Mr FITZGIBBON (Hunter) (12:10): For all the bravado and fights that go on within this parliament on a regular basis, there is one thing on which everyone can agree, and that's the importance of the agriculture sector to the Australian economy. We might have varying views about how we can best grow and protect that industry, ensure its sustainable profitability, and create jobs and economic wealth in our regional communities, but we can agree on its critical importance. I was just thinking that, in recent years, leaders of political parties both in government and in opposition have become a little bit more colourful in their approach to portfolio titles in the hope, I suppose, of putting forward a description which is of more interest to the constituents we try to win in that political contest. A recent example I can think of is 'Small and Family Business'. The Prime Minister was obviously hoping to better connect with that demographic by the description in the portfolio title. Some of them have become a little bit too long or a little too Orwellian, I have to say. But I think it's legitimate for a leader to choose how he might want to describe the work of his or her ministers in their areas of portfolio responsibility. I've often pondered whether 'agriculture' is the best descriptor of my own portfolio and the portfolio of the minister sitting at the table—I'm very pleased that he's here for my contribution. In fact, I've often wondered whether 'agriculture' is a sufficiently modern word for people to fully appreciate and whether 'food and fibre' might better reacquaint consumers with the product they're consuming and help to invoke more thought about where our food comes from and the important role our farmers play in food and fibre production. But I think that, if you're really trying to capture in full the work of an agriculture minister, you would have 'biosecurity' in the title, because in my somewhat short experience as the minister—I keep saying it was 12 weeks— Mr Clare interjecting— Mr FITZGIBBON: But the member for Blaxland is challenging me; I think it might have been 11. But it was a golden era in agriculture. I know we can all agree on that! In my lengthy experience, I found myself devoting a considerable amount of my time, if not the majority of my time, to dealing with biosecurity issues. It's very important. It goes to our productivity, it goes to our sustainable profitability and it goes to our reputation on both domestic and export markets. Our key competitive advantage, of course—I've said this many times; I feel I might be repeating myself a bit, but it is important—on export markets is our reputation as a provider of clean, green, high-quality, safe and ethically produced food. I'm pleased that the member for Blaxland is here. He understands this as the shadow minister and, I hope, soon the minister for trade: if we lose that reputation, we are in trouble. It is very difficult for us to compete with people who have other advantages in other areas, including a greater abundance of natural resources, greater proximity, more economies of scale or whatever it might be—lower costs in some circumstances. It's that reputation that allows us to keep on competing on international markets, and it's a reputation we must guard very closely. Of course, our biosecurity system and its integrity are absolutely critical to that. The bill we're considering today, the Biosecurity Legislation Amendment (Miscellaneous Measures) Bill 2018, comes to us as a result of the Inspector-General of Biosecurity's review into the outbreak of white spot disease in the prawn sector. That was a very serious challenge to the government of the day and certainly a very serious challenge to the sector. It cost the sector dearly. I was critical of the minister at the time. I thought he moved on it too slowly and didn't do enough urgently, but that's in the past now. We are looking forward. This bill does a number of things, including, of course, providing the department with more power in certain areas to ensure that, whenever there are allegations of wrongdoing within the biosecurity area, the department has sufficient power to address them. In fact, the bill aims to implement greater information-gathering powers that will allow for faster and more accurate identification of 'at-risk' goods. These are very important. Some of the changes are minor in detail when they are read, but they will make a significant difference, in our view, to the capacity of the department to do its work and to enforce our biosecurity system. On that basis, the opposition will be supporting the bill. The opposition is very pleased that the bill is now in the House. For some reason, it seemed a little slow in arriving here after its introduction by the minister, but it is here. It reminds us of the importance of the Inspector-General of Biosecurity. The idea of having someone independent, at arm's length from the department, looking at these things in the way an ombudsman tends to do is of critical