Carol Brown (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Families and Payments) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This bill amends the Farm Household Support Act 2014 to ensure that recipients of the farm household allowance are not required to serve an ordinary waiting period or liquid assets wait period—if the LAWP is applicable—before they can commence receiving the farm household allowance. Farmers seeking to obtain the farm household allowance are required to serve the ordinary waiting period of one week before payments can commence. The bill removes the requirement for the ordinary waiting period. Farmers seeking to obtain the farm household allowance who have liquid assets are required to serve up to a 13-week waiting period. The bill removes this waiting period.

The bill is seeking to streamline access to the farm household allowance for farmers and their partners experiencing financial hardship. However, the true intent of the bill is about addressing some of the failings in farm household support. Farm household support, as described by the shadow minister for agriculture, is like an unemployment benefit for farmers doing it tough—farmers who find themselves in a situation, whether it be because of drought or some other influence upon them, where they find it necessary to turn to the government, temporarily at least, for support.

This bill seeks to address the deficiencies in the farm household allowance, deficiencies that were obvious from day one. I remind the House that it was the farm household allowance that got the minister for agriculture in a bit of trouble in the other place when the minister attempted to respond to a question from the shadow minister about the failings of drought policy and the farm household allowance, which caused him to doctor the Hansard. In his attempt to embellish the effectiveness of the farm household allowance, he completely misled the House, kept it quiet and doctored his Hansard.

This bill is an admission that the minister was wrong back in 2011. Sadly, rather than dealing with the difficulties farmers were facing then when applying for the farm household allowance, the minister choose to sack his departmental secretary, Dr Grimes. Dr Grimes' crime was to take the minister on, question his integrity and ask him to, out of respect for his department, do the right thing, fess up in the parliament, correct his Hansard and take responsibility. But the minister decided he would not be taking any responsibility, and that is a sad and tragic event in the history of the department of agriculture in this country.

The point is that we have been telling the minister since at least the last quarter of 2014 that farmers were hurting and they were unable to access the farm household allowance. The bill does no harm, but sadly it does not fix all the problems associated with the farm household allowance. The bill removes the ordinary waiting period for those making an application. In other words, currently, if you apply to Centrelink for the farm household allowance and secure approval for the farm household allowance, you can wait a week before you qualify. This bill removes the one-week waiting period, but the Centrelink problems and the complexities of the form have not been fixed.

Senator McKenzie had a bit of a road tour or roadshow, where she consulted people about the problems that they were having with the farm household allowance. She hailed those roundtables as a great success. She finally delivered a report to the parliament, but only because the member for Indi insisted on one. But none of the key issues Senator McKenzie raised in her report have been addressed by this bill, and certainly this bill in no way fixes the Centrelink problems.

The other provision we are supportive of is a redefinition of some off-farm assets as on-farm assets—things like water allocations and interests in cooperatives—so that those assets do not count against a farmer when facing the assets test.

Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak to the Farm Household Support Amendment Bill 2017. The Greens will be supporting the sensible changes contained within the bill. The ordinary and liquid assets waiting periods appear to be pointless delays in farmers getting the support they need to keep themselves afloat while they return to profitability. We know that accessing these payments can still be a source of needless stigma for many farmers and it makes no sense to put in place punitive incentives for farmers to be running down their liquid assets while they are already trying to save their businesses.

The Greens also support the inclusion of water rights and other clearly farm-related assets, such as marketing cooperatives, within the farm asset cap of $2.55 million. Water rights, and other non-traditional assets held with regard to supporting farm business activity, are clearly farm assets, and I am glad to see that the government has listened to the community in making these changes.

It is my understanding that this bill is a response from the Nationals to a series of roundtables held across the country in dairy country last year, and these roundtables were into the milk price crisis and its effect on dairy communities. I have also been to many of the hearings that were held in Victoria and Tasmania as part of the Senate inquiry into the dairy industry. I heard many stories of how the dairy producers have been hit really hard by the world milk price and the actions of the major dairy producers and supermarket duopoly, Coles and Woolies, who are constraining and containing the level of return that dairy farmers are able to get for their product. This is a fundamental issue with the low prices that dairy farmers are able to get that lead them into this position of needing to access household support. But the Senate Standing Committee on Economics is still conducting its inquiries into these matters, and the Greens will have much more to say about this in the coming months.

However, one thing I can say today with a degree of certainty is that the dairy crisis that we are currently in will not be the last agricultural commodity crisis in the years ahead, and yet this government has its head in the sand when it comes to addressing the major issue facing our agricultural producers today, and that of course is global warming. We know that commodity price swings are only going to be exacerbated by global warming. Agricultural commodity supply and commodity prices will further fluctuate from year to year as extreme weather events, droughts, a shift in the Asian monsoon season and increased soil salinisation from seawater rises impact around the world. This is happening already and it is happening in the context of a tighter food supply, with demand for food growing year on year, with an increasingly growing middle class in Asia and populations still growing around the world.

