Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Minister for Agriculture) Share this | Hansard source

This is my first roll of the dice in the Federation Chamber in this process of the budget. Agriculture has been a vital industry and will be a vital industry for where our economy goes. It is a statement of fact that, if we did not have an agriculture industry, then we would not have the nation that we currently see. This nation was in the past strongly reliant on its development through agriculture, and I believe that that is coming back to the fore again.

I have been extremely happy with the process that agriculture has been going through since we attained government. I feel there has been a real return to the Australian people because of that. I note with some interest that, in the quarter ending in March, we had a 19.3 per cent increase in agricultural income, and it was 19.3 per cent in the same quarter in the previous year. This shows a trend, and this trend is underwritten by a whole range of factors that we have been concentrating on intently.

One of the issues is re-establishing the live cattle and sheep trade in a form that is bringing real dignity back into people's lives. I was happy to see that in Western Australia the other day they were getting up to $153 for sheep. This brings substantial change to people's lives, who get the dignity of a substantial cheque coming through the door on the sale of sheep. This allows them to reinvest in their property and brings dignity into their lives by allowing them to do some of the things that everybody else takes for granted—maybe it is renovations around the house, maybe it is buying themselves a new car.

This is the sort of outcome you would expect for people who go through the privations of living remote to many social services. If their job is one where they cannot get all the social services that one would expect, living in an urban environment, then we hope that the quid pro quo is a reasonable return for their endeavours. I am also happy to see that, in the timber industry, we are getting a large pick-up in the export of timber. We had a record number of live cattle moved in April, over 170,000. Prior to that—I think in the month before that—we had a record amount of frozen beef, 108,000 tonnes. When you stack all these things against each other, you can see that agriculture is not only starting to provide a real return to the people on the land but also managing to help our nation.

I will give one classic anecdote about that. Back in the month of January, we suspected that the nation would make a $100 million loss, a $100 million deficit. We actually made a $1.4 billion surplus—a $1½ billion turnaround. That was predominantly driven by agriculture. We had an excellent crop coming off in Western Australia—we got about 6.2 million tonnes of that onto the ships—and we had good outcomes in the live cattle trade, the live sheep trade and the export of frozen beef, chilled beef and chilled mutton.

Let me turn to some other areas. We have managed to finalise a free trade agreement with Korea, which has brought about a substantial reduction in tariffs, especially in the beef sector, and ultimately they will go down to zero. We have finalised a trade agreement with Japan, which has brought about a substantial reduction in tariffs. We are currently in the throes of negotiating the Chinese one. I have had discussions with the Chinese departments, and Minister Gao from China was here in the last fortnight. We were very focused on what we are doing there. Some of the increases in exports to China have been incredible. They have been 500 per cent in a year in some sectors. There has been an exponential increase in beef exports. These all augur well for a good outcome.

On the back of that we have also had to work closely on drought policy. We have been managing to deliver good outcomes on drought policy, good outcomes on infrastructure and great outcomes with the recent $100 million further investment in research and development in agriculture. That basically takes our total to around $700 million a year. I look forward to participating in this process over the next 45 minutes. We will see how we go.

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