find out about grant assistance, he was told he could get help with water, fuel and pollen supplement—that is all. Vince eventually got the giant bulk sugar, but that still has to be turned into syrup—a long, complicated process.

So the question comes: how do beekeepers survive? They've lost the bush that feeds the bees. The grant and loan criteria are so complicated and don't take into account the years and decade-plus that it will take to recover. What does the minister say to Vince and Maria? What does the minister say to fellow beekeepers? Today the minister spruiked what a good job his government was doing. So I say to the minister: Meet with Vince and Maria. Stop the grandstanding and start listening. Fix the bushfire assistance for farmers and our small business owners.

Local farmer Rob, a fifth generation farmer, has been dealing with the drought for years. Rob has fought hard, absolutely tooth and nail, to get some action to address the drought, to address the crisis in our dairy industry. Rob's farm was hit by the fires four times. It was devastating, heartbreaking for a farmer with such a history on his land. Afterwards, he described his property as a lunar landscape—not a desert anymore, a lunar landscape. Since then, he has led the call for Australia to step up and lead on climate change: Farmers for Climate Action—a concept this government doesn't seem to think exists. For farmer Rob, there is no question: climate change is driving this. Those opposite want to convince us all that farmers don't want action on climate change, but it's farmers who are leading the way. They are absolutely on the front lines and they have been crying out for help from this government.

The inconsistencies in the government's drought programs are causing more heartbreak and more distress for farmers. Farmer Daniel tried to access a drought loan through the Regional Investment Corporation. He was rejected because his property was only partially listed on the desertification maps. How one farm can be partially in drought and partially not is a mystery to me, but this is what the government is putting people through—different maps, different rules, sifting through website after website, program after program, promise after promise.

I visited South Coast Dairy in Berry only last week—a great, locally owned and operated cooperative. I talked to them about the impact of the fires. With the roads closed, their milk couldn't get out. As you can imagine, milk doesn't last forever, so they lost an enormous amount of stock and are trying to navigate the available assistance—a very complicated process. Essentially, if you don't suffer direct fire damage, there is very little for you. It's an industry already struggling with the drought, unfair milk prices and now the financial impact of the fires. But there is no help for them. It's really all too common a thread: the money is just not getting through. Whether it's money for the drought or money for the bushfires, it isn't going where it's needed. The farmers in my electorate just get on with it. Farmers are a strong bunch and they don't like to complain. They don't go looking for handouts or ask for people to solve their problems.

A week ago, I attended the Kangaroo Valley Show. This was a very important show. The bushfires just weeks before had come close to Kangaroo Valley, to the west. Many people lost their homes and livelihoods, but, in true Kangaroo Valley spirit, the show must go on. I have to say that, after spending two full days talking with people at the show, I was amazed at the stories I heard. One resident, who devastatingly lost her home, had her jam in the shed and the shed was saved, so she proudly entered the jam in the show. I'd say that's pretty special jam! Agricultural shows are wonderful community events. They bring us together, in good times and in bad. In the poultry pavilion, I met a couple who had also suffered damage during the fires but were able to exhibit their rooster. They had not accessed bushfire assistance; they were just getting on with it. So I was pleased to be able to provide some help. But this is a common story I am hearing from people over and over again. They can't access help. They don't know what is out there or it is all too hard to go through the mountains of paperwork.

Take Gerry from Conjola, for example. His waratah farm has been left absolutely desolate. They were hit by the fires twice. They stayed the first time and they stopped the flames at their door, but it was all too much and they decided to go when it came again. I spoke with Gerry last week and he told me about how, after weeks, he finally felt like he could reach out for help. He felt up to it, so he went to the recovery centre in Ulladulla. He spent 2½ hours filling out paperwork. By his estimate, he got 10 per cent of the way through. He couldn't take it anymore and he walked away. It was retraumatising. It will be two to three years before Gerry gets his flowers back to the point where he can sell them. He looks out every day at his blackened waratah shrubs. They are starting to sprout small bits of green—a little bit of hope, which is something very welcome on the South Coast. But people like Gerry need more help.

I come from a farming family. I know about the struggles that dairy farmers face, and I am heartbroken by the stories I am hearing. I don't want to see farmers leave the land because they can't get the help they need to survive because the government have their heads in the sand like a flock of ostriches, all simultaneously sticking their heads down—nothing to see here!

This is the 14th time the government has amended this bill. Labor has been raising concerns about the farm household allowance since 2014—six years ago—and here we are still talking about it. The government just does not have a plan to help farmers. It doesn't have a plan to help the dairy industry. I have said, time and time again, I will work with the government on these issues. I have put out my hand and asked them to come to the table to talk with local farmers in my electorate and hear what they have to say. I will keep saying this. I will keep fighting for farmers. It's in my blood, it's in my heart, and I won't stop until the government takes action.

Farmers in my electorate feel absolutely let down by this government. After all the promises those opposite made before the last election, they think that farmers didn't notice when they abandoned them. Well, they did. I know I did, too. We simply need a bipartisan approach to develop a national comprehensive drought policy through a drought cabinet. My local farmers need a drought declaration by the Morrison government. They need a fair price for their milk. They need help to rebuild after the fires. They need quick access to assistance programs. They need the processes to be simple and clear. They need a government that listens. I say to every farmer on the New South Wales South Coast: I stand with you and I will fight beside you. I will fight for you every day.

David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in favour of this latest amendment to the Farm Household Support Amendment (Relief Measures) Bill (No. 1) 2020. It is a great program. Since it got upgraded to a reasonable figure in 2014 there have been many amendments, but this is the last and most significant agenda for many people who've had trouble with it—finding out that they got onto the farm household allowance, having all their assessments done, receiving their payment and then, at the end of the year, getting told that they owe money back to the government. This particular set of amendments addresses the reconciliation process. It is hard to predict your total income up-front, so it will now bring the farm household allowance in line with the treatment of business income, like you do for all other social security payments. An estimate will be used to calculate the amount, and that amount will continue, but you can prospectively update it so that no retrospective debts will be accrued.

Because time is running out as the adjournment debate beckons I will shorten my speech. As I mentioned, we have had many amendments since 2014. Most significantly, the asset test has been raised to $5.5 million. That means that most medium, small and even large farms will come in and be eligible if they are really in financial hardship. The other thing is that we've increased the amount that can be offset for off-farm income to $100,000. That's per couple. We have also allowed funds for independent financial assessment, activities that supplement their planning for their business and training to improve income and their long-term financial situation, as well as the income support.

One of the other significant amendments that we've made since 2014 was to allow support for four years out of 10, rather than just four years. We can't keep people on income support permanently, but that is a much more reasonable outcome. Then there is also a payment for those who do finish their four years of support by the middle of this year. They get a supplementary payment to let them wind down into being responsible for themselves.

There were many logistical problems in getting assessed. They now have a farm household case officer and have access to up to 17 one-on-one meetings with their case officer to facilitate things. They also get a healthcare card, rent assistance and pharmaceutical, telephone and remote area allowances. The activities supplement to allow them to undertake these other activities to improve their financial situation is now $10,000. All these amendments mean that we have a functioning, much easier to use system. One can apply online. Instead of partner 1 and partner 2 both doing an assessment, they can unify it in one single assessment. We're trying to make it equitable. It will be audited like all social support payments but it is much more tangible, achievable and easier to manage. It gives people the dignity to put food on the table and support for them when they are in financial difficulty, like we have done with youth allowance and Newstart payments. There are a lot of farmers who have a great farm, but during the recent drought, floods and fires there is no way that they can make a profit. They deserve support from the nation like many other people who have to turn to in a temporary fashion. I commend this bill to the House.