Barry O'Sullivan (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I've said here before, as I've opened contributions in this place, that I always get very nervous when the Greens take an interest in agriculture and the plight of farmers. But it is good to see, at least, that their awareness has now peaked in an interest in our farming communities during this terrible drought. I haven't heard them mention it in this place before. If you just listened to the senator's contribution, you'd see that not one second of her contribution was devoted to providing any form of a solution for the here and now for our tens of thousands of farming families who are battling these current circumstances.

Before I get into the substance of my speech, let me share some particularly inconvenient statistics with the senator. This current drought is the 17th declared drought of significant size that this country has had since we commenced recording climate conditions in 1864. Of those 17, there have been 10 major droughts, six of a lesser degree and, of course, the current drought we have. Out of the total 154 years, large tracts of our land have been declared in drought for 81 of those years. These have had names like the Federation drought, the great drought and the millennium drought. This isn't our first rodeo dealing with difficult climatic conditions in the west.

I have good friends who live south of Hughenden, and I stayed with them during a visit to the west a couple of years ago. My colleague here, Senator McGrath, would know them and, I suspect, has been hosted by them on the verandah of that very same homestead. You can walk down the back steps of that homestead and go no more than 10 or 12 feet and turn over any piece of shale found in their backyard, and you will see a crab, a mollusc or a starfish. They are 1,300-odd kilometres from the high water mark of any ocean in this nation. So this business about changing weather patterns and the resultant impacts it has on the environment have been around for centuries. Only one cow is going to get fat during the course of this drought, and that's the cash cow upon which the environmental movement and the left-wing movement in this country will embrace. They will do anything—anything—to support their cause, with little or no regard for the people in country Australia.

I don't think I have stood up in this place in the four years I've been here without making mention of the circumstances confronting the people in rural Australia. I've had debates out in the open with our friends in the Greens movement and other movements in relation to what's happening. But nobody has put one foot forward with a plan that will help people in the agricultural sector to get through this current challenge. People in the bush are well aware of the conditions in which they operate, and they make provision for it. Most of them are able to make their way through these very long and debilitating periods of dry and come out the other end. There are families who have been on the land, on the same properties, since 1864. They have survived that whole time. They know how to manage this. What they don't need is for this to be politicised and turned into some climate change debate. What they need are policies that will assist this nation to support those people who support our national economy.

I've said it before and I will say it again: every single thing in our lives comes from primary production. The chairs we're sitting on, the clothes we're wearing, whatever we had for lunch, this building, this structure, the energy that comes out of the lights—everything—all start, in most instances, from primary production. What the people in the bush need is for this entire parliament and parliaments generally—state, federal and local government levels; and they're much better at it than the rest of us are—to be in tune with what their needs are during these difficult periods of time.

I also note that not one mention has ever been made about the suspension of the live cattle trade that drove hundreds of thousands of heads of stock into the domestic market of this nation at a time when many of these enterprises were trying to build their resilience for the dry periods they anticipated they would go through. The market had a 120 per cent reduction in the domestic price of the commodity of beef in particular. As they went into this drought they had nothing. There was nothing in the cupboard because we, as a parliament, had ripped away their opportunity to prepare on that particular occasion. That's why we're seeing such a significant impact on their lives now, as we move along six or seven years after that event.

So I urge my colleagues in this place not to use the people of the bush as some sort of political stick for them to pursue their causes. I know that my friends in the Greens won't be happy until all my poddy calves are sitting on the lounge with me, taking turns with the remote control. Until we can have a big juicy burger that I see them hoeing into down at McDonald's with a wrapper that says there were no little cattle slaughtered in the process of making this juicy hamburger, you have to leave the politics out of this. We as a nation need to recognise the contribution of primary producers and people who live in provincial Australia. We are a provincial nation—less than five per cent of our land mass is under metro. The rest of the people are out there working to deliver for our national interests and deliver our clothes, our chairs, the cars we drive and the fuel that goes in the tanks. What they need is less politics and more interest in how we will assist them to do what they need to do in a country that will always have these variations in the climate.