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

Yes. I'm learning every day—learning on the job, which is about the only option that the Liberal's vocational education policy allows people these days.

Directing the ACCC to test and design a floor price would be an important first step in giving dairy farmers a fair go. The Liberals and Nationals talk a big game in Canberra, but they have done nothing to help dairy farmers and refuse, for ideological reasons, to intervene in the market.

Where, in fact, is the National Party on the dairy industry? They have always been on the side of big agriculture, not family farmers and not farming families. Examine the history of dairy deregulation and government action and inaction in this area and the application, the relentless application, of Liberal Party big-end-of-town, neoliberal principles to the dairy market and you will always find the National Party there, the enablers of Liberal Party policy in the dairy industry—Liberal Party policy that is hurting family farms; Liberal Party policy that is making it harder for dairy farmers to operate. They are always there for big corporate power and big retailers and they have got the mealy-mouthed words and the quisling approaches to try to justify their proposition, but they weren't anywhere to be found when the crisis was on in the dairy industry. It's always the National Party. They are enabling pushing prices down.

It was Mark Latham in 1999 and 2000 who was into pushing competition policy and neoliberal policy in the dairy industry, but it's the National Party all of the time on that agenda. With friends like the National Party, dairy farmers in Australia sure don't need enemies. No amount of posturing in this place about the beneficial impact of free trade deals for market access for the dairy farmers will remove the memory of Liberal Party and National Party failure in the dairy industry, from deregulation in 2000 to a refusal to act now.

The member for Cook, the Prime Minister, is a failure in agriculture policy. He has no drought policy framework. He has no action on dairy. He is all talk and no action on water infrastructure. There isn't a dam that the Liberal Party has promised to build that has ever been built. It is about time the pretend friends, the National Party, wised up and realised that the show over here hasn't got the slightest bit of interest in the future of the dairy industry. The coalition has had more than five years to implement a dairy code of conduct and they have failed. In budget estimates last February, the government admitted that it had kicked the mandatory code down the road to 1 July 2020. Australia's $4 billion dairy farming industry supports more than 5½ thousand farming families and 42,500 jobs.

I should say that the crisis doesn't just affect dairy farmers; it is also costing jobs in the dairy processing industry. Brancourts, a dairy processing company that has made cheese since 1895, went into administration in September. Thirty-three full-time jobs have been lost in the Latrobe Valley. Twenty full-time jobs have been lost in Hexham near Newcastle. Brancourts cited ongoing stress in the market and a decline in the national milk supply as the reason for their closure. In August, Nestle announced a factory closure at Tongala in northern Victoria—106 jobs were lost. In May Fonterra announced a factory closure in Dennington, south-west Victoria—108 jobs were lost. Murray Goulburn has closed factories in Victoria and Tasmania, and at least 360 jobs have been lost. That is a litany of failure in terms of dairy farming families, it is a litany of failure in terms of dairy farming capability and it's a litany of failure in terms of secondary food processing jobs that people in country towns rely upon to maintain a decent standard of living for their families. And that's a failure that can be put at the feet of the people who've been in government over the course of the last six years.

Senators in this place and the people of Australia can be absolutely assured that, in government, Labor would act to implement an ACCC review and would act to move towards a farmgate price. The Australian dairy farming industry is in crisis. It's not alone. The American industry is in crisis, as is the industry in the European Union. The dairy farmers in the United States and the dairy farmers in Europe have had their governments actually stand up for them and actually take steps to protect their industry and to protect dairy farming jobs.