STATEMENTS

Mr FARLEY (Farrer) (16:27): I rise today deeply conscious of the honour of representing the people of Farrer in this parliament. I rise with a simple belief: we all live within and across three generations. We inherit the Australia built by those who came before us.

We enjoy the product of their toil, courage, enterprise and sacrifice. We're custodians of that inheritance for a short period of time. We carry an obligation to leave something stronger for those who follow.

That obligation between generations is at the heart of why I'm here. Ultimately, the measure of this parliament will not be the announcements we make, the arguments we win or the headlines we generate. It will be this: did we leave Australia stronger than we found it?

I'm a fortunate man. I was born into an exceptional, loving, hardworking family and raised among siblings, cousins, neighbours, sporting teams and, as every Australian child should have, a black-and-tan kelpie named Buster. My father, Keith, was the son of a First World War light horseman and ultimately an orchardist.

Dad served as a naval seaman during the Second World War before building his life in agribusiness. My mother, Patsy, born in Sydney and raised in Narrandera, one of three daughters of an agribusiness entrepreneur and service provider, is an extraordinary mother, grandmother and great-grandmother. My mum is here today.

Ninety-eight years young, she's lived through the governments of 23 Australian prime ministers, and today, somewhat improbably, she has one politician in the family. Mum, thank you. You are now a part of Farrer's political history as well.

I grew up in Narrandera, in a community where people understood that belonging brought you responsibilities as well as privileges. I was schooled sitting in a classroom full of excitement, aspirations, seated alongside Australian Indigenous and new Australians from all reaches of the globe. Language, skin colour or lunchbox content did not discriminate in the classrooms, the sports fields or the school holidays.

It moulded us all into the proud, contributing Australians that we are today. Football ruled winter; cricket, tennis and water sports occupied summer. But sports taught us something greater than how to win.

Henry Mathieson, the local butcher, trained and mentored younger generations of people in Australian Rules. Tommy Lee, who arrived in Australia as a teenage refugee from Germany after World War II, championed the rugby league teams. Unique men.

Different men from different origins, from different faiths, training us in different codes, but the same lesson: know your position; do your job; back your team mates; accept accountability and responsibility for the result. 'Accountability' and 'responsibility'—these two words are embedded in my life. I believe they belong at the centre of public life as well.

My father, Dad, ran his business and our household with something approaching naval precision. Preparing for school was an evening operation: boots cleaned, kit packed, everything organised before dinner. And dinner was at seven o'clock.

Not 6.55 or 7.05; it was seven o'clock, with approximately 15 seconds of elasticity either side. But dad taught me more than discipline. He was a people person, a friend of the farmers and a provider of emerging agricultural technologies, equipment, fertilisers and working capital transforming and assisting Australian agriculture.

Some of my greatest education came from travelling with him through the Riverina, walking and inspecting crops, sitting around farmers kitchen tables and standing in machinery sheds listening to discussions covering seasonal conditions, commodity prices, sports and politics. At the age of 14, Dad gifted me a book: George Orwell's Animal Farm. That left a lasting impression on me that has never faded.

It taught me early to question power, to question orthodoxy and to understand that noble language does not always guarantee ignoble outcomes. At 17, I left home to jackaroo at Boonoke in the New South Wales Riverina with FS Falkiner and Sons. Before I boarded the train, Keith, or Dad, passed to me a fraying copy of Rudyard Kipling's 1910 poem 'If'.

He told me: 'Keep it close. There will be times in life when you need it.' He was right. I still have it within reach, positioned opposite Theodore Roosevelt's speech 'Man in the arena'.

And Keith was definitely right: there are times in life where reading either gives personal or emotional perspective to your soul. And, as I boarded that train that day, a young woman came running down the station platform to wish me goodbye and good luck. That 17-year-old young woman is here today.

That's my partner, Janice. Life has remarkable ways of completing circles. Long days, cold winters, hot summers, sheep, cattle, horses, bushfires, lamb marking, cattle branding, football, polo cross, B&S balls and, occasionally, the Conargo pub.

