Rex Patrick (SA, Centre Alliance) Share this | Hansard source

Centre Alliance will not be supporting this bill. I want to make sure people understand and don't misconstrue this. It's not because we agree with the government or because the government has performed poorly; it's simply because it's not the right solution. I understand what Senator Hanson is trying to do. I am sympathetic to her cause, but it is not the right solution.

There are a number of things that need to be solved in order to help our dairy farmers. I will go through some of those. The first is price perception. The fact is that most people around this country think that a litre of milk is worth about a dollar, and that is just not correct. It's a perception created by organisations like Coles and Woolies, for their own purposes, that has led Australians to think that the cost of milk is less than the cost of water—and that is hugely problematic. Back in 2011, the Senate held an inquiry into the impacts of supermarket price decisions on the dairy industry, so this problem has been understood for some considerable period of time and, yet, not much has been done. In fact, there has been some progress, in that section 46 of the Competition and Consumer Act has been modified to deal with misuse of market power. Today, I invite people, when considering the 'big stick' legislation, to support the amendment that Centre Alliance will move that seeks to have divestiture right across all sectors of the economy. Once you accept that divestiture is a useful tool for controlling conduct in the retail electricity market, then it's reasonable to suggest that it's a remedy that is applicable right across the economy. That would help us deal with large corporations who exercise market power in an egregious fashion, as is the case in respect of $1 milk with Coles and Woolies.

The second is the farmer-processor imbalance, which has been talked about by a number of senators prior to me. It is good that we are now seeing a move to get an agreement or code of conduct in place. I point out that, along with the ACCC inquiry, in 2017 the Senate Committee on Economics conducted another inquiry into the dairy industry, with a report titled Australia's dairy industry: rebuilding trust and a fair market for farmers. The Senate examined that in the face of the Murray Goulburn farmgate price cuts. Do you know what? That was tabled in 2017 and the government still hasn't responded to it. Once again, I advise we're not supporting this bill, and it's not because we're supporting the government. The government has done very little in this space. The Nationals need to be poking their coalition partners in the side and getting a hurry-on in respect of some of these changes.

Water prices are another area of concern. Senator Davey mentioned input costs. The cost of water has increased considerably. We're now looking at things like water trading to see how we can fix that, but it's not just the drought; we've had matter mismanagement across the Murray-Darling Basin for as long as I can remember. It is not just the drought that is causing the problems we see with dairy farmers being unable to compete and pay for water. We've also got feed costs, which in some sense are related to the drought, but, again, that also goes back to proper river management. We see situations where the government is reacting. The pressure's coming on. Senator Hanson's put a lot of pressure on in relation to the code of conduct and the timing of that, so the government reacts. We have all sorts of problems on the Murray-Darling, and the government get reactive about them instead of being proactive, which is where they need to be playing.

For as long as the coalition have been in power, since they took over from the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government, energy prices have been high. I, as a South Australian, know that only too well because we, unfortunately, have the highest energy costs in the country, but Victoria's creeping up. There are a lot of dairy farmers in Victoria who are going to end up experiencing extremely high power prices as a result of a failure to deal with policy properly. So I agree with Senator Davey that this bill doesn't address the core problems, but we must also recognise that the government hasn't been addressing those core input cost problems either.

Finally, I know senators around the chamber will have an affinity with what I'm about to say—that is, as a senator, you have the honour of being able to pick up the phone and talk to just about anyone in the country. That is a huge honour. We are able to contact people—experts in their field—and, in relation to this bill, that's exactly what I did. I contacted the South Australian Dairyfarmers Association and I asked them for their considered opinion on this bill. They do not want it. As a South Australian senator, I have to listen to what my constituents say. The experts in South Australia—the people who are producing milk in South Australia—do not want this, and it is for that reason that Centre Alliance will not support the bill.