Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to also support the removal of the Agriculture (Biosecurity Protection) Levies Bill 2024 from the Notice Paper. I can't understand why we don't put a tax on the importers. We've now got the US President wanting to start a trade war, so let's call their bluff. Let's make the importers, the people who are bringing these containers on board, pay.

According to agriculture.gov.au, taxpayers have to pay 44 per cent of this levy. Believe it or not, Australia Post have to pay two per cent as well. Meanwhile, the importers only pay 48 per cent. Our wheat farmers and grain producers already pay through GST and through beer excise, and one of the policies that People First are advocating for is to reduce the beer excise tax from 60c per litre of alcohol down to 20c. This country was built by the beer drinkers and it belongs to them, not the wine drinkers. If wine can get a subsidy, so should beer.

The other thing we need to do to help our agricultural producers in this country is allow the farmers to engage in collective bargaining when it comes to dealing with big wholesale buyers. In the supermarket inquiry, I saw that Coles and Woolworths are leaning very heavily on our horticultural growers—a big shout-out to the guys in the Lockyer Valley and around Bundaberg and to the many producers up in North Queensland. We need to protect our horticulturalists, we need to allow them to engage in collective bargaining and we need much more transparency in the prices that Coles and Woolworths are offering to our farmers. These are two policies that People First will be proposing.

But I'll get back to this bill. We strongly believe that the people who import goods into this country should be the ones who pay for the biosecurity levy. It's not right that the consumers here in Australia have to pay for this. By putting a tax on the taxpayers, it's another impost on the cost of living, through food.

I, for the life of me, can't understand why we'd want to be encouraging foreign farmers and foreign producers to sell their goods into Australia when we have a very viable and competitive agricultural sector here in Australia. I might add that Australia is one of the very few countries in the world that doesn't protect its agricultural and manufacturing industry—it makes my blood boil—and that's if you don't add on the amount of pork that gets dumped in this country from the EU and from Canada. This is the thing. It's all very well to say you believe in free trade, but that doesn't mean you destroy your own producers while other producers in other countries get enormous subsidies—the EU's notorious for this—and then dump. They get enormous subsidies in their own country, and they overproduce and then dump in this country. So I support the disallowance of this bill. I think it's an absolute disgrace that we are trying to impose a tax on the Australian consumer. Let the foreign importers pay for this. I'd also just say that we need to also reduce the excise on beer—it's way out of control—and we need to allow our farmers to engage in collective bargaining with the big retailers like Coles and Woolworths.