Pauline Hanson (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

I will, thank you. Australians will be listening to what is going to happen in this chamber today relating to saving the Australian dairy industry. As I've raised previously, we are losing the equivalent of one dairy farmer a week in Australia. They are devastated that they are actually being stopped. When I hear the Nationals say, 'But we are doing what we can to help the dairy industry,' it is not the truth. For 4½ years, there has been inquiry after inquiry into the dairy industry. Nothing has happened.

There's been talk about a code of conduct. Where is it? It was only because I forced the issue that this code of conduct has been drafted up, and it is a pathetic draft—absolutely pathetic. It is not addressing it. Why have we moved so far from the ACCC recommendations on a dairy code of conduct to something that has been drafted on the run and is protecting the processors? A lot of the dairy industry participants that I have met admit that it does not go far enough to protect the dairy farmers.

All that I'm asking for, and what the people of Australia want, is a fair farmgate price for dairy farmers' milk. You can't expect them to run a business if they are not getting paid the cost of their milk to produce that milk. Don't you understand where we are? We're in dire straits in this nation. We had 22,000 dairy farmers. We're down now to 5,200, according to what the minister told me last week. We've lost another 500 just in the last year and a half, if that. That doesn't mean to say that these people are producing milk. A lot of them have held onto their registration purely in the hope that the industry will turn around.

This government has been so supportive of our dairy industry being sold to foreign interests. Chinese own the biggest dairy farm in Tasmania, with about 19,000 head of cattle. They're exporting their milk overseas. There is no reason why we should be supporting this. They now want to buy up Bellamy's, which has been supported by our Treasurer Frydenberg, and people here have said, 'What's the problem with that?' We've gone from 12 billion litres of milk in the year 2000. Now we're just scraping over eight billion litres of milk.

You talk about registering the industry. People must understand that this industry is not what it was previously, when it was supported by the state and federal governments. This is not going to be supported by either party or either government. This is about the farmers having a contract in place that the processors must pay them a fair price for their milk, and you're going to deny them that. There is nowhere else in the world where this is the case. We're the only country that doesn't have a regulated industry. Even in New Zealand, their milk is regulated. America and Europe have regulated the dairy industry, and they're powering ahead in their export market and their domestic market. They're producing more milk now. But you are so blinded and so bloody-minded that you are prepared to actually destroy the dairy industry in Australia. That is our food security. That's the people.