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

Thank you for your interjection, Senator Abetz—I do not want to slip under the radar how many farming communities are still suffering very much from the effects of drought. It is quite easy to listen to radio reports and believe that the whole country is being inundated by rain from the heavens, but it is not entirely true. It is great to see the water where it has happened. It is wonderful for producers in the regions where it has rained, but we have to remember, particularly in this place, that there are many people who still have not received rain. It is vitally important to recognise that, even where we have received rain, the effects of the drought continue. In some areas across this country we have had drought for up to seven years and it takes more than a few inches of rain here or a shower of rain there to alleviate the effects of drought. This is an incredibly serious issue because it affects not only farming families but farming communities. There are flow-on effects right throughout rural and regional communities, and knock-on effects when there are no farm incomes to flow on to the agricultural sector—to local agribusinesses, the local fuel station, the local newsagent, local supermarkets, local clothes shops, the local chemist and the local butcher. They are all people in the community with families who deserve to know that the government in this place is the doing the best they possibly can for them.

Having had a change in government, we are now starting to see the government’s approach to those rural and regional communities, and I must say that I have been absolutely appalled to see that approach because that approach has been to put in place measures that cut spending to rural and regional Australia. I know that Labor, with their new-found fiscal responsibility and this wonderful attitude they now have to this fiscal responsibility, think it is important to cut spending, but they have started with the bush, with rural and regional Australia. They have started with the very people who are least able to cope with the funding cuts. I reiterate: one shower of rain does not change the effects of seven years of drought. Actually I did notice that it was the Minister for Finance and Deregulation, not the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, who put forward these cuts, which I find quite surprising, really. As hard as I have searched I cannot see where the agriculture minister has (a) had anything to do with this—so maybe he has been completely sidelined—or (b) made any comment on nearly $500 million worth of cuts to regional Australia; he is the agriculture minister. A lot has been made about him coming from Beverly Hills in Sydney. I do not particularly care; I just want an agriculture minister to do a good job.