24 June 2009
DAFF09/124T
Minister for Agriculture Fisheries and Forestry Tony Burke
Summing Up Speech, Rural Adjustment Amendment Bill 2009
First of all I thank everybody who has participated in the debate on the Rural Adjustment Amendment Bill 2009.
The amendment in this legislation involves only half a dozen words, but it has provided an opportunity for broad-ranging debate, and I certainly welcome that. Some people have used the debate only in part to give me a whack back for the different things I have said during Question Time—and good on them, that is part
of the banter back and forth.
Overwhelmingly, this debate has been an opportunity for people to put on the record the extraordinary levels of hardship they have seen and to deal with the policy challenges. We all acknowledge that we have not got this right yet. The emotion that has come out in some of the speeches—and I was not able to be in here for many of the speeches today—
Member for Kennedy Bob Katter—You were here for a few, and you should be applauded, Minister, for that. We thank you.
Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry Tony Burke—I was here during the speech of the member for Maranoa, which I think was a really good example of somebody recollecting, when talking through the policy, the very deep hardship they have seen in their own electorate. As soon as he reminded me of the time that we shared a platform in his electorate, I recalled being told the moment the plane landed that in the previous few days there had been yet another suicide in that community.
Those sorts of stories are far too commonplace for Members of Parliament, including in the electorate of the Member for Mallee, who is here. It is difficult to see an area that is doing it tougher than Mildura. Drought is always hard, and an irrigation drought is something nobody thought to plan for. I also acknowledge the Member for Calare, the shadow minister, and the very real hardship in many parts of his electorate. Some parts have good news again, but there have been some good farmers who were unable to stay in business while they waited for the good news to come.
There is one argument that has been put in a number of speeches. I continue to refute it and I will refute it again. I once again want to caution members about this particular fear campaign. The Government has continued to say that any changes from a crisis management approach to a risk management approach with our drought policy—which we are still working through—are about trying to help people better prepare for the next drought. All our discussions with industry have worked on the basis that the rules will not change from under people who are still going through the current drought.
I know that each year when the budget comes out there is a level of alarm about EC payments not appearing in the Forward Estimates. I have here—and there is no point tabling them, because they are already public—pages from the previous government’s final budget. In the out years, nothing is there. That was not because they were planning to abolish EC. It is the strange way that these issues always appear in the Forward Estimates. Every budget, the same argument will be able to be run. This time, you had the added complication of some issues appearing in the Treasury papers which used to appear in the Agriculture papers. But of all the different political campaigns to run back and forth, I plead with every Member of Parliament to try to avoid running a fear campaign that puts people who are already very much living on the edge in a fear which they do not need to have.
The guarantee has been given many times by me and the Prime Minister. I hope that, when we hit next year’s budget, this will not be an issue. Whatever the new drought policy is, I don’t know that we do much for the people who are still working under the old transition system, who have drought declarations and EC declarations appearing in the same form, by participating in a fear campaign when we know that this is the way that the budget has always been presented since this issue was first brought in.
There are other challenges with the current drought system that were part of the broad canvassing of debate. I do not know whether we will be able to fix all of them with the new drought policy. We are having very constructive talks with industry. But the issue of lines on maps remains a grave injustice. To have two adjacent properties that have an identical level of hardship, sharing a fence but not getting the same assistance—one getting it and the other not—is an unjust feature of the current system.
When I first made the ministerial statement referring to what we wanted to do with drought policy, the Leader of the Nationals, to his credit, raised lines on maps as being a problem and also said that the previous government had on many occasions tried to find a way around it and found that it is really hard to do. And it is. We are still wrestling with that and working our way through it with industry.
The other issue which has been raised, and it was raised just now by the Member for Kennedy, is that drought is not the only form of hardship that farmers face. To the extent that we get drought policy right—and that is only to a limited extent, but there is certainly a lot of good done through the current drought policy—we do not take adequate account of other forms of hardship.
The stories that the Member for Kennedy tells are all too true. We have a very unusual situation in his seat. I was warned about it when I travelled with him to Cloncurry and Normanton. I was warned then by the pastoralists that, even though what I was looking at was a mass of water and a flood, if I were to come back a few months later exactly what the Member for Kennedy has just reported on would be what I would see—a landscape that looked like a drought. That is for the very simple reason that, if you have a flood and it lasts a few days, a week or even a week-and-a-half, when it goes the land will largely bounce back. When you have vegetation covered for something in the order of six weeks—and I think that is right—
Bob Katter—Yes. It could be eight weeks.
Tony Burke—the vegetation is largely gone. What then happens, as the heat returns you have nothing to hold the soil moisture together. When you add the fact that—from what I understand from the first musters up there that took place last month and that are concluding know—basically the entire calf population is gone, you have very similar impacts to the ones that we talk about with drought, but they do not satisfy the EC test.