We know that drought, water shortages and heatwaves are going to harm yields at home and lead to huge increases in the financial riskiness of farming. It is shameful that the government and the National Party are still dragging their heels on acknowledging, let alone addressing, climate change. It is shameful that just weeks after the National Farmers' Federation called for 'a coordinated national strategy for emissions reduction and electricity market reform' so that farmers, food producers, regulators and communities can all plan and have certainty in the transition to a low-carbon economy, the Deputy Prime Minister is still out there driving a fear campaign about rolling blackouts unless the government intervenes with subsidies to prop up polluting coal ventures. If we want what is best for agricultural communities, then there has to be planning for the transition to a low-carbon economy and how we are going to adapt to climate change, on ways to insulate farming communities from drought, extreme weather and commodity price swings and to act as quickly as possible to shift our industry to a more sustainable basis by helping them decarbonise their farm operations and getting cheaper and better access to renewables, storage and low emissions farming methods.

We know that the impacts of global warming are already being felt in the heatwaves that hit New South Wales late last year and earlier this year, and we have had the impact for the dairy industry. Forty-seven dairy cows were killed in the Shoalhaven because of excessive temperatures. These are the impacts that are being felt already. We know that wheat yields have been dropping over the last 20 years due to the increase in temperature due to global warming. That decrease in wheat yields has been evened out and masked by an increase in productivity, but that is not going to continue to occur. We know that under four degrees of global warming, which is where we are headed at the moment, the climate of our current wheat-growing areas is going to become like the climate of the central deserts, and you cannot grow wheat in that climate. These are the huge impacts of global warming that are going to overwhelm the impacts that we have seen so far.

While the Greens today are supporting the changes in the Farm Household Support Amendment Bill and acknowledge that they are improvements on the status quo, we do so while also acknowledging that this government is completely dropping the ball on the largest issue facing regional communities and call for an end to the ridiculous bull-headed approach from the Turnbull government on managing our transition to a low-carbon economy and a safe climate for us all.

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

As a senator who is serving the people of Queensland and Australia I rise to congratulate the government on this Farm Household Support Amendment Bill 2017. It does remove the waiting period, which is currently up to 13 weeks, for eligible farmers to receive the farm household allowance. It also changes the categorisation of certain assets, such as water entitlements, which has the effect of broadening eligibility. However, I need to talk about two additional things.

The first is: what about compensation for farmers who had their property rights stolen under the Howard government? Prime Minister John Howard colluded with the Premier of Queensland and the environment minister in New South Wales at the time, Mr Bob Carr. They stole farmers' property rights in order to comply with the Kyoto protocol, despite the fact that the Prime Minister at the time said that he would not ratify the Kyoto protocol. He said he would comply. My understanding is that there are two ways to comply with the Kyoto protocol. The first is to cut back on industry. At the time the Prime Minister did not have the guts to do that, so he took the softer option. He penalised the farmers by preventing them from clearing land. That was a clear stealing of farmers' property rights.

We are told that there is nothing more sacrosanct to the Liberal Party than protecting property rights. Instead, the Prime Minister, in collusion with the then Premier and a minister in the New South Wales government, stole these rights without compensation. If these rights had been stolen or removed by the federal government alone, that would have required compensation. That they were removed by the passing of native vegetation protection legislation by the states meant the farmers were not entitled to compensation. So we had millions, if not billions, of dollars of farmers' land and property rights stolen by the federal government working with the New South Wales and Queensland governments. It was an absolute theft. Yet now we have the Liberals talking about supporting changes to section 18C, which we endorse. The fundamental freedom is property rights, but freedom of speech is also there. Why is it that the Liberals still will not give compensation to farmers for stealing their property rights?

I must add before moving from this topic that four years after he was thrown out of office John Howard in fact admitted in a major policy speech for the Global Warming Policy Foundation that he is agnostic on climate change. His chief of staff while he was Prime Minister was the current Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science, Senator Sinodinos. Surely he would have been advising the Prime Minister. Even though the Prime Minister was agnostic on global warming and that we are affecting climate through our use of hydrocarbons, he must have been advised, presumably by Senator Sinodinos, to push these global-warming claims. That is the reason, in my view, why the farmers lost their property rights and still to this day have not been compensated. Some have committed suicide over the loss of their land, because it has made them unproductive. Others have paid the penalty and walked off. We have seen Queensland regions devastated by this.