importance. Unfortunately, the House will recall that the former minister, the member for New England, decided to effectively abolish the Inspector-General of Biosecurity back in—I think—2015. Why he would want to do that is a mystery to me. But a greater mystery to me, as is always the case, is why his Prime Minister would give him that authorisation to do so. To reinforce that, I just want to share with the House what the Australian Veterinary Association said about that in the time. They said: If the Inspector-General's role is designed to be similar to that of an ombudsman (as described in the Beale Review)— and I will return to the Beale review— the public should be able to refer matters directly to the Inspector-General. I wonder where the minister of the day, the member for New England, was going to send those powers at the time, having gutted the inspector-general. Yes—I know what members are thinking—it was to himself. The member for New England was effectively going to be the Inspector-General of Biosecurity when he was the minister, until he was embarrassed, or otherwise, into that backdown, and that must have been a scary proposition for everyone working in the agriculture sector. Of course, in more recent times, he abolished another inspector-general—no, that was actually not in more recent times; it was in earlier times. He'd already abolished another inspector-general, and that was the Inspector-General of Animal Welfare and Live Animal Exports. We now know where that ended. It ended in tears. We saw a culture develop both in the department and in the industry as a result of the directions from the member for New England and as a result of the abolition of the inspector-general—and, of course, eventually, we saw the Awassi Express on our TV screens. I've said before that the live sheep trade might have had a future if we'd had an inspector-general for live animal exports from 2013 onwards and we hadn't had the member for New England create such a culture of risk taking in the sector. On the member for New England: I noticed that today, in the farm household allowance debate, he suggested that members of the Labor Party hate farmers and—I think it was—hate coalminers. That is an offensive thing for the member for New England to say. The member for New England has no monopoly on care for farmers. I know the new minister would never say that. He knows better. But, of course, this is the modus operandi for the member for New England: create divisions in our communities and pick a side. When you're a member of the National Party, you only need three per cent to get to where you want to— Mr Littleproud interjecting— Mr FITZGIBBON: Oh, four per cent. The minister has corrected me. You only need four per cent to get yourself into this place and, of course, to become Leader of the Nationals, you only need to corral—how many in your party room now? You only need to corral a dozen or so, and it will get you across the line! It's an interesting model they have. As a member of the LNP, you will appreciate this, Mr Deputy Speaker Vasta. They come in here and they speak with conflict of interest on a daily basis. If I was a financial adviser and I was in here talking about a bill relevant to financial advisers, they would be screaming conflict of interest, but if I'm a farmer—a sheep producer, a cattle producer or a dairy farmer—and I come in here and I speak about farm bills, it's okay. I always say the worst agriculture ministers are farmers! We have a banker, and he— Mr Clare: Barnaby wasn't a farmer. Mr FITZGIBBON: No, Barnaby claimed to have a few cattle! I once said, 'all hat and no cowboy', and someone said, 'No, the term in Australia is all hat and no cattle.' And I said I did that very deliberately, because I think Barnaby had three cattle running on the Tamworth property, so that would not have been accurate. I was very cautious in my approach to that claim. But how dare the member for New England say members of the Labor Party don't care about farmers? You know the best thing you can do for farmers? I heard the minister say it this morning: take them with you, have the conversation, work with them and go together to the hard decisions. Go together to the hard decisions. And there are hard decisions to be made in the agriculture sector. Some of them will be around biosecurity. But what you don't do is create divisions in the community, including in the farming community, and then say, 'I'm just here for you,' as if the rest of us are not. In other words, those guys who are interested in reform to maintain and build sustainability and profitability? They're against you. They don't understand you. They don't like you. They don't sit around the kitchen table with you. I know that's not the minister's view and I appreciate and welcome that, but I do resent this charge from the member for New England that people in the Labor Party don't like farmers. It's a ridiculous thing to say, and he should come in here and apologise and retract. If he doesn't come in here and apologise and