The Farm Household Allowance Bill was on today’s agenda as a matter of importance.

Transcript

As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, I support this bill. The reform to make the farm household allowance a flat rate paid on current income, helps to reduce the regulatory burden on farms, who already work long hours for decreasing rewards.

These income audits were a massive distraction, so this is a good move from the government, a welcome move, the extension of time for conducting an assessment helps farms involve their accountants, or bookkeepers, in a process that was previously an ordeal.

My concern in light of current events, is that COVID-19 assistance is targeted at urban, and not rural areas. Our farmers have come through the worst drought in 100 years and the drought may or may not be ending.

What we do know is that the rivers are full, but the damns are empty. Farmers are watching this water, this bounty of water, running down rivers and out to sea. General-security water licence holders are still on zero allocation, they have no confidence that irrigation licences will be honoured.

If international trade is being disrupted, we need to grow food, we need to allow more water to be taken for irrigation. The environment has had a drink, a bellyful, from recent rains, it’s now the farmer’s turn.

What good is farm assistance if farmers go broke, because we took too much water for the environment and not enough for food and fibre? And I’d like to talk about the productive capacity of our country, especially the rural productive capacity.

We have destroyed it in the last 20 years. Farmers have had their ability, their right, to use the land taken from them, stolen from them, to comply with international agreements starting with the UN’s Kyoto protocol.

We need that back, or farmers paid compensation for the loss of their rights. Secondly, water, I’ve just touched on water, but we need to have investment in water infrastructure, and make sure that farmers have that water, because its essential for food. And we need energy prices to be lowered.

We have the world’s biggest exports of natural gas and coal, and yet we have among the highest prices of electricity in this country. We have farmers not able to irrigate, because they can’t afford the electricity to pump water in a country that’s blessed with energy.

What is going on? We have to restore the productive capacity of our country, which means getting back to sensible electricity policies, energy policies, so that we have, once again the lowest prices in the world, the best policies, we’ve got now, the worst.

Restoring the productive capacity will involve, also, other sectors, including education, but it starts with land use, the right to use the land that farmers have bought, the right to access water at sensible prices, free of corruption, and the right to electricity at reasonable prices.

I also want to talk about one other aspect, and that is we have fallen for the globalist trap, of interdependence, inter-dependence, and what that really is, is dependence, because when we’re in interdependent on someone else, with around the globe, and they shut down, we’re suddenly dependent on them.

Australia has got abundant minerals, abundant energies, abundant agricultural resources. We’re not using these resources. Australia has enormous potential with its people, with its resources and its opportunities, and we need to rekindle these, and get back to putting Australia first.

No more interdependence, because that is simply dependence We need to become independent, as we were and we were independent we thrived. And that, when we restore our independence, we will restore our economic resilience and we’ll also restore our productive capacity.

So we compliment the government on this initiative, but we need to go much much further to restore the productive capacity, and economic resilience of our country. Thank you, Mr. President.