THE question you ask when buying a horse, or buying a car, or voting for a politician is this: are their best days ahead of them or behind them?
In Agriculture we’re delivering on our vision that places our best days ahead of us.
We have taken on a massive task against massive obstacles at times and turning the obstacles to opportunities and delivering great success.
Australia’s Ag White Paper, which was initially condemned as a shopping list of unrelated items is now lauded as one of the most extensive overhauls of federal agricultural policy and departmental operations in our memory.
We have now set the agenda for this government to continue with, and capitalise on, the work done by so many.
Every issue was hard fought for.
Fought for by standing behind the expansion of the live export trade, securing seven major new live export destinations and assisting in the negotiation of three new free trade agreements and we won’t stop there.
Since September 2013 we have achieved 70 key market access gains or restorations.
We have created a new labelling system for food products with a proper country of origin labelling system.
We have provided a substantial change in the role of government in assisting with finance facilities for farmers and the support for families on the land doing it tough.
We have now lent out over $430 million to over 800 farm businesses.
We have stood up against a puritanical approach of anything goes in the sale of our land, by delivering new foreign investment rules, while still managing to attract the highest level of foreign investment interest in agriculture in many decades.
We have record prices in so many soft commodity lines that now rural exports are the second largest export after iron ore.
We have five new agriculture counsellors based overseas, taking our overseas network to seventeen counsellors, to assist in the sale of our products.
We have a dedicated ACCC Agriculture Commissioner to promote fairness in how farmers are dealt with at home.
And we are driving the further roll-out of biosecurity controls such as the K5 Calicivirus and the planned roll-out of the Carp Herpes virus to control European Carp.
We are boosting our investment into research and development to improve farm profitability.
We have expanded farm management deposits up to $800,000 with capacity to be written off against the loan on your place - giving farmers access to a tax deduction to pay off their farm.
We have provided depreciation measures including the 100pc write off for fencing, 100pc write off for water reticulation and write off over three years for your silos, haysheds and other fodder storage measures.
We are assisting farms protect their stock from predation by investing in wild dog control, through fences, baits and a national coordination centre.
In 2013 we inherited a department that had lost more than half its funding under the previous Labor/Greens/Independent government and we have made it bigger, stronger and better, now including Water Resources.
We’re decentralising, to build centres of excellence for the country, in the country - RIRDC to Wagga Wagga; GRDC to Toowoomba, Dubbo, Adelaide and Perth; and Fisheries R&D to SA.
The cotton RDC is in Narrabri, not Canberra.
New dams will be built - $450 million in grants will assist construction, with $2 billion in concessional loans on top of that.
We have an additional $120 million in dams and water infrastructure already under construction in Tasmania and we are spending around $2.5 million on water infrastructure in the Murray-Darling Basin every day.
Next is roads and rail.
The Inland Rail has been one of the greatest fights for the National Party and it is now going ahead – with $594 million of momentum.
That’s new efficiencies in freight transport and jobs, jobs, jobs – from planners and labourers to Aussie steelmakers.
Once again this was a Labor/Green/Independent dream but with the Nationals in government, reality.
We have delivered a budget that deals with the dry fundamentals of making sure we have our finances under control so that our legacy to our children and our grandchildren is not the impecunity of our times, or the selfishness of our whims, nor the misplaced zeal of unplanned ventures and butterfly chasing exercises.
We as a government have dealt with the problems that were left to us and are rising to the challenge of the future in a methodical and planned way.
The future is the best place to be when the best days are ahead of us because we know the future is the only place where our children and grandchildren will live.
