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

It's not surprising the Greens stand up in here supporting the taking over of Australian sovereignty by ideological fellow travellers from overseas. The fact is that Australia should set the rules for Australian farmers as to how they operate in what is considered forest country in Australia. We should not have those rules imposed on us from outside by another party.

I consider myself a strong free-trader. It's one of the reasons I thought very hard before speaking out against a prospective free trade deal with the EU, because, quite frankly, the EU have history in this space. They have a strong focus on trying to control the countries they do business with and how they operate and, quite frankly, this is not acceptable. This is not an acceptable way for an international player to operate, and it's not an acceptable way for an Australian government to take those approaches lightly.

We should push back; we need to push back. We need to defend the rights of this place, this parliament, to make decisions for Australia. We need to support great industries, like the Australian beef industry, who do a lot in this area to manage the plains type environments, open savanna type environments that Senator Canavan talked about, where there is a mixture of agricultural activity, trees, landscapes. We have great Australian businesses operating in that sort of an environment. We don't need rules and regulations being imposed on Australian beef producers in this way by a foreign actor.

This isn't the only space where the European Union in particular has sought to interfere in other countries. We've seen it in the use of some chemicals. A chemical like glyphosate is extraordinarily important to the broadacre farming sector in Western Australia particularly, but also right across Australia. Without chemicals like glyphosate, broadacre farming would be forced to either shut down or return to the old methods of tilling. The environmental damage that would be done if we were forced to abandon no-till approaches to agriculture would be simply extraordinary, to the point where it would probably be either completely inefficient or extraordinarily destructive to do.

The idea that we would accept the judgement of other countries who do have other imperatives driving this—as Senator Canavan said, the type and nature of forest cover in Europe, given their long, long history of intensive agricultural production, is very different to Australia. As are their soil types and the kinds of agriculture they undertake. They're much heavier soils than in Australia and the use of chemicals such as glyphosate are less important to their farming systems, on a relative basis, than they are in Australia. So we have to be very careful when considering our relationships with other countries and other foreign organisations like the European Union.

Looking at the incentives that are driving their decisions, they aren't always just about positive environmental messages. Often there are underlying reasons for the settings they seek to put in place, the settings they seek to impose on other countries. These settings actually give them a relative economic advantage. That's their job, and I don't think we should find anything particularly surprising in that. But when making decisions in this country, we have to make them in the best interests of this country. That is why I'm very happy to support Senator Canavan in this urgency motion.