That was our jackarooing life. There were 12 competing for the opportunity and career. Nobody owed you promotion; you earned it.

Success was achieved beyond hard work. Being interested, being polite, being equitable, being presentable, being there and present, commitment, being curious and being there for the team, knowing the job at hand and accepting responsibility and accountability for the outcome of that job. Among the owners of FS Falkiner and Sons were Rupert Murdoch and his lieutenant Ken Cowley, and both remained generous mentors to me long after I left their employment.

From there, life took my young family to north-west New South Wales. With a family of two—wife, Deborah, and daughter Emma—we were introduced to the challenges of north-west New South Wales at Collymongle Station. Daughters Kate and Sarah completed our family and were educated among the realities of Mother Nature's leverage over Australian agriculture.

They are here today with me as well, and the next generation: Magnus, Archer, Wilhelmina, Charlie, Matilda, Jock and Primrose—my grandchildren. They are not incidental to what I say today; they are the reason for it. Building something unique at Collymongle Station, at the confluence of the Barwon and Gwydir rivers, I became part of an extraordinary period of Australian agricultural development.

What began as a 62-hectare crop of cotton in 1982 grew into an enterprise cultivating tens of thousands of hectares; operating major cotton-ginning facilities, warehousing facilities and logistics infrastructure; and marketing Australian cotton to the international markets. Colly Cotton became a recognisable force in the global quality cotton markets and an annual case study at the Harvard Business School taught under the tutelage of professor Ray Goldberg, the father of modern agribusiness learning.

It taught me what productive capital can achieve when people, soil, water, technology, finance and markets are brought together. It also taught me that the wealth is not created by government decree. I had the privilege of working alongside some remarkable people: Derek and Sam Shaw, Brian Fallon, Jeff Dewar, Lawrie Willett, Ken Webb and two absolutely unique men, Eugene Allison Rowlands—or Bucky, as we called him—and Phil Beal.

They were great men. They were lieutenants on the right and lieutenants on the left. I later moved to California to lead Calcot, a large but financially challenged farmer owned cotton cooperative operating across California, Arizona and south Texas.

That experience brought me into direct contact with American agricultural policy, Washington, farm programs, commodity finance, teamster union, international trade and California's never-ending contest for water. It reinforced another lesson: government policy is never theoretical to the people who must live with the consequences. A regulation in an office can change a business.

A ministerial decision can change an industry. A poorly legislated policy can damage a community for generations or eventually collapse a nation. That lesson became painfully clear when I returned to Australia to lead the Australian Agricultural Company, AACo.

AACo brought responsibilities on an enormous scale: land, livestock, employees, families and communities spread across northern Australia. At the core of agriculture is uncertainty. Drought is real.

Flood is real. Markets rise and fall. Mother Nature just does not negotiate.

What industry should reasonably expect, however, is that government decisions affecting their survival are deliberate, evidence based and conscious of consequences. The suspension of live cattle trade with Indonesia demonstrated what happens when policy is made at speed without adequately understanding the chain of consequences. The damage didn't stop at the farm gate.

It travelled through businesses, transport operators, air operators, Indigenous enterprises and communities, employees, families, lenders, holidaymakers in Bali, boarding schools and regional towns. Domestic cattle markets collapsed from Roma in Queensland through to Dubbo and right down to Wodonga in Victoria and Powranna in Tasmania, writing off hundreds of millions of dollars in the value of the Australian herd in one trading day.

Relationships painstakingly built with Indonesia were damaged, and Australia learned an important lesson: good intentions are not enough. Government must ask the next question and the question after that. What happens tomorrow?

Who carries the cost? What are the unintended consequences? And what happens if we're wrong?

How do we manage failure? That is not weakness in leadership; that is the discipline of leadership. Eventually I returned to Narrandera, my home town on the banks of the Murrumbidgee River at the gateway to the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area.

I returned to find communities across the Murray-Darling Basin struggling with another enormous experiment of public policy. Many today would say the Water Act 2007 and its birth child, the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, is a failing, expensive ideology—a set of political, economic and social doctrines that can't sustain a functioning society or deliver on its core promise when put into real-world practice or the next round of severe droughts.

