Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the urgency motion moved by Senator Hanson regarding dairy farmers. It's been quite some months now that I've been in the Senate, and finally Senator Hanson has developed a resolution that I feel capable of supporting—I suppose a stopped clock is right at least twice a day! Everybody knows that the dairy farming industry needs government action. Even One Nation realises that. Our dairy farmers are caught in a long-running cost-price squeeze that is being compounded by drought and Morrison government inaction. Labor believes that government intervention is needed in order to secure our dairy sector and our dairy farmers. Absent government action, our kids will no doubt be drinking imported milk, and I don't think that is a future Australia should be setting up for itself.

Of course, the history of government action in the dairy industry goes back some decades now—right back to when the Howard government deregulated the dairy industry in 2000. As curious as I was to search back through the history of dairy market deregulation, there was one notable proponent for dairy market deregulation in 1999 and 2000, and that was former Labor MP Mark Latham—the current leader of the One Nation party in New South Wales. In an article titled 'Pull the udder one'—a dad joke that even I hesitate to make!—the article said:

Labor MP Mark Latham, about as gung-ho for competition policy as you get on either side of the parliament, said in an ABC interview in February: "I'm on the side of the dairy farmers. Ninety per cent of Victorian dairy farmers voted for deregulation. This was Australia's first ever democratic deregulation. So how can anyone like Hanson or other people campaigning on these issues say that they want to reregulate the industry when it's the industry itself, the great bulk of Australia's dairy farmers are in Victoria and they decided that they wanted to go down in path?"

That's what Mark Latham, the leader of One Nation, said then. After the dark despair of the election loss in 2004—the self-loathing, the despair, the sewer that he climbed into over the course of the ensuing years to finally emerge as a leader of the One Nation Party in New South Wales—that's his political record in terms of the dairy industry. I'm actually very surprised to find One Nation here in the Senate with a skerrick of sympathy and interest in the future of dairy farmers, if that's the kind of character they are prepared to recruit for political leadership in New South Wales.

In February Labor promised that if we were successful at the election we would task the ACCC with testing the merits of a minimum farmgate price and to make recommendations on the best design options. That's the responsible course of action. There is only one potential party of government in this place that would act to save the dairy industry. It's not acceptable for our farmers to be paid less than the cost of production for their milk. If a floor price is needed to win this crisis, that's what Labor, in government, would support. Australia needs a thriving dairy industry, not a dying dairy industry. Scott Morrison should act.