The second thing I want to talk about is the global warming claims made by Senator Rice, a Greens senator. There is no empirical evidence anywhere, no hard data or physical observation, that shows there is anything unusual occurring at all in any aspect of climate—not temperatures, not rainfall, not snowfall, not drought severity, not drought frequency and not drought duration. We had longer and higher heatwaves in the 19th century, from the 1880s to the 1890s. We have seen no change in sea level at any of the longstanding—that is, 100-year—tidal gauges around this country and, in fact, in many places around the world. Storm severity, frequency and duration are not changing. In fact, North America and Australia have had a lull in storms in recent years.

Yields of corn, wheat and other crops are actually increasing. In fact, every crop is carbon based. Its core cellular biology is carbon. It is essential for all life on earth. We do not need to have a low-carbon economy. In fact, a low-carbon economy is false and impossible because every cell in that Greens senator's body contains carbon. Every cell in every food she eats contains carbon. It is absolute nonsense to say that the seasons are unnaturally varying in their growing duration. There is no warming going on at all. There is nothing unusual in the temperatures. It is entirely cyclical. That is what the evidence and the hard data show.

What is more, the evidence, the hard data and physical observations confirm not only that we are not affecting the climate through our use of hydrocarbons but also that we cannot affect our climate through the use of hydrocarbons. In fact, the Greens senator raised a question about Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce. Then Senator Joyce told me in a meeting in his office in St George, Queensland, that overwhelmingly the coalition members of parliament and if not all members of his party, the National Party, then certainly almost all members of the National Party in parliament were sceptical of claims that carbon dioxide from human activity affects climate. He thinks it is nonsense. In fact, he went on many, many times to say that the notion that we can affect the global climate from a room in Canberra is absurd. The transition to what the Greens fancifully call 'a low-carbon economy' is essentially a transition to the death of our economy. It is quite ironic that everything naturally green on this planet depends on carbon dioxide. We commend the government for moving this motion and amending this bill, and we support it.

Anne Ruston (SA, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Agriculture and Water Resources) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The farm household allowance program provides up to three years of income support for eligible farmers and farmers' partners while they take steps to improve their long-term financial situation. FHA recipients also have access to a number of other government supports, such as healthcare cards, pharmaceuticals allowance, rent allowance, telephone allowance, energy supplement and remote area allowance.

The Farm Household Support Amendment Bill 2017 demonstrates that the government continues to be responsive to the needs of the farm communities in rural and regional Australia. Further, the bill demonstrates our willingness to streamline the assessment of farm household allowance applications where appropriate and where possible. We pride ourselves on having a program of continuous improvement. These changes that we seek to legislate today are to support ministerial rulings that have been given by the Deputy Prime Minister in support of the flexibility that we believe we should be affording our farming community when they get into situations, often—just about always—not of their own doing, where they are suffering significant financial difficulties.

The bill continues that improvement of the farm household allowance program by seeking to put into legislation a series of changes. Farm household allowance applicants and recipients will benefit, we believe, because clarifying the eligibility test to apply for this support and removing unnecessary waiting periods will be of significant benefit to those people who are in need.

This bill seeks to clarify the treatment of the assets necessary for the operation of the farm enterprise under the act and includes them within the farm assets test. It also removes the requirement for successful farm household allowance recipients to serve an ordinary waiting period or a liquid assets waiting period before they receive their payments. The bill also addresses community concerns relating to the time taken to process applications for farm household allowance and the treatment of water assets and shares in marketing cooperatives as non-farm assets rather than as farm assets which are necessary for the operation of the farming business. The cost of this particular action is negligible.

I thank all of the senators who have made a contribution today for their support in relation to this bill. I have to make a couple of comments in relation to some of the comments that were made. Firstly, in relation to the comments that were made by the Labor Party, which sought to politicise what has been a pretty important change in support of our farmers. Whilst they were the ones who actually abolished a number of things under their previous administration, not the least of which was cutting the budget of the department of agriculture in half, they then come in here and have a political swipe in relation to something that Minister Joyce had said, which I thought was pretty cheap.

In relation to Senator Roberts from One Nation and Senator Rice from the Greens, I think they probably counteracted each other. One said one thing and one said the complete polar opposite. I am sure the truth of the matter probably resides somewhere in the middle.

Before I finish, I congratulate and thank Senator Bridget McKenzie for the huge amount of work that she did in rural and regional Victoria particularly, in trying to get a very, very detailed assessment of the impacts of this particular measure and how it could be improved so that we can assist our farmers in a better way. Senator McKenzie's work has enabled us, when we made the changes to this particular legislation that we are proposing today, to make it far better informed from the grassroots of our farming community. The roundtables have certainly been of major assistance to us.

I thank everybody for their contribution to this debate. I commend the bill to the Senate.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.