PRIVATE MEMBERS' BUSINESS

Mr HOLZBERGER (Forde) (12:02): I want to answer the question that some people might have: why is a member for an outer metro seat in Logan in the northern Gold Coast—between Brisbane and the Gold Coast—getting up to speak on this? There are two reasons: the first is that I never want to miss an opportunity in this place to let people know where I come from and to let people know what my roots are.

I think the experiences which really drive my values are the ones that I had working as a station hand on outback sheep and cattle stations around Broken Hill—in fact, a couple of hundred kays west of Bourke, around a little town called Wanaaring. The second reason I want to talk about this motion today is I'm probably one of the few people in this place, and may ever be in this place, who is able to actually give testimony to what happened when the dog fence fell apart in western New South Wales, because I was there.

When the member for Gippsland talks about the federal government not having an interest in what goes on out there, I can tell you, as somebody who was actually there in western New South Wales when the dog fence fell apart in the early 2000s, it was the Liberal-National government who was in power at the time. So, when it comes to neglect, I think that they need to take a hard look at themselves and the fact that they're actually responsible for it.

Because, as much as the member for Barker might have a little chuckle, I was actually working on the land, and I saw it fall apart in the space of two years or so, really. It was the millennial drought, around 2000, when, over the course of one year—I can't remember which year, 2000 or 2001—we had about 180 points under the old system, which is just below two inches.

The place that I worked a lot on was owned by a family that owned four places which, combined, added up to about 300,000 or so acres. When I got there, they ran about 15,000 sheep across those four places, and, by the end of the millennium drought, there were about 2,000. So the drought knocked them down, but the broken fence kept them down.

In that space of time, from when they had 15,000 sheep—the millennium drought was particularly harsh, lasing for two or three years—to the end of that, with 2,000 sheep, the dogs had moved in, and it was the dog problem that prevented them from restocking. I got to work on sheep and cattle stations, but, after me, they were cattle stations. And, really, western New South Wales has barely recovered.

I wanted to talk about this because, without listing all of the things that the Albanese government are doing around biosecurity or agriculture, and without trumpeting the fact that we are actually investing $20 million or so in a wild dog management plan and we do have the interests of our farmers at heart—families that really give me the values that I stand to represent in this place today—I think that we have, in the Albanese government, a complete change of philosophy.

The reason why the Howard government let the fence collapse and why the Albanese government is about rebuilding our fences and our industries is a change of philosophy. It's the same philosophy that is driving us to support our steel industry in Whyalla, our aluminium industry in Gladstone, our copper industry in Mount Isa and—just the other day—our aluminium industry in Tomago.

It is a philosophy of 'nobody held back and nobody left behind'. The previous philosophy, of the Howard government and of the Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison governments, is summed up best by their daring the car industry to walk out. Whether it is in agriculture, whether it is in manufacturing or whether it is in mining, this Albanese Labor government has a philosophy of protecting those industries, looking after our farmers and our workers and trying to fix the mess that we have been left with after 30 years of neglect.

So I condemn this motion, really. I think that it hides the facts; it hides the history. I can tell that from a personal perspective because I was there.