retract, that will say much more about him than his original statement. If I came in here and said members of the National Party or the Liberal Party hated shopkeepers, there would be hell to pay. The member for New England shouldn't be able to come in here and charge members of the Labor Party with hating farmers—or coalminers, for that matter—if for no other reason than that he knows it's untrue. He knows it's basically absolutely untrue. We have been talking for a long, long time about biosecurity and improving it because of its importance. We go back to the Beale review, a report commissioned by the then Labor government. Of course, the Beale review in many ways changed the way we look at biosecurity. And, of course, Beale recommended a change to the language as well at that time. He thought 'quarantine' conjured too much of the image of defence of the border, whereas the real task, of course, is very much defence beyond the border, making sure the trouble is nipped in the bud at its source. So we ended up with the term 'biosecurity'. I think it's a confusing term for some people—'quarantine' has been with us for a long time, and people know exactly what that means—but as time goes on people will come to understand the importance of the term 'biosecurity'. I think that word 'security' does highlight the importance of the work. Over many years, we have further developed that work. As a result of the Beale review, we ended up with the Intergovernmental Agreement on Biosecurity. This is very important because so much of the work in protecting our reputation is and will continue to be done by the states. The only way to do that effectively is to ensure we have ongoing agreement and cooperation with the states, including, of course, joint resourcing of the work that has to be done. This is one of the reasons I've been so critical. I don't like to dwell on the member for New England—I feel like I'm sort of kicking someone while they're down—but he abolished the COAG process. His first act in government was to abolish the Standing Council on Primary Industries. This is the coordinating body for collaboration with the states. It's the body that should've been looking at drought policy over the last five years, but was unable to do so because it was abolished. Mr Littleproud: It's called AGMIN. Mr FITZGIBBON: I'm going to pick up on that. I predicted the minister would interject at that point, and he's right on cue. Let me tell you the difference, Mr Deputy Speaker. SCoPI was a formal creature of the COAG process, with the usual COAG resourcing and support. AGMIN is no such thing. In fact, the member for New England had no intention of having an AGMIN. When I challenged him on the abolition of SCoPI back in 2013, he said, 'We don't need that; we'll just do things on an ad hoc basis from time to time when we think there's something to discuss.' Then, I suspect, he probably got a call from the Prime Minister of the day, who would have said: 'I think we need to do a little bit better than that; these are pretty important issues—biosecurity et cetera. I think we can do better than that.' So he created AGMIN. That's short for agriculture ministers, of course. So we have AGMIN, and AGMIN meets from time to time. I'm told the dinners which follow are very nice. I'm not going to ask questions about where they were held, but I'm told they are very nice. It has no real working agenda. There is no discipline. It's not like it's a quarterly meeting and officers who represent the department come back or their departments come back and say, 'Well, here's the thing.' SCoPI had a productivity agenda, a sustainability agenda and a profitability agenda—it had all sorts of ongoing work that was revisited each time SCoPI met. In the golden era of agriculture, when I was the minister, I had the good fortune of chairing SCoPI on one occasion, so I had a good insight into how SCoPI worked. AGMIN does none of those things. In fact, we don't know when AGMIN meets. The minister might tell me when AGMIN is meeting again. Mr Littleproud: In December this year. Mr FITZGIBBON: December this year. The minister does realise it's June? The minister might tell me when AGMIN— Mr Littleproud: We met two months ago. Mr FITZGIBBON: That's right; in Brisbane two months ago. I remember it very well. That's when they considered the fact that the intergovernmental agreement on drought comes to a close this week, but failed to put a new agreement into place. Now, what he's saying is the old intergovernmental agreement will continue until we get around to getting a new one. He's just told us—was it December?