Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak to the Farm Household Support Amendment Bill 2017. The Greens will be supporting the sensible changes contained within the bill. The ordinary and liquid assets waiting periods appear to be pointless delays in farmers getting the support they need to keep themselves afloat while they return to profitability. We know that accessing these payments can still be a source of needless stigma for many farmers and it makes no sense to put in place punitive incentives for farmers to be running down their liquid assets while they are already trying to save their businesses.

The Greens also support the inclusion of water rights and other clearly farm-related assets, such as marketing cooperatives, within the farm asset cap of $2.55 million. Water rights, and other non-traditional assets held with regard to supporting farm business activity, are clearly farm assets, and I am glad to see that the government has listened to the community in making these changes.

It is my understanding that this bill is a response from the Nationals to a series of roundtables held across the country in dairy country last year, and these roundtables were into the milk price crisis and its effect on dairy communities. I have also been to many of the hearings that were held in Victoria and Tasmania as part of the Senate inquiry into the dairy industry. I heard many stories of how the dairy producers have been hit really hard by the world milk price and the actions of the major dairy producers and supermarket duopoly, Coles and Woolies, who are constraining and containing the level of return that dairy farmers are able to get for their product. This is a fundamental issue with the low prices that dairy farmers are able to get that lead them into this position of needing to access household support. But the Senate Standing Committee on Economics is still conducting its inquiries into these matters, and the Greens will have much more to say about this in the coming months.

However, one thing I can say today with a degree of certainty is that the dairy crisis that we are currently in will not be the last agricultural commodity crisis in the years ahead, and yet this government has its head in the sand when it comes to addressing the major issue facing our agricultural producers today, and that of course is global warming. We know that commodity price swings are only going to be exacerbated by global warming. Agricultural commodity supply and commodity prices will further fluctuate from year to year as extreme weather events, droughts, a shift in the Asian monsoon season and increased soil salinisation from seawater rises impact around the world. This is happening already and it is happening in the context of a tighter food supply, with demand for food growing year on year, with an increasingly growing middle class in Asia and populations still growing around the world.

We know that drought, water shortages and heatwaves are going to harm yields at home and lead to huge increases in the financial riskiness of farming. It is shameful that the government and the National Party are still dragging their heels on acknowledging, let alone addressing, climate change. It is shameful that just weeks after the National Farmers' Federation called for 'a coordinated national strategy for emissions reduction and electricity market reform' so that farmers, food producers, regulators and communities can all plan and have certainty in the transition to a low-carbon economy, the Deputy Prime Minister is still out there driving a fear campaign about rolling blackouts unless the government intervenes with subsidies to prop up polluting coal ventures. If we want what is best for agricultural communities, then there has to be planning for the transition to a low-carbon economy and how we are going to adapt to climate change, on ways to insulate farming communities from drought, extreme weather and commodity price swings and to act as quickly as possible to shift our industry to a more sustainable basis by helping them decarbonise their farm operations and getting cheaper and better access to renewables, storage and low emissions farming methods.

We know that the impacts of global warming are already being felt in the heatwaves that hit New South Wales late last year and earlier this year, and we have had the impact for the dairy industry. Forty-seven dairy cows were killed in the Shoalhaven because of excessive temperatures. These are the impacts that are being felt already. We know that wheat yields have been dropping over the last 20 years due to the increase in temperature due to global warming. That decrease in wheat yields has been evened out and masked by an increase in productivity, but that is not going to continue to occur. We know that under four degrees of global warming, which is where we are headed at the moment, the climate of our current wheat-growing areas is going to become like the climate of the central deserts, and you cannot grow wheat in that climate. These are the huge impacts of global warming that are going to overwhelm the impacts that we have seen so far.

While the Greens today are supporting the changes in the Farm Household Support Amendment Bill and acknowledge that they are improvements on the status quo, we do so while also acknowledging that this government is completely dropping the ball on the largest issue facing regional communities and call for an end to the ridiculous bull-headed approach from the Turnbull government on managing our transition to a low-carbon economy and a safe climate for us all.