It leads to chronic systematic crises, economic collapse and widespread human suffering, causing society to ultimately and eventually reject or abandon the system. I support healthy rivers, healthy wetlands and environmental stewardship. Anyone who has spent a lifetime on the land understands that productive agriculture ultimately depends upon healthy natural systems.

But stewardship and productivity are not enemies. The environmental policy cannot be considered in isolation from food production, regional communities, natural resilience and human wellbeing. Australia needs the courage to examine the Murray-Darling plan objectively—not ideologically, not defensively and not on the assumption that, because the government has spent billions and billions of dollars, every underlying model and decision must therefore be correct.

We must ask: 'What has worked? What has failed? What environmental outcomes have we actually achieved?

What economic capacity has been lost? What has happened to regional communities? What has happened to food processing capacity?

And how much water is required to secure 40 million people by 2050?' but, more importantly: 'Is the Australian food chain prepared for the next great Australian drought?' because the greatest test of Australian water policy will not occur during a wet cycle. It will come when the dams empty, the rivers contract and 30 or 40—depending on what time—millions of Australians will be expecting affordable food on supermarket shelves.

Water policy, therefore, is not simply environmental policy. Water policy is food policy and national food security. It's regional policy.

It's economic policy. And, unquestionably, it's national sovereignty policy. I want Australia to undertake a serious assessment of how we manage this sovereign resource.

International agreements deserve respect, but Australian governments must never outsource their fundamental responsibility to protect Australia's national interest first. We've particularly done that with our 2007 Water Act and our Murray-Darling Basin Plan. We should determine first what is necessary for Australia's sustainable environments, national food security, communities and sovereign resilience, and ensure any international obligation serves Australia first.

Australia must remain master of its own destiny. There are other reasons for this to matter. Most Australians today have enjoyed an extraordinary period of relative security and prosperity under what was often described as the Pax Americana era.

We built businesses within it. We traded and travelled with confidence. We expected global supply chains would function.

We assumed shipping lanes would remain open. We assumed energy, fertiliser, medicines, technology and manufactured goods would remain available. These assumptions can be no longer taken for granted.

The world has become more fragmented, more transactional, more technologically competitive and more multipolar. Artificial intelligence, semiconductors, energy, critical minerals, food, shipping routes and supply chains are becoming instruments of strategic power. Australia cannot be blind, deaf, arrogant or naive about that change.

A sovereign nation must possess the productive capacity to withstand shocks and to survive on its own. That means baseload energy security and global competitive pricing of that energy. That means food security, water security, fuel security, agricultural inputs security, defence capacity, skills, manufacturing, critical infrastructure and financial resilience.

Sovereignty is more than flying a flag above Parliament House. Sovereignty is capacity. It's the capacity to feed ourselves, power ourselves, finance ourselves, defend ourselves and make decisions for us—Australia.

And that brings me down to national debt. Australia's governments collectively carry an enormous debt burden. Collectively, it's pushing $1.6 trillion.

But debt in itself is not immoral. Used intelligently, debt can build productive assets that serve Australians for generations. Our forefathers borrowed to build infrastructure because they understood that productive assets could strengthen the nation.

Our forefathers repaid their borrowings from the benefits and the surpluses that the infrastructure produced. The issue is not simply whether governments borrow. The issue is: Where do we spend?

And what do we spend the money on? Every major debt-funded capital project should therefore face basic disciplines, similar to every competent business. What is the objective?

What is the return, the timetable, the budget? Who is accountable? And what happens when it faults or fails?

Australia should demand a greater accountability for major public investments, because debt is not free money. Interest and principal must be paid. And, if not, somebody inherits that liability.

There's an old Yiddish proverb that's very relevant: 'Interest on debt grows without rain.' Those who have lived through drought understand the wisdom of that sentence. Australia has enjoyed one of the greatest commodity booms in history, and let's not forget that it wasn't so far away that we rode on the sheep's back. Iron ore, coal, gas, agriculture, minerals, critical minerals—global demand for the resources right beneath our feet has generated extraordinary national wealth.

