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

Thank you very much, Senator Boswell. I was going to refer to some comments that the leader, Senator Joyce, made earlier this morning. Isn’t it peculiar that they are being hailed for taking out something that was never in? I might be a little bit cynical in my old age, but my bet is, given that we have had the deputy before the Senate committee saying that they have absolutely no idea how to measure the emissions from the animals, that the government was never going to have it in the ETS anyway. So here we have a fantastic thing—they have taken five weeks to give in on something that, quite probably, they were never going to include anyway and which, as Senator Joyce said, was not included in the first place!

So there is no great joy there, and I will tell you why. All of those imbedded costs—fuel, transport, electricity, cement, packaging and fertiliser, and the list goes on—will still fall right in the laps of our farmers, the backbone of this country. Those farmers are feeding this nation. This government expects those farmers to just accept those costs and say: ‘That’s okay; that’s fine. We’ll accept costs for something that’s going to make no difference to the environment.’ How stupid is that? Those farmers are also going to have to put up with the fact that food processing is still in the ETS, so abattoirs are going to have to pass their extra costs down to the farmers. Farmers are the bottom of the food chain; there is nowhere else for those costs to go. I will not stand in this chamber and not do everything I can to try and stop that happening. It is simply wrong.

Regional Australia has had absolutely enough. Since this government have been in, we have seem them abolish the single desk, get rid of the $2 billion communications fund and try to whack on an extra 40 per cent to AQIS fees. We have seen Land and Water Australia gone, cuts to the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, a $12 million cut to the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation and uncertainty around the future of drought funding—right at the very time that so many farmers in rural communities right across this country are still in the grip of drought. And now what does the government want to do? They want to give regional Australia an ETS. They want to give all of Australia, obviously, an ETS, but they want to—