Ms KING (6:40 PM) —The Farm Household Support Amendment (Exceptional Circumstances Relief Payment) Bill 2005 amends the Farm Household Support Act 1992 to give effect to some of the measures in the 2005 drought assistance package announced on 30 May 2005. You would think by the way the government are talking that the drought has caught them by surprise—that suddenly, a scant few weeks after a budget that promised over $22 billion worth of spending, it has suddenly dawned on them that the drought is still actually going on. The government’s handling of the worst drought on record has smacked of absolute incompetence. The government have failed to take heed of the warnings of their own experts and to plan for the prolonged nature of the drought. They cut funding in the budget for the exceptional circumstances program and then, some three weeks later, had to put a new relief package in place. The government have failed to manage the exceptional circumstances application process in a timely and transparent way, and farmers continue to be hampered by red tape as they try to access the program. The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, the Bureau of Meteorology’s National Climate Centre and the Queensland Centre for Climate Applications have all been warning that the last five years have been amongst the driest on record and that there is no evidence that the situation is likely to improve in the long term. Drought is not new to this country: it is a problem farmers have had to contend with since the late 1880s. Australia has experienced several severe and prolonged droughts. They include the Federation Drought of 1895-1902; the 1914-15 drought, the World War II droughts between 1937 and 1945, the 1982-83 drought, and the El Nino associated droughts from 1991 to 1995 and again in 1997. However, the present drought has been particularly severe and it has stretched farmers’ resilience, resources and resolve.

The lack of action, vision and leadership is becoming a theme common to this government. While I support this bill, I note there is so much the Howard government could have done over the last five years to reduce the hardship that farmers in drought-affected areas have been experiencing. The Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry has given a whole new meaning to the saying ‘all talk and no action’. The government first promised drought relief reform more than five years ago and since then has announced breakthroughs in numerous press releases from the agriculture minister with titles that have included ‘Drought policy reform breakthrough’, 13 April 2005; ‘Headway made on streamlining EC’; ‘Truss welcomes EC drought reform support’; ‘Progress on drought reform’, 19 May 2004; ‘National drought policy: the way ahead’; ‘Federal government seeks to make EC support fairer and more workable’; and ‘Truss offers way forward on exceptional circumstances policy’. If the minister had put less effort into writing media releases and more effort into backing his public comments with policy commitments, rural businesses, families and workers would not be feeling the increased anxiety and depression that they are currently feeling.

The frustration over the Howard government’s talk fest on drought assistance has drawn criticism from the National Farmers Federation president, Mr Cornish, who said in an article in the Canberra Times on 27 May this year:

However, the list of the government’s critics does not stop at the National Farmers Federation and the Australian Labor Party. The Australian National Audit Office report on drought assistance released earlier this month shines a light on the lack of planning, strategy and coordination in this policy area. Some of the report’s key findings include:

the department—

…              …              …

No wonder the Howard government’s drought policy is in such a mess. It beggars belief that, with much of the country gripped by prolonged drought over the last decade, the minister did not even have a plan for what to do if the drought got worse. Nothing encapsulates the neglect of planning in this area more than the $72.7 million cut to the estimated expenditure on exceptional circumstances assistance in the 2005-06 budget. It is beyond belief when 45 per cent of Australia’s farmland is currently drought declared; with states like New South Wales the figure is closer to 85 per cent. But, not wanting to stop there, the Howard government knew an El Nino event was likely. Instead of increasing EC assistance in the budget, what did it do? It actually cut estimated expenditure.

On 15 April 2005—three and a half weeks before the budget was handed down—the agriculture minister was briefed by the Bureau of Meteorology at a meeting of the Primary Industries Ministerial Council and told that the first quarter of this year was the second driest on record and that another El Nino event was likely this year. Either the government ignored the warning, the agriculture minister failed to pass it on or they decided that they did not want to talk about the drought in the budget papers because of the impact that would have on the economy’s bottom line. In any case, a number of newspaper articles outlining these warnings appeared at the same time, so it is not as though it was not known in the lead-up to the budget that there was going to be a problem with drought assistance. The drought that started in 2002-03 has been particularly severe by historical standards. The consequences have included a decline in crop production of more than 50 per cent in 2002-03. Flow-on effects have contributed to a downturn for rural businesses and fewer regional employment opportunities.

