Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise, alongside my Labor colleagues, to indicate our support for this bill—declared a non-controversial piece of law making today called the Export Control Amendment (Quotas) Bill 2015.

It is uncontroversial in that it seeks to do something rather simple but nonetheless effective by consolidating four pieces of legislation that govern export quotas and allows for quota certification arrangements for agriculture to be carried out under one set of powers.

I want to speak on this, because it is a bill that goes to issues of trade. I think it is important to get on the record that Labor is the party of trade and that we have a very profound and outward-looking view to the world with regard to trade. It was in fact Chifley in 1948 who, in the Bretton Woods project postwar that saw an economic architecture established that was outward looking, understood the power and importance of trade—not just traditional trade back to the mother country but burgeoning new opportunities for trade, which particularly focused on America in the first instance but also started to look, through Labor eyes, for a way to create markets and jobs of quality for Australians and to Asia. It was that vision that drove Labor early in the last century to be the party of trade.

I think also people listening to this debate and perhaps those here with us in the gallery might recognise the importance of the Labor contributions to trade in 1973 with the decisions of the Whitlam government to cut tariffs by 25 per cent. I know that this was controversial at the time and there was much debate about it; however, it recognised that there was nothing very progressive about a policy that meant working people were not able to afford things such as children's school shoes.

The intimacy of our trading patterns, what we do in terms of trade and the way in which we live are all intertwined. The government tries to talk about families in one breath as a liability for the country—cutting family tax benefit A, putting a GST on school, health and education; that is their agenda—and, at the same time, they are saying, 'We are the party of trade,' as if these things are separate. Labor understands that they have a deep and intimate connection.

Again, in 1998 and 1991, Labor, under the Hawke-Keating governments, continued to make sure that Australia remained a competitive economy. It has been estimated that the tariff cuts of the Hawke-Keating era put nearly $4,000 per year into the pocket of the average Australian household. This is a very important part of understanding how trade and our everyday lives are intertwined.

I also wish to refer to the fact that Australia is a great producer of food and fibre product and we are so despite the fact that we have many challenges as a food-producing nation. In fact, we are clearly challenged by water scarcity. We have less than optimal soils, and we are challenged much more than many countries by climate change. Indeed, I would like to refer to the Climate Commission's report The critical decade 2013: climate change science, risk and responses. I know that there are, alive and well, climate sceptics on the other side, and I know that there are many still in the media who have more access to the Australian ear than I think is their right and continue to peddle nonsense about alternative views of the world that do not involve science, but this report is critical. In fact, it declares Australia as 'the world's driest inhabited continent'. It says:

The impacts of climate change on Australia's water resources are therefore of critical importance for our communities, agriculture, industries and environment.

We do know.

Just last weekend, I was in the beautiful part of New South Wales known as the Riverina in the city of Wagga and prior to that, earlier this year, down in the areas of Leeton and Griffith. They very clearly understand that 'river flows in Australia vary substantially from year to year and decade to decade' and exacerbate 'the multiple conflicting demands' on water supplies for Australia. This is a critical issue that impacts on our capacity to trade and on our capacity to innovate in agriculture. We are known for being a remarkably successful, science and evidence based agricultural nation, and that is one of our great export capacities. We actually take dryland farming to other, similar parts of the world and share that expertise from our great farming communities right across rural and regional Australia.

Of course, we do have vast distances between the farm gate and our markets, both our domestic markets and our export markets, but, despite all of that and the many challenges that face Australian producers, the value of our farm output—for an island nation of only 23 million or 24 million—is more than $50 billion annually, and our exports are worth more than $30 billion. In other words, we export around two-thirds of the food we produce. While we should always be cautious and alert to our food security issues, talk of food security in Australia really is rather silly. It might grab the odd headline. It might titillate those who want to peddle and continue to peddle a climate of fear in this nation, but fear will not help us advance. We need a language of hope, and we need policies of endeavour and recognition for effort.

Sadly, that is not the game that is being played in this space by many of those in the government. They compromise the very people that they claim to represent. The National Party are the party of the bush, they say. Well, regional and rural Australia is sadly let down by that party day after day in this place. Continuing escalation of fear about food security plays into the hands of those who would limit our capacity as a nation, not those who would enable it. Food security is not one of our challenges in food production. That is made clear by the evidence that we export two-thirds of everything we produce, and it is why much of the debate that is going on around foreign ownership is also silly and misinformed. If we are going to grow our agricultural opportunities, we need a lot of investment in agriculture, and we will need it over the coming decades. We have a small population, and, with limited savings capacity, much of that investment will have to come from other sources. And that is as it has always been in all of our recent history.

