Kerry O'Brien (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Primary Industries, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

Clearly, Senator Johnston has been conned, because he does not understand what the legislation says. It is interesting that Senator Johnston has not said a word in these debates. He is a senator from Western Australia—a senator from a state that exports a whole lot of wheat—and he has never said a word in these debates, but he wants to interject because the government are embarrassed about this. They want to rush this thing through the parliament. That is why they did not want an inquiry. The government wanted this thing through the parliament without an inquiry because they did not want growers to have a say. They did not want an inquiry to embarrass them. They did not want the dispute within the party room to go on—which it would have because the inquiry would have showed that there are serious deficiencies in this piece of legislation.

The only part of this legislation that has any urgency at all, considering we have waited years in relation to the deregulation of boxed and bagged wheat, is the extension of the veto power to be held by the minister on the basis that it should not refer to AWB. Frankly, in the original bill, that is exactly what would have happened on 1 July. So there has been a concession made to part of the argument in the coalition party room in amendments that have now been made to the original bill—that is, that AWB cannot have the veto power. But it can have the single desk. Indeed, that is what the legislation says. If government members say that that is not the case, they have not read it—they do not know it. All we are depending on is the suggestion that something will happen after the election—something which has not been defined, something which may well be different things in the minds of different members of the coalition party room. It certainly has not been spelt out to wheat growers and it certainly has not been spelt out to the community.

We have given a contingent notice to split this bill so that the issue of the veto power can be dealt with and the rest of this bill can be set aside, because frankly it is not urgent, and we still believe that growers deserve the opportunity to have some proper input into this through the processes of a committee—controlled by the government, I might add—of the Senate that has looked at this and other issues on many occasions and on most occasions has come up with unanimous findings.

So we have question marks about what we consider to be flaws in the quality assurance schemes for boxed and bagged wheat. Although there are claims of grower support for this bill, the strength and number of submissions Labor has received indicate that the government does not have anywhere near a united industry position or grower support for the position it has put forward. We have concerns about that. It is worrying that we are being told that there is some possibility of an entity with grower support developing but there is no test in the legislation to determine whether that is actually the case. There is no proper ministerial accountability and there is no transparency of the reporting process in the legislation. And I say again, despite the PM’s promises, AWB can resume control of the single desk as the single seller—albeit without the veto power but still with the single desk—if there is no exercise of a determination under new provisions of the act to determine that there is another organisation that can take control of it. So all a National Party minister, if the coalition were to win the next election, after the election needs to do is nothing. What will happen? AWB—‘nominated company B’—will be the entity which controls marketing.