Slade Brockman (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak on the Protecting Australian Dairy Bill. In doing so, I will point out and pay tribute to the three colleagues of mine who have spoken before me on this bill, all of them with direct experience of agriculture in Australia.

That is the case with me too. As many of you know, I grew up on a family farm in the South West of Western Australia—a family farm that has done pretty much everything in the course of its life. My dad built a dairy. My dad ran a dairy for a number of years. As with Senator Rennick, he left the industry when I was a young boy—again, well before deregulation took over. On our family farm alone, we've had four highly regulated industries where we've seen the heavy hand of government, sometimes aided and abetted by industry leaders who think they know best, try to control what farmers do. On our farm in the South West of Western Australia, at various times we've produced milk, we've had a fine-wool merino flock, we've had prime lamb production and we've grown potatoes. All of these at one stage or another were massively overregulated. They were highly regulated, with price controls and quotas. You name it; those industries had it, and it affected them all negatively.

Senator Rennick talked about the collapse of the reserve price scheme for wool. Dad and Mum struggled on for probably six years with our fine-wool merino flock, but with that wool stockpile hanging over their head they just couldn't do it any longer, and in the end they had to get out. I think Senator Rennick was actually a little bit kind to the impact of the collapse of the reserve price scheme when he said '10 years'. I think it was closer to 15. It's probably only been in the last six or seven years that there have been decent returns for wool again in this country, as finally that floor price for wool and the negative impact it had on the wool industry in Australia have washed out of the system and finally woolgrowers across Australia have got a decent return for their clip.

We had a regulated lamb industry in Western Australia and, obviously, a regulated dairy industry. The potato marketing board, up until recently, regulated the production of potatoes in Western Australia. All of these in the end had to wind up. They had to collapse. They had to be wound up because they failed. They failed to meet the test of what agriculture needs, and that is farmers being able to do their best to produce the food and fibre that the world and Australia need.

Bureaucrats in Canberra or Perth cannot judge what is required by farmers on the land. It is impossible. We can help set the rules by which everyone operates. We can help make sure that those rules are as robust and fair as possible and encourage transparency as much as possible, but, as soon as we get into the realm of starting to talk about floor prices, we are rerunning history that has already failed. The devastation that was caused by the previous regulation of industries cannot be overstated. I had another example in my professional life when working with the Pastoralists and Graziers Association at the time of the end of the Australian Wheat Board, the export monopoly for wheat, a situation which saw Western Australian grain growers effectively underwriting the cost of marketing wheat to the rest of the world and eastern states grain growers, who operated in a deregulated domestic market, taking advantage of that in some years and ignoring it in others. West Australian grain growers carried the costs. Regulation of industries with a one-size-fits-all model does not work. It has failed. It has failed. It has failed again.