PRIVATE MEMBERS' BUSINESS

Mr VENNING (Grey) (12:20): Harvest has started in Grey. It's the second earliest start on record, with barley coming out of Thevenard some two weeks ago. Where I come from, harvest is about a week away.

Across the Eyre Peninsula, the Yorke Peninsula and the Mid North, headers are being serviced, so are tractors, balers and trucks. Families in Grey have put a year of blood, sweat and tears into their crops, and a header or a combine harvester is how they get it out of the paddock. When one stops, the clock starts to repair it.

Everything stops until that part is secured and the header is moving the next day. On more than one occasion, I have driven to Melbourne overnight—a 20-hour round trip—just to get a part so the header could keep moving. As a farmer myself, I was always taught to know how to repair it yourself or replace it yourself, whether it was replacing a bearing or rebuilding a motor, servicing your own ute or building a new shed.

My father always taught me that, if you want something done well, you do it yourself. That is why this bill is important. That is why a farmer's right to repair matters.

I get very frustrated, even today, that I can't service my own vehicle or truck without it voiding the warranty. A farmer who owns a machine worth hundreds of thousands of dollars should be able to choose who fixes it. A new header will now cost more than $1 billion.

That is before a single litre of diesel goes into the tank. Families and farming businesses are already facing huge cost pressures. Now diesel prices are going up, and this Labor government is doing nothing about it.

I want to take people watching at home back to when Labor was in opposition and when then opposition leader Anthony Albanese was attacking then prime minister Scott Morrison about the price of fuel. Well, the price then was about $1.75. Now prices are up at three bucks, and this Labor government is doing nothing to solve it.

On the inverse, our fuel price shield means that the fuel excise would automatically be halved when the Brent crude price of oil goes above U$S100 a barrel. When the government says it will extend the right to repair to agricultural machinery, it sounds good, but 'sounds good' is not the same as working. The government committed to this in November last year.

A discussion paper followed in May. Consultation closed on 3 July this year. But a discussion paper does not fix a header.

So the question everyone is asking is: what will it actually look like for farmers? Take the phosphine limits by this federal Labor government as an example. The state Labor government have just delayed the cut to workplace exposure limits for phosphine by at least 18 months—finally listening to farmers and the grain industry that their proposal would not work.

We are heading into what could be the biggest harvest on record, yet, consistent with Labor, they pressed ahead with drastic changes without alternatives, risking major supply chain bottlenecks without thinking about how this would impact our farmers and our regions. There are still significant concerns around exposure levels to grain dust. What gets me about this bill is the irony of this Labor government actually doing something for our farmers.

This is coming from a government who has a Treasurer that thinks that chocolate milk comes from brown cows. Have Labor considered the logistics of this for our regions? Many repairers in our regions are independent small businesses.

How will they be supported? It is all well and good to give local repairers more information, but the locals have to exist first. I support this reform.

Farmers have waited long enough for the right to repair their own machinery, but this Labor government needs to tell the regions what it will look like in practice.