—they're going to meet again in December, so he's just going to let the current intergovernmental agreement run until then. Mr Littleproud: No, it doesn't, and you know it doesn't. Mr FITZGIBBON: Is the intergovernmental agreement running to December? Mr Littleproud: It continues on. Mr FITZGIBBON: That's right; it's going to run to December. It's now five years old. The whole idea of the intergovernmental agreement on drought, beyond the collaboration with the states, was to put new drought measures in place. I said yesterday, in another debate, that the states and the Commonwealth, with the support of the National Farmers' Federation and other farm leadership groups, agreed to start from scratch. The IGA was supposed to be reviewed over the five-year period, and now it's ready to be replaced. The minister has already extended that period. The minister has had long enough. They've had five years in government under the IGA. They've had long enough. Now he's kicked it down the road to December. Do you know what the significance of that is, Mr Deputy Speaker? It's very obvious: he's kicking it beyond the election. Just like live exports, he's kicking it beyond the election. The minister doesn't want to tackle the IGA and he doesn't want to tackle the hard issues; he wants to kick them all beyond the election. There's another IGA that I think is about to come to an end, and it's about biosecurity. We had a review, led by Wendy Craik, on the IGA— Mr Littleproud: Did you see the budget? Mr FITZGIBBON: The minister has just made the point: have I seen the budget? Yes, and Wendy Craik's recommendations have financial commitments attached to them. Mr Littleproud: We're doing them. Mr FITZGIBBON: The minister's just made an announcement: he's doing them. The minister has just told us he's picking up every recommendation of the Craik review. Mr Littleproud: 42 recommendations. Mr FITZGIBBON: 42 recommendations—in full! We have learned something today. They might not have come as quickly as we would have liked, but we have now learned today that the Turnbull government is going to embrace in full the recommendations of the Craik review. That's a great revelation. I appreciate the minister sharing that with us. That review is compulsory reading. If someone wants a Reader's Digest version of how biosecurity works in this country—where the flaws are and where the opportunities are—I recommend people in this place read that report. It's informative and they will find it interesting, believe it or not, because it does take you to interesting topics. It's a good review and I'm glad to hear that the minister is about to embrace it. It must be a very good thing. There's another aspect to biosecurity, which is really relevant to this conversation, and it's somewhat of a repeat of the discussion we had yesterday but it's worthy of it. What is also important in biosecurity is how we manage our land and water resources. The great myth in this country is that we have an abundance of natural resources, or soil and water and, of course, nothing could be further from the truth. We have the driest inhabited continent on the earth and our soil resources are limited to a relatively small part of our continent. Some of them are very rich; some of them not so. We have farmers, as the climate continues to change, increasingly working what might be described as marginal land. The strength of our water resources, and how we manage and allocate them, is also critical to our biosecurity efforts. On that basis, we cannot just deal with the enforcement and regulation of biosecurity—making sure people aren't doing the wrong thing—we must do the work ourselves in other areas of policy, including natural resource management. This is a complex area of public policy. Agriculture is a challenging portfolio. I think it's fair to say that it's a portfolio that would not rate highly in this place as a portfolio that a majority of people understand well. I think if you took a scatter plot of the various portfolios and worked out where the strength of knowledge is, agriculture would not be in a high-priority plane on that scale. Why is that, given its importance to our national economy? I think it's because it's so complex. It's very complex and it's so diverse. You might argue that the agriculture portfolio is 20 portfolios if you took it commodity by commodity and added biosecurity, export arrangements and all that goes with it. It does make it almost intimidating for someone who's not working in the agriculture space all of the time. It has certainly been a magnificent learning curve for me in the five years I've been in the portfolio. It's been a very enjoyable experience and I've appreciated the opportunity to do this work. With a little bit of luck, I might have the opportunity to create another golden era in agriculture in the not too distant future. I want to finish by foreshadowing something that I know my colleagues will talk about and that is the recent outbreak of fruit fly in Tasmania. This is a very, very serious issue. Tasmania is not without its challenges—distance being one of them. It is an island state, obviously, and it enjoys a clean green status, a safe status, that any country around the world would envy and, indeed, even those of us on the mainland would envy. Any challenge to that status is a very, very serious one for Tasmania, so dependent as it is on the agriculture sector, and horticulture in