Future Australians are entitled to ask: What did you do with it? What productive assets did you build? What debt did you retire?

What infrastructure did you leave? What industries did you strengthen, and what resilience did you create? These are all questions my generation must be prepared to answer.

The Australian government is not a corporation. The Commonwealth government is not a private or for-profit corporation. We're a sovereign, independent, democratic nation with a constitutional monarchy.

Citizens are not shareholders, and Australia is certainly more than a balance sheet. This government exists to serve Australia to create the framework of enabling prosperity. There are disciplines from successful enterprise that governments should never fear—competence, accountability, productivity, capital discipline, measurement, delivery and responsibility for results.

Australia possesses extraordinary and many natural advantages, including capital and, more importantly, democratic institutions. Above all, we've invited talent from every corner of the world who choose to call this nation home and become contributing Australians. Our national generosity and kindness and humanity has offered opportunity of new life to those who have been discriminated and persecuted against.

That same generosity and kindness must be guarded and respected as we open our welcoming doors. There are those who arrive onto our shores who want change and expect that change must be us and not them. We must, with expediency and with minimal cost, remove those who want to bring harm and disrespect to this great nation of ours.

Our problem is not the shortage of national assets. Our challenge is to have the courage and the competence to use them wisely. We are temporary custodians.

My generation is moving through the later chapters of its contributing life. Behind us are the millennial generations of X, Y and Z, then the alpha and the beta generations. They will inherit whatever we leave behind, and I return to the questions which I began with: Will they inherit an Australia stronger than we inherited?

Will they be able to afford to own a home, passing it to the next generation without losing it to death taxes; to raise a family; to build a business; to afford food and energy; to find meaningful work; and to live securely? Will they inherit functioning infrastructure and productive industries or merely a massive debt incurred while we were talking about building them?

These questions transcend beyond party politics. They belong to every member in this House, and Australia does not need smaller ambition. It needs greater ambitions and an aspirational, visionary future, but ambitions must be accompanied by discipline.

We need a government culture prepared to confront difficult problems and not postpone them; a culture to prepare to be able to distinguish between investment and expenditure; be prepared to defend productive capacity, to reward enterprises and to demand accountability; and be prepared to say when something is not working, being courageous enough to change course.

Changing course when the evidence demands it is not political weakness. It's leadership. I come to the parliament representing 126,000 square kilometres of an extraordinary section of Australia, a home to 160,000 citizens of which 140,000 are voting age, a home to many from different lands and cultures seeking a safe life and security with the opportunity of prosperity.

Farrer contains farmers, manufacturers, teachers, nurses, tradespeople, business owners, retirees, young families, established Australians and new Australians. It contains some of Australia's greatest agricultural regions. Farrer grows a cornucopia of crops.

Every day of every year a food or fibre crop is being harvested within Farrer. It contains communities that understand drought, flood, distance and adversity. It contains people, including myself, who are tired of being told that regional decline is inevitable.

It is not, and I reject that premise. I campaigned on a simple commitment to Farrer—return productivity and capacity to Farrer. Those words are now my obligation: return productive capacity to our agricultural industries, strengthen our towns, improve our health services, develop skills, attract investment, protect and build water security, build infrastructure and create opportunity—make regional Australia somewhere our children choose to stay, not somewhere they must leave.

If we can demonstrate that reform in Farrer, we can demonstrate something larger. Regional Australia is not a problem for government to manage; regional Australia is an asset for the nation to unleash. I stand here today in front of you as a member of One Nation.

I represent every constituent in Farrer: those who voted for me and those who voted against me—and those who never dreamed of voting for me. That is democracy. Once elected, representation extends beyond the ballot box.

Our national ambition should be equally broad. Australia must remain a country where the circumstances of someone's birth don't limit their future, where enterprise is rewarded, where work has dignity and success is respected, where those who need assistance receive it, where assistance becomes a bridge to opportunity and not a permanent architecture of, or for, dependence.

