Senator JOYCE—I will try to be brief, because I want everyone to get a chance; and I am from Queensland so I have talked to you before. I would also like to declare on the record that I know these people. The issue you are really talking about, Mr Packer, is that our laws and our inability to deal with monopolies is apparent in our inability to deal with Incitec, so how are we going to deal with a monopoly when it is a monopoly that we are having to sell to. We will be hit twice. They will be selling to us under a monopoly from our inputs, and we will have to sell to a regional monopoly, and our laws are not able to deal with that.

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Mr Packer—I think it is almost impossible financially for individuals to tackle companies. The legal costs are prohibitive. It just gets beyond the individual to do these things. That is what worries us: they are too big for us to touch. That is our biggest worry.

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Senator JOYCE—I just want to touch base about something that is interesting. Mr Walton, we have heard today, over and over again, the position of Western Australian wheat growers. Do you have any knowledge of Western Australian wheat growers, and do you agree with the proposition that they are overwhelmingly in support of getting rid of the single desk?

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Mr Walton—I should declare to the committee that I am an ex-West Australian. I have family in WA, so I visit WA pretty regularly, but I did leave WA in 1983. My family are involved in grain growing—wheat growing, in particular—and some canola and what have you, and machinery businesses in WA. I have spent plenty of time talking to West Australian farmers and I cannot find anybody, other than a few minor groups, who would like to get rid of the single desk. It is split, like the membership of the two organisations that make representations to government. The Western Australian Farmers Federation has the vast bulk of membership, and it would support the single desk. The pastoralists and graziers have always been a minority group and they would like to get rid of the single desk. One of the things that I have noticed in my time, in travelling backwards and forwards and talking to people over there, is that there appears to have been, by some senators who come from WA—and Senator Judith Adams, I notice you come from WA but, I am sorry, I have never heard your name before, and I am not making reference to you—from rural electorates—

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Senator ADAMS—Besides me?

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Mr Walton—No, there are more.

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Senator ADAMS—There are not.

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Mr Walton—Maybe in the House of Representatives, I beg your pardon, who seem to misrepresent dreadfully the farmers in their electorates. I am not naming anybody. That is what I have noticed over time. Those are the people I talk to; and, Senator, I could direct you to those people if you like.

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Senator ADAMS—That is fine, but this is in the last two months?

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Mr Walton—I spent Christmas over there, so not in the last two months.

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Senator ADAMS—Since we have had the wheat consultation committees over there, people are now informed about what is going on. So I can assure you that wherever you have been is very different from what has been coming through the door of my office. I travel through WA, through the wheat belt, all the time. I live there.

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CHAIR—May I suggest, Senator Adams, we will come to you. I know you did want to answer Mr Walton’s question—

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Senator ADAMS—I had to reply to that.

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Senator JOYCE—It is fair enough that Senator Adams gets to reply on that. First of all, I want to thank you for giving us a presentation today. To be honest, a lot of people have been very lax in that we have not had presentations, but at least you have delivered one, and that seems interesting coming from a small farmers group. Who is the predominant receiver of wheat in your area?

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Mr Walton—It depends on the season, of course. If it is a very low production year—not last year but perhaps the year before—it may well be that local feedlots will take a fair portion of it. Beyond that, it goes simply to GrainCorp. There is nobody other than GrainCorp.

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Senator JOYCE—Do you feel that GrainCorp—because of what I think has become clearly evident today—has a vested interest in the repeal of the single desk?

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Mr Walton—Senator Joyce, that is an absolute certainty—and the same in Western Australia for Co-operative Bulk Handling. They both have a vested interest in looking after their shareholders and extracting margins from farmers rather than doing the right thing by farmers.

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Senator JOYCE—You were here when evidence was being given by the Grain Growers Association. Do you believe, because of their association with GrainCorp, there could be a perceived—whether or not in actuality—conflict of interest between their representation of grain growers and the problems they have in being a shareholder of a great benefactor of the repeal of the legislation?

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Mr Walton—Frankly, I was quite concerned by the presentation from supposedly 17,000 members. I think Senator McGauran was asking about that. I struggle with that number of 17,000 members. I also struggle with the fact that these guys say they support a single desk because they have been to their farmer groups and then the day they sit down in front of a committee like this they tell you that they accept the legislation and they are going to get on with it. I really find that very difficult to deal with. That is one of the reasons that representation in our area, for instance, is very poor. In fact I know of a couple of members of AgForce, which is supposedly our local grain representing body, but I know of no meetings whatsoever in a decade—not a single meeting, certainly since it joined with the cattle organisations.

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Mr Packer—I am a member of the Grain Growers Association and do not grow grain. I just wonder how many of those grain growers they have as members do not grow grain, because there are never any surveys done. The membership cost is nil, so it is very easy to belong to it. You pay an initial membership and after that there is nothing to pay, so it is very hard to work out where these members are, where the membership figures come from—even how many of these members might be dead.

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Senator McGAURAN—That is exactly why I asked the question.

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Senator JOYCE—Most of what you say is in here. Firstly, with regard to the legislation, do you have any concerns about the mechanisms of transparency and protection of growers as outlined in the eligibility for accreditation? Do you get any sense of solace that protection mechanisms that are currently available under the Trade Practices Act are going to resolve any issues whatsoever that will become apparent when you get discrepancies in the price that you will receive—whether or not they like the look of your face—because they will be able to offer you a different price each time?

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Mr Walton—Senator Joyce, this is a question that you have repeated several times today and I am going to give you an answer like most other farmers would. We do not think that the Trade Practices Act can do a job in protecting us at all. We draw this committee’s attention to the fuel industry and the games that happened th