Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Sorry—Mr Beazley and most his frontbench would have between them. I say to those people who seek to attack Mr Vaile: play the ball and not the man. As long as this nation’s growers operate in a distorted global wheat market and the majority of Australian wheat growers want the single desk arrangements to remain, The Nationals will fight to retain the single desk.

Australian grain growers are competing against distorted world markets right across the world. Our wheat growers are not playing on a level playing field. We need to remember that US and EU farmers alone receive around a billion dollars in farm subsidies every day. The single desk allows our grain growers to compete with international providers. I am advised that Econtech, who are respected economic modellers, have calculated that the average premium achieved as a result of having a single wheat desk is $13 a tonne.

Australia’s wheat industry employs more than 150,000 people in rural Australia, and the single desk arrangements deliver almost 2,000 jobs in rural Australia alone. Approximately 45,000 non-farm business enterprises in rural Australia rely on the profitability of the wheat industry. Every day, wheat growers tell me and colleagues in The Nationals to save the single desk. Last week, more than 700 wheat growers rallied at Warracknabeal to send a clear message: save the single desk. Two quotes from the media reporting on that meeting stuck out for me. Firstly, ‘Every time Beazley opens his damn mouth, we lose another couple of hundred thousand dollars’ and, secondly, ‘Bracks should tell Rudd to pull his head in and stop doing the American grain growers’ dirty work.’ Those are not my words but the words of angry, distressed farmers who are just trying to make a living. Their message to Labor is clear: hands off the single desk.

Last Thursday, the Land newspaper, the paper that New South Wales farmers turn to every Thursday for the latest ag industry news, published the findings of a Rural Press nationwide survey of wheat growers. The results were overwhelmingly in favour of the single desk. Seventy-three per cent of Australian grain growers still support the single desk for wheat exports; almost 70 per cent of them think that AWB has been unduly victimised compared with other international companies named in the oil for food scandal; and 69 per cent of growers support AWB maintaining its role as the wheat export single desk manager. This is a survey that was taken within the last couple of weeks and accurately reflects the feelings of those growers. As I travel across New South Wales, the message is still the same: those growers want the single desk to stay.

This Friday, around 1,000 wheat growers are expected to gather at the Parkes racecourse to send the same message: they want the single desk to stay. But I ask where Labor are on the single desk. I suppose it depends on who you ask. Had we asked Labor’s current shadow minister for trade, Mr Rudd, last week, his answer was:

We need to consider it on its business and economic merits. This requires thorough consultation with the wheat industry. My colleague Gavin O’Connor is currently engaged in those consultations and we won’t be making any premature policy announcement on that until those consultations are concluded.

Labor’s shadow minister for revenue, small business and competition, Mr Fitzgibbon, recently described the single desk as ‘an anachronistic wheat marketing monopoly which has been selling Australian farmers short.’ Then last week, after what must have been a very thorough consultation with some 30 growers in Wagga Wagga, Mr Rudd declared that Labor would support the single desk.

Labor claim that they act in the interests of wheat growers, and they certainly seem to feign sympathy for wheat growers. But, given those two quotes, I wonder where they are on all of this. There certainly does not seem to be any kind of position. If attacking the single desk is Labor’s idea of support for the single desk, then I think that is very sad for Australian farmers.