And, most importantly, we should rebuild confidence in ourselves. We are one nation of extraordinarily fortunate people occupying an extraordinarily fortunate continent. We can manage our own destiny.

No person arrives in this chamber alone. My life has been enriched by many extraordinary people. Jeff Dewar taught me fearlessness; Lawrie Willett, educated purpose and visionary presence; Bruce Parncutt, intellect and equity.

My mate Eddie Jernigan taught me mateship and commodity commerce; Nick Burton Taylor, vision and a strong moral and commercial compass. And an exceptional Australian who's been a great mentor to me is Mr Bruce McIver. To my elder sister, Susan—I think Susan's in the audience today.

You have been my champion during turbulent times—good times. Your ears and time have been generous to me. Your eyes have kept watch on what I'm blind to.

So thank you. To my former wife, Debbie, the mother of our three daughters: thank you for the endurance, the patience and the commitment required through those enduring years. To Emma, Kate and Sarah and to your families: thank you.

To Janice: thank you for standing on the Narrandera railway platform all those years ago and for being here today as another chapter begins. And to my mother, Patsy: your presence here today is a gift beyond words. To my campaign team, volunteers and supporters across Farrer: you have achieved something euphoric and historic, so thank you.

To Pauline Hanson: thank you for taking the plunge into politics way back in 1995 and thank you for your unwavering commitment and dedication to One Nation and Australia—and the support for me. To my other One Nation colleagues, Senator Bell, Barnaby Joyce, Senator Roberts and Senator Whitten: thank you for your trust and the opportunity to serve alongside you.

Above all, to the people of Farrer: thank you for lending me your voice. I intend to use it. I didn't come to Canberra at this stage of my life to build a political career.

I've already had a career. I'm here because experience is of little value if we're unwilling to share it and put it to work. I've lived in the dust of drought.

I've fought floods and experienced their devastation. I've enjoyed business success and I've learnt from business failure. I've traded into and across international markets.

I've been bloodied by government intervention. I've prospered with good policy and I've been crippled and strangled by bad. I've seen communities prosper and I've seen communities bearing the consequences when decision-makers get it wrong.

Those experiences have taught me that courage in public life doesn't mean shouting the loudest. Courage is accepting responsibility. It's asking uncomfortable questions and challenging your own side when necessary.

It's listening when evidence contradicts your assumptions. It's making decisions where the benefits may arrive long after the next election. And sometimes it's standing alone.

We will disagree in this chamber. We should. Democracy without disagreement is despotism, but disagreement need not diminish respect.

We will argue strongly, we will question orthodoxy, and I will defend Farrer relentlessly. But I will work with any member of this parliament who genuinely wants to leave Australia stronger than we found it, because the challenges ahead are bigger than any political party. My grandfather's generation served.

My father's generation built. My generation prospered from much of what they created. Now, we must prove ourselves worthy of that inheritance.

We cannot promise our children an easy world. We cannot control drought. We can't control global conflict.

We cannot control every market or technology disruption. But we can control how prepared Australia is to confront them. We can build rather than consume.

We can produce rather than regulate. We can invest rather than spend and we can reform what's failing rather than defend it because change is politically difficult. We can again make intergenerational responsibility a central purpose of government.

When my grandchildren someday look back at this period of Australia's history, I do not want them to ask, 'Why did they know what was happening and do nothing?' I want them to say, 'They saw challenges, they had the courage to confront them, and they built for us.' Australia has everything required to succeed on this rich continent. Our people are capable, our democracy is strong, and our opportunities remain enormous.

What we require is confidence in ourselves, discipline in government, courage in leadership and a renewed determination to build the government framework that allows this to happen. The sun may be setting on a passing global era of history, but it does not have to set on Australia. Our task is not to preserve yesterday; our task is to build tomorrow for Farrer, for our children and our grandchildren and for generations of Australians whose names we'll never know but whose future will be shaped by the decisions we make in this chamber.

That is our watch, that is our responsibility, and that's why I'm here. Thank you, Mr Speaker. Thank you, Farrer.

Thank you, Australia.