MATTERS OF PUBLIC IMPORTANCE

Senator CANAVAN (Queensland—Leader of the Nationals) (15:59): I thank my One Nation colleague Senator Whitten for bringing forward this discussion because it has exposed the government's inability to speak for more than 30 seconds or so on the benefits of this so-called great deal with the European Union. If it is so great, why is it that the government can't speak for five, 10, 20, 30 minutes listing in detail exactly how Australian farmers, Australian exporters, the Australian economy and Australian people will benefit from this deal.

After about 30 seconds of largely assertion and quoting of modelling figures which usually mean nothing, the government then resorts to invective, to partisan attacks on various colleagues around here. It exposes a lot. It exposes a lot about the inadequacy of this deal.

This is not me saying that. It's not One Nation or any political party that is criticising the government's deal. You only have to go to the words and feedback of Australian farmers yesterday to see how bad this deal is.

I've never seen anything like it. We have negotiated a lot of free trade deals over the last 30 years, most of them under the former coalition government, but almost invariably farming communities and farming organisations welcomed the deals. They were over the moon with those deals.

But yesterday—these are just some of the comments from Australian farming groups on the news of the deal. They said it was 'pretty embarrassing', 'disappointing', 'pathetic', 'unfair', 'simply appalling', 'a kick in the guts' and 'a horrendous outcome'. Maybe the government should reflect on the reaction it has generated from Australian farmers and think again.

This deal has not been ratified. They could scrap it and start again, tell the European Union: 'Sorry, this is not acceptable to Australian farmers, to the Australian community. We need more.

We need better.' It's not acceptable. Just in the limited time I have, I won't resort to invective. I'll go to the details of the deal and explain why it's not acceptable and why this reaction has been generated.

I spoke to many farmers yesterday, and they went through in great detail their disappointment. One part of the disappointment from the red meat sector is that the government is trumpeting the fact that 35,000 tonnes of carcass weight—let's be clear, it's the carcass weight, so they're measuring the bones and trim, and sometimes they add that back into the ship weight.

That 35,000-tonnes effectively takes us back about 10 years. It doesn't advance the country. In 2019, the European Union did a side deal, a so-called ringfence deal, with the first Trump administration to lock out Australian beef productions from their so-called Hilton quota.

We used to have access to a 50,000-tonne Hilton—50,000-tonnes in ship weight terms—of beef to the EU market. That was allowed globally, and we'd often get a big chunk of that. In 2016, we exported about 20,000 tonnes of ship weight, about 20,000 tonnes of carcass weight of beef to the EU under those arrangements.

But Donald Trump came in. He had the art of the deal—not like this government, who can't do a deal. He locked us out, took us down to 4,000-odd tonnes from that quota.

Now the government wants applause for just taking us back to where we were 10 years ago. This is about 27,000 tonnes of ship weight beef. That's why the beef sector has come out and panned this because they're not stupid.

The government thought its spin would pull the wool over their eyes, but they're not stupid. Cheesemakers have panned this deal too because the government seems unaware that the European Union subsidises farmers to the hilt, and cheesemakers in the European Union get about A$17.8 billion a year in subsidies. An average European cheesemaker gets 30 per cent of their income from government support.

Because of that wildly out of whack subsidy system, the Australian governments of all persuasions have put in tariffs on EU cheese to protect their own industries and protect our jobs. That tariff's $1.22 per kilo at the moment, but the government in this deal yesterday has wiped that tariff and exposed our entire cheese industry to this unfair competition. That's why the Australian cheesemaking industry yesterday panned this as a deal that is unfair.

They said that it will heavily expand heavily subsidised European dairy imports while failing to secure reciprocal access for Australia. I don't know if the government has spoken to these organisations before doing the deal, but they certainly have been caught flatfooted by the response. As I said, it'd be best if the government just started again.

They walked away three years ago when it was a bad deal. Walk away today. Don't sign any deals.

Only sign a good deal for Australian farmers.