COMMITTEES

Senator McDONALD (Queensland—Deputy Leader of the Nationals in the Senate) (18:13): I support this referral of the Fuel and Fertiliser Security Facility to the Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee. Fertiliser is not a luxury. It's a critical input that supports Australian agriculture and Australian food production both for Australians and of course for hundreds of millions of others around the world.

For farmers, particularly in regional and northern Australia, the cost and availability of fertiliser directly affects farm viability. Just last week in Mareeba I was speaking to farmers who told me that their fertiliser bill had doubled, a massive impost on the viability of that business. If fertiliser supply is disrupted, the consequences flow through farms, transport operators, regional businesses, families and to every Australian, and Australia has seen how quickly global supply chains can be disrupted.

Australians have also seen how this Albanese Labor government shoots from the hip on policies. We deserve to know whether this facility is actually delivering greater fertiliser security and supply resilience. Is this government support building long-term resilience or simply responding to short-term shortages?

We need reliable fertiliser supplies when farmers need them, not after a supply disruption occurs. We also need a government who are transparent with the Australian people and, importantly, with Australian farmers. Government financial assistance must provide value for money.

We need transparency around who receives government assistance, how this program was drafted, who was consulted, what the outcomes are and, of course, who the beneficiaries were. Is taxpayer support delivering additional investment and greater supply security? The inquiry should examine whether the facility is supporting the resilience of regional supply chains.

It needs to identify what is working and what needs to change. It needs to examine the entire fertiliser supply chain, from production and imports through to the farm gate. We need to ensure that government intervention is targeted and effective and delivers genuine long-term benefits, because regional Australia needs practical outcomes not additional bureaucracy.

Australian farmers are amongst the most productive and resilient in the world because they're not subsidised, unlike many farming supply chains around the world. We should not make their job harder by leaving critical Australian inputs vulnerable to international disruption. We learnt this during COVID, when Australia came within two weeks of running out of fertiliser and pesticide supply.

I'm incredibly proud of the work that the coalition did, particularly the work Matt Canavan did as the then minister for resources and Northern Australia to ensure that the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility made funds available to back the Perdaman project. The Perdaman project is an important project at Karratha in Western Australia. It takes natural gas, available from those massive gas projects there, and converts it to urea.

Thanks to the foresight then, that project will come online early next year. That will supply around two million tonnes of urea to Australian farmers per year. Urea is an important product not just for farming but also as an additive for fuel—something else that we all learnt during COVID.

That is a project that will add to Australia's fertiliser security, but we need to ensure, through this inquiry, that Australia really has invested, over this most recent shortage, into the sorts of investments that will provide genuine fertiliser and fuel security. It wasn't just a bandaid that would get us through the shortage and not leave Australian farmers with more affordable supply and more predictable supply.

We know that food security is national security. We know that fertiliser security is food security. This inquiry is an important opportunity to ensure that Australia is prepared not just for the next season but also for the next decade.