Yet, on the face of it, if you took the words ‘exceptional circumstances’ for what they say, by any definition flood is exceptional and is a situation for which people would want us to find a way of providing greater levels of assistance than the current policy settings allow. Those talks with the <ember for Kennedy are ongoing. I can’t report a landing point yet, but the concerns that the member for Kennedy raises match
exactly with what I have seen firsthand on the ground in his electorate.
They are a number of the challenges that we want to work through. I appreciate the genuine nature of the debate that has gone on across the House in this discussion.
There will always be times when there is a whole series of issues such that the partisan nature of this chamber takes over, and that is part of it. We are not going to pretend to take the politics out of the Parliament.
But all people involved in primary industries ought to be able to use this debate as a reference point to understand the very high level of goodwill and desire to get policy right in their interests that exists on every side and in every corner of this chamber. I should finally refer to what the legislation that we are about to vote on actually does. The National Rural Advisory Council only allows people to serve two terms. There are challenges and there are times when the National Rural Advisory Council gets it wrong. There were some very strong examples of this that were put forward earlier in the debate by the member for Hume.
One of the challenges that I have tried to deal with within the current policy settings is to make sure that, where there is an allegation that the National Rural Advisory Council has got something wrong, they go back in there as soon as possible and reassess. We have been doing that constantly.
If an area is largely in recovery, I urge the state ministers to let us know beforehand what the revised boundaries should be so that we can do the check under revised boundaries, instead of having the situation we have at the moment, which is where the National Rural Advisory Council makes a majority ruling on a region and you end up with a whole lot of people who are not out of drought being told that they have
no benefits and then having to wait for the reassessment under new boundaries so that they can be told, ‘Oh, no; now we’ll look after you.’
A similar challenge was raised very early after I got the portfolio by a number of members from each side of the House. There are challenges which occur due to the NRAC decisions coming down too late and too close to the concluding day. An argument has been put many times by David Crombie, which is that, if farmers are going to stay, they should be able to stay with dignity and, if they are going to leave, they should be able to leave with dignity. People are not treated well by getting a couple of weeks’ notice of benefits ending.
The current system lends itself to that. We have now started to try to conclude the process earlier. But that of course means that we do not end up with the benefit of the latest data. That is a balance that we are trying to work through.
This bill allows us to appoint the members of the National Rural Advisory Council for a further term. They have a great level of expertise. They deal at the absolute coalface. Even though there will be times when members say they have made a mistake or the majority decision was not just, I have to say they are extraordinarily decent people. Originally all of them came to me as appointees of the previous government and I would like the opportunity to be able to ask each and every one of them to stay on. They do their job in an extraordinarily honourable and professional way.
This bill, if it is carried, would provide that opportunity. I urge the Senate, in the time that it has remaining before we rise, to deal with this bill hopefully more quickly than we did. I do not want to be in a situation from 1 July where we do not actually have a fully functioning NRAC to make those decisions. There is a strong case to maintain the expertise of the current serving members on NRAC. If the legislation does not get progressed in the winter sitting, the remaining members of NRAC could be required to take on additional responsibility and new members would need to be chosen to replace the retiring members, even though those members ultimately would not have needed to retire. I hope we can avoid that situation. Certainly it would be regarded as unsatisfactory by the farmers who rely on those decisions.
I commend the bill to the House. I thank the opposition and the crossbench for the constructive way that they have dealt with the debate. I certainly hope that at some time in the near future I am able to report on a proposal for a new drought policy that is able to retain the sort of bipartisan approach which has characterised this debate for so many years.
Member for Mallee John Forrest—Mr Deputy Speaker, on indulgence and in the spirit of the comments of the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, I seek to put a question to him. The thing that is worrying my farmers is that the portfolio budget statements—I think it is page 60—attempt to explain why the forward estimates do not add EC but contain the sentence ‘because EC is to be terminated’. I wonder whether the minister might put on the public record and make a contribution to the gesture he is asking for by removing the fear.
Tony Burke—Mr Deputy Speaker, on indulgence: I can give the same guarantee that I have given on many occasions. The date that appears in the budget papers refers to the termination of those payments appearing in the portfolio statements of the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry. It does not refer to the termination of the program. They cease to appear in the portfolio statements. I give the guarantee to each of the farmers in your electorates who are currently on EC payments that, when we reach 1 July in a few weeks time, they will continue to receive the payments. Those budget allocations now appear in the Treasury papers because of a COAG decision rather than in the Agriculture papers. That is why you have an annotation there. Where they appear in the Treasury papers, the usual problem with the forward estimates is still there. But that is the reason for the unusual annotation which is there. I hope that that provides an absolute level of clarity. The people who are eligible at the end of this month continue to be eligible next month and onwards throughout current declarations.
I cannot prejudge future NRAC decisions and recommendations as to whether those drought declarations will be renewed, but if they were to be renewed it is certainly the intention of the government that those people continue to be eligible for assistance.
ENDS