I want to address the arbitrary nature of how the boundaries of EC are declared and how the assessment process is conducted. The Australian National Audit Office report directed particular attention to the assessment of EC applications. It found:

Because of the way EC areas are declared many farmers are suffering arbitrarily. In my electorate, Gordon and Ballan are both considered to be EC drought declared areas, but if you travel just 50 kilometres west to Snake Valley, Beaufort and Learmonth the farmers are not so lucky. They have been unable to get their areas EC declared, despite receiving exactly the same levels of rainfall and having the same pressures as the farmers in Gordon and Ballan. Despite being in the same boat by virtue of being on the wrong side of a line, farmers of equal need will receive varying levels of support. The real concern for farmers is not so much the insufficient financial assistance from EC funding but the eligibility criteria. I know that farmers who are on the other side of that line are still doing it tough—they still sit around the kitchen table at night wondering how they are going to pay the bills and buy stock for the next season.

In my area the process has been particularly painful. Time after time we have had applications going in and the applicants being told more information was needed. In fact, you actually have to pay to access the information—and where do you have to go to pay for access to that information? You have to go to the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics, a federal government office, so you can submit an application to the federal government. It just seems absolutely ridiculous to me that we are in those circumstances. On each occasion the application for EC assistance for those areas has been rejected. As I said, what that has resulted in is a small proportion of my electorate being drought declared while other parts that are suffering just as badly remain undeclared. Because they have not been able to obtain information or there has been a lack of clarity about the information required, those farmers and businesses in those communities have had to go without.

The arbitrary nature of exceptional circumstances funding was also picked up in the Audit Office report. It noted that there is no standard approach to describing EC areas in the EC applications which were subsequently announced in press releases. As a result, the descriptions of exceptional circumstances declared industries and regions were at times complicated. As well, some maps of the EC declared areas did not accord clearly with descriptions of the areas.

After five years of talk from this government any increase in assistance to farmers is absolutely welcome. However, if the government thinks that it has done nearly enough, it is gravely mistaken. There is still much to be done and improved on. The government has failed to take on board in a timely way the warnings of the CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology and the Queensland Centre for Climate Applications. It has failed to fund the proposed CRC for climate risk technologies, which might have actually helped to address some of these issues in the future. Its decision to scrap the drought investment allowance is a great disappointment to many farmers. Its failure to adequately fund drought relief in this year’s budget, despite the fact that it had information about it, shows that the government is not serious about drought policy at all. It only moves to deal with the issues when they appear in the media. That is no way to run your public policy program.

I say to the member for Indi—who in this debate could not even manage to speak for the 10 minutes allocated to her without attempting to take some cheap political shots and who had not even seen a regional or rural area until she tottered down the highway in her Manolo Blahaniks to try and win a seat off the National Party—that it takes more to represent a regional or rural area and do something about drought funding than just sticking your name down on a bill that happens to have something about farmers in it.

It is important that the government implements an effective and long-term plan for addressing the problems farmers experience during sustained drought, because the livelihood and prosperity of farms not only impacts on farmers and their families but has a direct link to the vibrancy of regional and rural communities. It has been estimated by the National Farmers Federation that up to 70,000 jobs have been lost because of the current drought. Recent studies by Charles Sturt University of drought-hit towns in New South Wales show jobs losses from drought include teaching, retail, hospitality, apprenticeships and skilled labour, as well as seasonal farm labouring jobs. The farming community in my electorate is in many respects the lifeblood of towns like Ballarat, Ballan and Learmonth. If we do not address the long-term issues that are facing farmers in rural communities, we put at peril the economic as well as the cultural wellbeing of regional Australia.