There are many things that will determine the extent of our success in agriculture over the coming decades, and these are some of the issues that this bill is attempting to contend with. The first element that it attends to is the extent to which the government is willing and able to provide leadership and strategic guidance in an increasingly globally competitive market for agricultural products.

The second is the effectiveness of the management of our limited natural resources—most importantly, as I indicated, our water and our soil resources. The question in the future will be: how do we do more with less water and fewer soil resources? We are already the driest continent on earth and becoming a drier continent because we are finding our droughts becoming more protracted, and entering an El Nino period signals that those challenges will just become greater. We need more focus on how we better manage our soils, including how we develop the capacity to retain water in our soils. And everything that we do in agricultural planning has to take into account the sustainability of what we do—how we ensure that those precious resources are available not just for today but for decades to come.

The third is our performance in research, development and extension, and our embrace of biotechnology. These are going to be critical also to our future success.

The fourth element is the extent to which we are able to lift productivity and our cost competitiveness. Clearly, that is a comment that speaks for itself. I know that the remarks of Senator Moore and Senator Cameron, who spoke just prior to me, addressed many of those issues.

The fifth—and I want to spend some time on this—is the issue of how we deal with the challenges of having a workforce in the regions. We have the reality of an ageing population. We have an ageing workforce generally, but in particular these are significant challenges for Australian agriculture. We are dealing right now with the question: how do we attract people to agricultural employment? Can I tell you: we do not attract people to agricultural employment or to employment in the regions of this country by slashing their wages. That is what this government is pushing forwards with: the cuts to penalty rates.

Many of the jobs in our regions are supported by people who work in the retail industry. Right across the state of New South Wales this summer, this Christmas, people who need to travel quite long distances across the great state of New South Wales to spend time with their families will now be forced to work on Boxing Day. That is not because the law actually says that but because the workplace practices have now been liberated by a vote in the New South Wales parliament to enable exploitative employers to push people to work on Boxing Day. This means that, for families who once were able to say, 'Yes, I'll be home for Christmas on Christmas Eve; we'll have two days together, Christmas and Boxing Day,' that will become a thing of the past in New South Wales unless the review in two years overturns a disgraceful decision that was enabled by the so-called family-friendly Fred Nile in the upper house of New South Wales.

These sorts of decisions that are made around workforce capacity and possibilities in our regional and rural areas impact on people's lives in profound and significant ways. While this party of government, the Turnbull-Abbott government, say that they care about the bush, cutting penalty rates for workers who work unreasonable and extraordinary hours is not going to enable our communities in the bush, in regional and rural Australia, to thrive and grow. We need people to come back to the farm, and they will do that when good money is there to be made and they can assure themselves of a few important things—that they can give their families the opportunities they need to succeed.

We want to trade. We want to export. We have capacity and we have expertise. But there are a few things that are missing. The seat of Farrer, the seat of Riverina and the seat of Hume, three of the duty electorates that I have, are definitely rural. But closer to Sydney, on the Central Coast, where I live. I think of Mangrove Mountain and that plateau, which has been a significant part of the food bowl of Sydney. The resources that people need to have to do their work there and to do it efficiently involve access to a global market. That is what we are talking about: trade with the rest of the world. And instead of a visionary NBN, where we were getting fibre to the premise, fibre to businesses and fibre to homes right across this country, with ubiquitous access, we saw Mr Turnbull, the current Prime Minister, when he was the Minister for Communication, rip that visionary infrastructure project to absolute shreds to deliver a dog's breakfast called the mixed technology mode, better known as 'Malcolm Turnbull's Mess' across this country.

You can talk to anybody in regional Australia, whether it is the Northern Territory, Queensland or Western Australia, and all of them know that they need access to the internet. Their kids need access to the internet. They will not stay and farm in our communities and generate the income for this country that we need and have relied on if they cannot give their kids access to the future that they need or if they cannot run their businesses because they cannot compete because this miserly government, with a limited vision for the country, has ripped away a vital piece of infrastructure that they need to grow and compete.

But that is not the only thing that is challenging us in terms of our capacity to create trade and to benefit our country. People in the bush are screaming at me every time I am out in the country when we are looking at health and hospital access. This is a government that has taken $57 billion out of our hospitals across the country. In Melbourne a couple of weeks ago, they told us it is the equivalent of shutting down two hospitals. In Queensland it is taking $11.8 billion out. It is 4½ thousand jobs that should be coming to Queensland that will not come because this government has decided that health is not its bag. It has just decided to walk away. It has torn up national partnership agreements, and the impact is on the people of the bush. That is a critical reason for why they are leaving the bush. If your child is born with a speech pathology problem and you want to live in the country and work in the bush, in regional and rural Australia, you cannot have access to those services, because they have been torn apart by this government—