John Williams (NSW, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to add a few words to those of my colleagues, Senator Joyce, Senator Nash and Senator Boswell. I said on 15 September last year in my maiden speech to this parliament, ‘Do not ever take the supply of food for granted,’ and I meant it.

I just want to relate a brief story. I live in Inverell in northern New South Wales and our parish priest is Father Joe Adriano. I got to know Father Joe in 1995 when he first came to Australia from the Philippines. We were fishing in the creek on my property one night and he said to me: ‘John, you’re so lucky here in Australia. You walk into your supermarkets and all the shelves are full. You walk around to the butchers’ section and there are all sorts of lamb, steak and pork.’ Of course, I was pig farming at the time. He was simply amazed at the stocks of food that we had in our supermarkets in Australia. He said that back in the Philippines the shelves are mostly empty. That is why I say, ‘Don’t take our supply of food for granted.’ We are lucky. The nation was built by our farmers and now we have policies that do their utmost to destroy our farming sector.

Life is about fairness, and when you have a situation where a large company with a pocketful of money can go in and buy up agricultural land, inflate the prices and prevent the traditional farmer from buying the land, that is wrong. As Senator Boswell just pointed out, when farmers want to expand their acreage, perhaps because their son has just left school and wants to go onto the land to keep the generations going, they get done over in a bidding war. That is wrong. Inflating the price of land is keeping the genuine farmers from producing food for feeding not only Australian but the rest of the world as well, because we are a major food supplier for many areas of the world. The laws as they stand are simply wrong and that is why we are going to support the amendments put forward by Senator Joyce and Senator Milne.

The upfront tax deductions of planting down good agricultural land with trees are simply wrong in every way. We cannot eat trees, we cannot eat bark and it is simply wrong for the future. My fear arises when I hear statistics and forecasts that in the next 30 to 40 years the world is going to have to double its food production to meet the demand for human consumption. How are we going to do that when our nation is being planted down with trees? It is ridiculous. That is why a commonsense attitude should be brought to this whole debate.

The Nationals have stood by their argument all the way through this debate. We are not going to continue this debate for years to come, day in, day out.. Senator Joyce has made that quite clear. We stand by what we believe in and we stand by our regional communities. We do not want to see this huge tax incentive for these turbocharged managed investment schemes, known as carbon sinks, to continue when the genuine farmers are squeezed out. The genuine people who actually feed our nation, who put the food on our table every day, are the people we need to support and who we will continue to support. That is why we find ourselves in this position in this upcoming vote.