particular. What we don't want in the future are spats about who caused what and why the breakdown occurred. What we do want is a parliament working in a unified way in close cooperation with the Tasmanian government to make sure the right resources are being invested in the first place, and then, in turn, ensuring that any outbreak is treated with the urgency, determination and energy it deserves. It's a very serious issue for Tasmanians. I know other contributors will have more to say about it, but I want to tell Tasmanians, including my Tasmanian colleagues, that it's very much on my mind and we will do anything we can to work with governments—plural—to make sure those outbreaks don't occur again in the future. If, God forbid, they do, Tasmanians will have all the support of the people in this parliament to make sure that we address the problem as quickly and as urgently as possible. Again, the opposition will be supporting the bill, and I look forward to this not being our last bill this week. I welcome the minister's intention to bring back the penalties bill for the live sheep trade, and look forward to that. That bill, of course, is one of the minister's key responses to the McCarthy review into the Awassi Express and the wider issues in the live-export trade. We've made it clear that we don't see the bill having much effect, because history tells us that fines and penalties and other sanctions are rarely applied in the live sheep export trade. That's why we need an inspector-general for animal welfare and live animal exports. But we don't believe, of course, that increasing penalties can do any harm. Although I will say that, potentially, there's been a bit of a moral hazard in the past, in that the regulator has been reluctant to impose penalties that exist, because they may see them as being out of proportion to the crime. So, there's an argument that maybe the penalties have been too high and there's been a reluctance to impose them for that reason. That's only an anecdotal view, but it is entirely possible. But we like to think the bill can do no harm. We're prepared to support the bill, but I've done the right thing: I've foreshadowed my intention to move amendments which would immediately put a stop to the dreaded Northern Hemisphere summer trade and would phase out the live sheep trade over a five-year period. Mr Littleproud interjecting — Mr FITZGIBBON: The minister does himself or the industry no good by invoking cattle. He knows that the Labor Party views the live cattle trade entirely differently, and he does the cattle trade no good by trying to bring it into the debate. That can only do the live cattle trade harm. Mr Littleproud interjecting— Mr FITZGIBBON: He's saying that the penalties bill covers cattle as well, and that's fine. We are ready to support the bill. Bring it on. The only reason the minister is withholding the bill is that he's concerned about my amendments. I would assume that—given he's in the government, which implies he has a majority of votes in the House of Representatives—he'd be pretty confident about defeating my amendment in the House of Representatives. So, bring the bill on. If the amendment loses, we will pass the bill and it will go to the Senate. Mr Littleproud interjecting— Mr FITZGIBBON: The minister is saying no, he's more concerned about the Senate. Well, the minister might think about what democracy is: allowing the parliament to express its will. That's what people elect us to do. Mr Littleproud: There's a separate bill for that. Mr FITZGIBBON: He said there's a separate bill for that. Bring it on, Minister. Allow the parliament to express its will. That's how the Westminster system works, and that's what democracy is about. Bring the bill back. He is holding a bill that he described as an urgent response to the Awassi Express affair, yet he's too concerned about one or two people—maybe it's six people; I don't know—crossing the floor. So he's more concerned about the embarrassment of the government than he is about progressing a bill that he says is so important. I will close by making one point. The minister said the government was going to adopt the 42 recommendations of the Craik review. He might want to indicate at some point that that's something more than an in-principle-only commitment, because I think those words might have been used in the past. I understand that today he said that it was the government's commitment to accept those 42 recommendations in full, not just in principle. He can do so by way of interjection or more formally, using some other means. I think he is confirming it. It's not just in principle? Mr Littleproud: I'll do it with cash. I'll put cash on the table—cold, hard cash. Mr FITZGIBBON: I think he's confirming that the government is embracing the Craik recommendations in full. There are some challenges for him in those recommendations, so it's not without courage. It's nice to hear that the government's intention is to respond to that report, because it's been a little while in doing so.