Annette Hurley (SA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Before the break in my speech, I was talking about the government’s failure to provide adequate safeguards for wheat growers on the price of their grain and for the many of them who have shareholdings in AWB. The government did this by being complicit, with the AWB, in failing to provide any alternatives or deal with the imminent threat of the end of the single desk. The government was found out earlier than it wanted to be, because of the cracks appearing in the structure of AWB and its single desk marketing arm. Those cracks were obvious to anyone, yet the senior management of AWB—as, it appears, was their wont—refused to look at a plan B. They refused to look at any alternative or at any response to the competitors that were knocking at their door. Competitors like CBH and ABB are large grain marketing outfits that are perfectly capable of dealing with bulk wheat shipments in the international market, but the AWB refused to address this issue.

What we got from the government was repeated inquiries into the single desk. We had economists at 60 paces, and we got no result whatsoever. It was put off and off, until finally the government has been forced to face what has happened with the Cole inquiry and the collapse of the single desk. This is despite Prime Minister John Howard having promised at the last election to maintain the single desk. The government has failed on repeated occasions. What do we see now from this creaky coalition? We see some inadequate compromise for six months—another putting-off. The Leader of the Nationals, Senator Boswell, has now put the onus on the growers to come back with a solution. We have had years and years of inquiry after inquiry—everyone has known that there is this pressure—and now Senator Boswell says to the wheat growers around Australia: ‘It’s up to you. You have to come back with a single unified solution that is workable.’

These wheat farmers are having to cope with the drought and the fact that they will probably get less from AWB for their wheat crop this year and the fact that the value of their shareholding in AWB has plummeted. But they are also having to get together and determine a sophisticated, international marketing structure for their wheat into the future. Is this not a monumental failure by the government and by the party that is meant to represent the cockies out there, the National Party? It is a monumental failure not to have dealt with this issue previously and not to have had some plan for what might happen if the single desk collapsed.

This is in the face of international pressure, from the United States and elsewhere, on the single desk. There are not only the internal pressures and problems that we knew existed that led to the cracks in the edifice; there is also the international pressure to get rid of it. But the government did not deal with the issue; they refused to deal with it. They cosied up with their mates in AWB and refused to look at the issue. They stuck their heads in the sand, and in doing so they have let down the wheat growers of Australia as they have not adequately provided for them, particularly for their long-term future.

I think the government should hang its head in shame over this. Agriculture has been the mainstay of our country since its inception, and the government has let down one of the chief elements of our agricultural industry. It has let it down in many ways, but the marketing arm is the particular way by which it has done so. I hope wheat growers do indeed, as Senator Boswell exhorted, contact their members of parliament to tell them what a failure the government has been in this instance, that they expect much better of government members and that they expect to have a model that they can be properly consulted by the government on and can vote on and that the government will not turn its failure against the wheat growers of Australia.