BARNABY Joyce has told a large gathering of sugar cane farmers he won’t be telegraphing his political “punches” to foreign owned sugar milling company Wilmar.
But he’s promised they will “hate” his form of government intervention, if an on-supply agreement can’t be reached to satisfy monopoly bound sugar producer suppliers, via Queensland Sugar Limited (QSL).
The Agriculture and Water Resources Minister and acting Prime Minister met with hundreds of growers at Ingham in Queensland’s Burdekin sugar cane production region on Saturday afternoon, as the protracted Wilmar and QSL dispute speeds towards a February 28 deadline around record high forward pricing contracts.
The meeting ventilated harsh criticisms of Wilmar’s political actions in the ongoing argument, with one grower accusing the monopoly sugar miller of virtually holding 1500 growers to ransom, with its delaying tactics.
Growers and industry figures said action was needed soon with the February 28 forward-pricing deadline just around the corner, while accusations were also raised that growers were being blackmailed into signing contracts, due to the delay tactics.
“If they went any slower they would reverse into someone,” one grower said of Wilmar’s strategy while also warning an agreement with QSL seemed close but was in fact a long way off.
Mr Joyce also expressed angst at Wilmar’s actions in stalling the negotiations, as another crowd member described the Singaporean owned company as “recalcitrant”.
Mr Joyce said last year before Christmas he had Wilmar and QSL in his office for a meeting where he stated the issue must be sorted out and nobody would be going home until that happened.
But he said those talks went “around and around the table” and ended up “nowhere” so he then promised to bring the issue “to a head” to start this new parliamentary year, “because I’m sick and tired of it”.
“I said this is a little carbuncle that’s annoying me and I want it resolved,” he told the crowd adding he’d now pulled rank and made it a major issue within the Coalition, which was his right as Nationals’ leader.
“I don’t particularly want to tell Wilmar all my tactics so if I’m in some instances, I’m reticent, it’s not because I’m trying to hide anything from you.
“I’m trying to not telegraph my punches, because if I telegraph my punches, I’ve already seen how this one works.
“I say what I’m going to do, Wilmar gets on the phone, they start ringing up my colleagues and start saying what a terrible person I am and they’ve got all their lines ready by the time I walk up, so I’m not going to go about it like that.
“But we have options at the federal level.
“The quickest way to fix it would be if Wilmar fixes it up tomorrow - that would be a piece of cake.
“I’ve got other cards up my sleeve and I’ll play them at my will.”
Mr Joyce said he attended the large public meeting “to try and get this thing resolved” but stressed a cabinet process had already started and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was “right across it”.
He said amendments due to be introduced into the Queensland parliament - which aim to bring the two warring parties into a dispute mediation process but needed support of the LNP Opposition, two Katter’s Australian Party members and independent members - was the second fastest way of resolving the issue.
Mr Joyce said a less-immediate resolution was to introduce a compulsory sugar industry code of conduct and he was ready to “fight that fight” when needed, in federal cabinet.
However he said the industry code - which has been heavily backed by Queensland LNP MP George Christensen - needed to go through a length parliamentary process, including committee inquiries and re-drafting, before coming into effect.
The Queensland Labor government isn’t supporting the proposed amendments and therefore federal Labor would also be against introducing the new code, he said.
Mr Joyce said the draft code resulted from an inquiry he deputy-chaired in the previous parliament, after the dispute between Wilmar and QSL first broke out in April 2014, but it was now out of date and would need re-drafting.
But he said if the federal Coalition had to go down that path, “I can assure Wilmar, they’ll wish that they’d actually come to an agreement tomorrow”.
“But if that’s what it takes, that’s what we’ll do,” he said.
“I can say it openly to Wilmar, the smartest thing for them to do is to say, ‘This is turning into a complete and utter stink and I think we’ve now got some serious players involved and I think that they’re serious’.
“And they’ve got that right - we are (serious) - so they should resolve it themselves.
“If I was an account for them I’d be saying, ‘Fix this up; get it off the books; get it done.”
Mr Joyce said if the federal government had to step in and resolve the dispute “everybody will hate it” and the code would be a “clumsy thing”, with government telling them what to do.
He said he’d been through Wilmar’s counter arguments “up-hill and down dale” and “I’ll tell you how they won’t play ball”.
He said firstly they would challenge the validity of a code of conduct as per the constitution and also challenge its validity, against the Singapore Free Trade Agreement.
Mr Joyce said he anticipated Wilmar would also delay an agreement by “kicking it down the road” but “all those contingencies, we’ve thought about”.
“Some people say, why aren’t you like Donald Trump and just walk in there and tell them to do it?” he said.
“In our nation you don’t have executive powers; you can’t just order people to do it.
“You’ve got to go through a cabinet, therefore you’ve got 22 people who are around the table and I’m in that cabinet and I go in as best prepared as I can, to argue your case.
“I’ve got to bring everybody else around that cabinet table to me and that’s precisely what I am doing and precisely what I intend to pursue.”
Mr Joyce told the meeting “I’m kind of on your side” but the issue must also resonate in a “wider form”, like in Brisbane or on Sydney talk back radio, which would help to inform and convince his other political colleagues.
He said what he was relaying on the industry’s behalf, to people living in the western suburbs of Sydney who had nothing to do with sugar cane, was a warning about producers being exploited by a privately owned monopoly sugar processor.
“Sugar by its very nature works to a monopoly,” he said.
Mr Joyce said farmer-owned co-ops had no reason to rip anybody off because they’d just be ripping off themselves, given profits are returned to the farmers.
“The only monopoly you can ever have is one that’s actually owned by the growers because they’re not going to rip themselves off,” he said.
“What we don’t believe in on our side of the political fence is monopolies because monopolies, if you don’t have price competitiveness, can exploit you.
“They can say they’re not going to do but of course that’s their job – that’s what monopolies do.
“And if someone says, ‘well the only person you can sell your cane to is me and after you harvest it you’ve got about 16 hours to get it in and after I get it, I determine who I sell it to and I might sell it to myself and not only that, I’ll determine the price’.
“Well that’s rubbish - it can’t work like that.
“That’s the very truncated form of what I’m delivering to cabinet on your behalf.”
Mr Joyce said people overseas also had to understand “we do not believe in monopolies – especially private ones”.
“We like competition,” he said.
“We like lots of people trying to buy my cattle; I like lots of people trying to buy my sheep; I like lots of people trying to buy your sugar.”
Mr Joyce also warned against other trying to resolve the issue by making “a racket” and not being in the federal cabinet, and that somehow “magically something will happen”.
He said it “doesn’t work like that” and the only way to resolve the issue was “if you’re in the place that has the authority to do it” but stressed he also listened to his colleagues first.
“If someone says I don’t have to be in your party, and I don’t have to be in your show, and somehow I’m going to have a big effect on you, well they’re not,” he said in a thinly veiled warning to One Nation leader Pauline Hanson.
“I’ll talk to the tea lady, because we’re busy.”
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said at the weekend he understood the Queensland LNP Opposition had proposed to make further amendments to state legislation – and had the numbers – to address the sugar marketing dispute.
“We are looking forward to an early resolution and we urge the parties to come to a resolution to end the uncertainty,” he said.