Anne Ruston (SA, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Agriculture and Water Resources) Share this | Hansard source

The farm household allowance program provides up to three years of income support for eligible farmers and farmers' partners while they take steps to improve their long-term financial situation. FHA recipients also have access to a number of other government supports, such as healthcare cards, pharmaceuticals allowance, rent allowance, telephone allowance, energy supplement and remote area allowance.

The Farm Household Support Amendment Bill 2017 demonstrates that the government continues to be responsive to the needs of the farm communities in rural and regional Australia. Further, the bill demonstrates our willingness to streamline the assessment of farm household allowance applications where appropriate and where possible. We pride ourselves on having a program of continuous improvement. These changes that we seek to legislate today are to support ministerial rulings that have been given by the Deputy Prime Minister in support of the flexibility that we believe we should be affording our farming community when they get into situations, often—just about always—not of their own doing, where they are suffering significant financial difficulties.

The bill continues that improvement of the farm household allowance program by seeking to put into legislation a series of changes. Farm household allowance applicants and recipients will benefit, we believe, because clarifying the eligibility test to apply for this support and removing unnecessary waiting periods will be of significant benefit to those people who are in need.

This bill seeks to clarify the treatment of the assets necessary for the operation of the farm enterprise under the act and includes them within the farm assets test. It also removes the requirement for successful farm household allowance recipients to serve an ordinary waiting period or a liquid assets waiting period before they receive their payments. The bill also addresses community concerns relating to the time taken to process applications for farm household allowance and the treatment of water assets and shares in marketing cooperatives as non-farm assets rather than as farm assets which are necessary for the operation of the farming business. The cost of this particular action is negligible.

I thank all of the senators who have made a contribution today for their support in relation to this bill. I have to make a couple of comments in relation to some of the comments that were made. Firstly, in relation to the comments that were made by the Labor Party, which sought to politicise what has been a pretty important change in support of our farmers. Whilst they were the ones who actually abolished a number of things under their previous administration, not the least of which was cutting the budget of the department of agriculture in half, they then come in here and have a political swipe in relation to something that Minister Joyce had said, which I thought was pretty cheap.

In relation to Senator Roberts from One Nation and Senator Rice from the Greens, I think they probably counteracted each other. One said one thing and one said the complete polar opposite. I am sure the truth of the matter probably resides somewhere in the middle.

Before I finish, I congratulate and thank Senator Bridget McKenzie for the huge amount of work that she did in rural and regional Victoria particularly, in trying to get a very, very detailed assessment of the impacts of this particular measure and how it could be improved so that we can assist our farmers in a better way. Senator McKenzie's work has enabled us, when we made the changes to this particular legislation that we are proposing today, to make it far better informed from the grassroots of our farming community. The roundtables have certainly been of major assistance to us.

I thank everybody for their contribution to this debate. I commend the bill to the Senate.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.