Carol Brown (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Families and Payments) Share this | Hansard source

This bill amends the Farm Household Support Act 2014 to ensure that recipients of the farm household allowance are not required to serve an ordinary waiting period or liquid assets wait period—if the LAWP is applicable—before they can commence receiving the farm household allowance. Farmers seeking to obtain the farm household allowance are required to serve the ordinary waiting period of one week before payments can commence. The bill removes the requirement for the ordinary waiting period. Farmers seeking to obtain the farm household allowance who have liquid assets are required to serve up to a 13-week waiting period. The bill removes this waiting period.

The bill is seeking to streamline access to the farm household allowance for farmers and their partners experiencing financial hardship. However, the true intent of the bill is about addressing some of the failings in farm household support. Farm household support, as described by the shadow minister for agriculture, is like an unemployment benefit for farmers doing it tough—farmers who find themselves in a situation, whether it be because of drought or some other influence upon them, where they find it necessary to turn to the government, temporarily at least, for support.

This bill seeks to address the deficiencies in the farm household allowance, deficiencies that were obvious from day one. I remind the House that it was the farm household allowance that got the minister for agriculture in a bit of trouble in the other place when the minister attempted to respond to a question from the shadow minister about the failings of drought policy and the farm household allowance, which caused him to doctor the Hansard. In his attempt to embellish the effectiveness of the farm household allowance, he completely misled the House, kept it quiet and doctored his Hansard.

This bill is an admission that the minister was wrong back in 2011. Sadly, rather than dealing with the difficulties farmers were facing then when applying for the farm household allowance, the minister choose to sack his departmental secretary, Dr Grimes. Dr Grimes' crime was to take the minister on, question his integrity and ask him to, out of respect for his department, do the right thing, fess up in the parliament, correct his Hansard and take responsibility. But the minister decided he would not be taking any responsibility, and that is a sad and tragic event in the history of the department of agriculture in this country.

The point is that we have been telling the minister since at least the last quarter of 2014 that farmers were hurting and they were unable to access the farm household allowance. The bill does no harm, but sadly it does not fix all the problems associated with the farm household allowance. The bill removes the ordinary waiting period for those making an application. In other words, currently, if you apply to Centrelink for the farm household allowance and secure approval for the farm household allowance, you can wait a week before you qualify. This bill removes the one-week waiting period, but the Centrelink problems and the complexities of the form have not been fixed.

Senator McKenzie had a bit of a road tour or roadshow, where she consulted people about the problems that they were having with the farm household allowance. She hailed those roundtables as a great success. She finally delivered a report to the parliament, but only because the member for Indi insisted on one. But none of the key issues Senator McKenzie raised in her report have been addressed by this bill, and certainly this bill in no way fixes the Centrelink problems.

The other provision we are supportive of is a redefinition of some off-farm assets as on-farm assets—things like water allocations and interests in cooperatives—so that those assets do not count against a farmer when facing the assets test.