Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Northern Australia) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Agriculture (Senator McKenzie) to a question without notice asked by Senator Green today.

It's the last week of parliament, and what do you know? It's another bad week for the National Party. Over the course of these last six months, since the last federal election, we've had the National Party, the junior partner in the government, who should have been triumphant after their victory in May, just gradually go down in this spiral with issue after issue after issue concerning their actual base in rural and regional Australia, particularly when it comes to farmers and farming communities. We've seen it on the drought. We've seen, over the course of estimates and other proceedings, it exposed—that all of the work that the National Party claims to be performing in the interests of farmers and farming communities to provide money to combat the drought is all just built on massive fibs and misrepresentations. We've seen it on the dairy as well, and of course we see it in the ongoing leadership rumblings, usually surrounding Senator Canavan and other Queensland Nationals.

We've seen it again today with a series of questions asked by Senator Green of Minister McKenzie about the government's extremely poor performance on the dairy code of conduct. As we have said here on a number of occasions, if you can't get the National Party to care about dairy farmers in Queensland, in Victoria, in New South Wales and in other states, what can you get the National Party to do? They are letting down their core voters, their core constituents in the form of dairy farmers and farming communities generally. What we've exposed over the last few months—and I recognise the efforts of Senator Hanson and Senator Roberts on this matter as well—is that the National Party has profoundly let down dairy farmers across Australia. They've finally made promises, under sufferance, to introduce a dairy code of conduct, but we're still waiting. We're into the final week of this parliamentary sitting, and there is still no sign of this dairy code of conduct. You look under every rock, looking for the National Party's dairy code of conduct, and it's still missing. And, yet again, we see here today, that there's no sign of this code of conduct being delivered any time soon to save the dairy farmers that the National Party says they exist to represent.

The minister was given every opportunity today by Senator Green to tell us when this dairy code of conduct would actually come into effect, and, yet again, there are no answers, no promises and no time line. Dairy farmers, who are fast going to the wall, will have to just sit back and wait for this National Party to get its act together and come through on this dairy code of conduct.

In fact, things have got so bad that one of the National Party's own senators, Senator McDonald, has had to take matters into her own hands by writing to Coles' and Woolworths' chief executives, as well as to major milk processors, urging them to sign up to the proposed code of conduct and commit to paying fairer milk prices immediately. Senator McDonald wouldn't have to do that if Minister McKenzie were actually just doing her job and getting this dairy code of conduct provided and out there into the public. But because Minister McKenzie is unable to do this and has had to go and do deals with Senator Hanson to try to stave off leadership challenges in her own ranks, Senator McDonald has had to take matters into her own hands.

The extraordinary situation we saw here in question time today was that irrigators from the Murray-Darling Basin, who had travelled here, ended up walking out on the National Party agriculture minister. I don't think anyone has seen farming communities walk out, literally, during question time on answers from a National Party agriculture minister. That shows you the level of difficulty this minister and the National Party in general are faced with. What this goes to more generally is an incredible split that we see opening up day by day within the National Party. The body language that was on display by all of the National Party senators here today was something to be beheld. We had the National Party's own deputy leader, the agriculture minister, on her feet and trying to defend herself from the accusations that she hadn't done her job on the Murray-Darling Basin or on the dairy code of conduct. The level of misery on the faces of National Party senators was something to behold.

Of course, chief among them was Senator Canavan. We know that Senator Canavan and the other Queensland National senators and members of parliament cannot wait to get rid of Senator McKenzie out of the deputy leader spot, because they want it for one of their own. They want it for the Queensland National Party. They have never accepted Senator McKenzie, and I predict that, before the week is out, we are going to hear more about leadership rumblings in the National Party. (Time expired)