Glenn Sterle (WA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Road Safety) Share this | Hansard source

He had hair on that committee; I'm telling you! I will ignore that interjection, anyway. What about increasing the farm asset threshold from $2.6 million to $5 million? We didn't bat an eyelid.

All the way through, we have to listen to some of this nonsense. The senator who is Minister for Agriculture—I've forgotten her name; darn!—can't wait to get out and say it's only the Nats that look after the bush—Senator McKenzie. She's the bush girl. I didn't know St Kilda was in the bush, but it was at one stage—or Mordialloc or wherever she's living. Do you know what her great contribution to the rural and regional affairs committee was? She couldn't wait to leak out a reference for inquiry and the recommendations before the committee had even ticked off on them. Senator McKenzie, it's all right taking the big pay packet, but, seriously, you're the leader of the Nats in the Senate. You come in here, Senator McKenzie, and tell me why it's a great idea to raid a $3.9 billion infrastructure fund for rural and regional Australia—not playgrounds or infrastructure pet projects in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane and Darwin but projects delivered to your region. You come in here and tell me why that's a great idea.

What you should be doing, Senator McKenzie and crew, is grabbing hold of your senior partners—not the doormats but the senior ones, the grown-ups—and then asking them: 'Hang on, what happens when this $100 million runs out? What do we do next? What's next on the plan? Are the Libs going to tell me that this $100 million bucket of money, wherever or with whomever it's going to end up, is going to stop the drought? What do we do next year? What do we do the year after?' Why aren't you, Nats, asking these questions of your senior partners, the rural Liberals? I'm not the one that has to answer that, but I tell you what: I'm not going to let you forget it, and I'm going to keep reminding you, because you're going to own this. So, while you're all here in your joint party room thinking, 'How can I get a promotion and not upset the senior coalition partners?' by crikey, think about how you will go back to your bush communities and defend this, because it's been six years that you've been in government and you've done a duck egg—zero, nothing, not a thing.

While we're at it, Minister, please take this on board: tell me how you came to $100 million. I'm not blaming you, Minister Cormann. You're the one that's got the sandwich, but sort it out. You're the one that's been told. You're the fixer, mate, not that impostor from South Australia. You're the fixer. You're the one that's going to find the money. Tell me how you got $100 million that will help these poor devils out. Tell me how long it will take to get whatever it is into wherever it's going to go. Minister, just stand up and cut me down, because I'll be the first one to congratulate you when you actually show me a list of names—it may be redacted—showing how much each family's going to get in their pocket, their bickie tin, the marmalade jar or whatever it might be and tell me how you got to that figure.

Please, Minister, do not insult my intelligence and that of other members of this fine establishment here by telling me you're going to offer them low-interest loans. Please don't go down that path, because one thing I learnt from the immortal former senator Bill Heffernan—and I'm probably the only one around here who likes the bloke, because he used to give you mob a good shake-up—is something he said to me way back in early 2006, very clearly: the last thing farmers need when they're in stress is another damn loan. He wasn't so succinct in his language. I tell you what: I've tamed it down a fair bit. But doesn't that make sense? So, Minister, please tell me a stupid statement like that is not even going to pass your lips when we have people who are under stress—and I don't even want to start going down to the mental stress that these poor families are going through at this moment and have been going through for more than just the last week, when the minister and the Prime Minister thought it was a great idea to go out to the bush and have a meeting when they haven't done anything for six darn years leading into it. I can't think what they'd be going through. I reckon they could tell you what to do with your low-interest loans. They'll tell you what to do with them and where they could go.

I'm summarising. I'm sorry, Mr Acting Deputy President. I could go on about this for hours and hours. The sad part here is that so many questions need to be asked. In the final seconds that I've got, I say to the Nats, if you're up there listening: you'd better get your act together and get down here. You are the ones that need to be asking these questions, because it will fall on your shoulders when that money doesn't start flowing through. You build the expectation of a figure that's got two zeros on it and perfectly fits into $100 million. You're making absolutely no sense. The more I talk about it, the more confused I'm getting. You can keep your smart remarks, but I know what you're thinking over there. But I'm not the only one, because I don't think any of you lot know what's going on. In saying that, I won't be supporting this.