PRIVATE MEMBERS' BUSINESS
Mr McCORMACK (Riverina) (12:10): The first words in the first sentence from the member for Bass were 'farmers in north-east Tasmania'. I have every respect for the member for Bass, and she knows that I do, but those farmers in north-east Tasmania to whom she refers have benefited largely because of the establishment and construction, under the former coalition government, of the Scottsdale Dam on the Camden Rivulet.
More than 85 irrigators are now able to grow some of the world's best produce, and I say it is some of the world's best because it is. But that would not have been possible without coalition infrastructure spending—coalition infrastructure spending which has now dried up, sadly, because of this Labor government. When Labor members come in here and talk about farming and helping farming, you know there is something tragically wrong.
The member for Bass talks about independent repairers having access to the information they need to compete with the right to repair et cetera. Certainly if there's something that's going to help our agricultural sector, all well and good. But, at the same time, this Labor government is making it harder to farm.
They are taking away the spending on water infrastructure. The road infrastructure is appalling. It's approaching harvest, and those trucks and heavy harvesters, the machinery that's needed—the chaser bins et cetera—need to go from paddock to paddock, farm to farm, on roads that are deadly and dangerous.
The first budget that the member for Rankin handed down as Treasurer had $124 million in it for farming. Do you know what that farming spending was for? It was to stop the live sheep trade, to get those sheep farmers to do something else.
I'd really like to know what the members opposite think of the Australian Conservation Foundation telling an international conference, just in recent days, that beef is killing the reef. I need the government to stand up against the ACF and say that this is not acceptable. There is a proliferation of intermittent power projects taking up valuable farmland.
When it comes to farming, the government needs to be strong and needs to say enough is enough. Then, of course, we've got the water buybacks. Recently, the Labor government spent $430 million on 86 gigalitres of water—equivalent to 34,400 Olympic sized swimming pools—to take it away from farmers, to take it away from production and to take it away from the consumptive pool and do what?
To flush it down the mouth of the Murray. This is wrong. It's just shortsighted.
But wait for it—the government now wants to spend more money, even though it's over $1 trillion in debt, on a future buyback to the equivalent of about 130 gigalitres to reach former prime minister Julia Gillard's Goolwa 2012 pledge of 450 gigalitres. So they're 130 short and they're going to be buying—spending all of that money, going into the water market and distorting the water market.
I appreciate it's a long way from Bass. I get that. But Tasmania is a microcosm of Australia, and the bad policies that this Labor government is putting in place in Tasmania are then replicated right across the nation.
When it comes to these intermittent power projects, my electorate of Riverina is renewable central. I've got a local government area, Upper Lachlan Shire, which hosts and houses more than half of New South Wales's renewable resource projects. What we're seeing is blackout after blackout in the largest centre of that particular LGA, Crookwell, yet they're hosting 53 per cent, or thereabouts, of New South Wales's power projects.
On one of these renewable power projects, the proponent isn't even proposing to actually connect it to the grid. Do you know why they're not going to connect it to the grid? They don't care about how much power they're putting into the system; they just want the subsidies—the subsidies that come from Labor, the subsidies that are there on the table.
This is nonsense. What we also need to do, and what the Labor government needs to do, is stand up to Premier Chris Minns and the stupid, absolutely ridiculous idea that these projects can get the tick-off under some state priority significance status, because it is cruelling our farmland. Don't take my word for it.
Ask Emma Webb or the mayor of Yass Valley Council, Jasmin Jones, who describes what is happening to her pristine, beautiful area as it being turned into an industrial junkyard by the policies of those opposite.