Senator JOYCE—I think that you—especially Gary—have brought up the issue that we are possibly replacing one monopoly with another one. We are going from a transparent monopoly to a closed monopoly. Through your knowledge of the act, what capacity do you believe you have to remove the accreditation of one of the receival sections in the Western Australian market if that monopoly comes into place and you feel that you are getting touched? Do you know of anything in the legislation that helps you remove someone’s accreditation?

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Mr Peacock—The federal legislation or the state legislation?

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Senator JOYCE—The federal legislation.

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Mr Peacock—I presume you vote at the ballot box, don’t you?

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Senator JOYCE—But you do not get a vote for accreditation.

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Mr Peacock—I presume you lobby your political representatives, saying that you are not happy with the current legislation and the way the legislation stands. Through your farm lobby groups and your political organisations, you lobby for a change in the legislation. Again, I am not actually sure it is a grower’s job to be saying who is and who is not accredited. I think that the more simple the accreditation process becomes, the more cut and dried it is as to whether people fall into it. I am presuming that, under the situation I can see, it would have to be a very catastrophic event for a licence holder to lose that licence—going broke and not paying his bills. Again, I believe, under the Australian Constitution and business law, corporate law, we are reasonably well protected by the ACCC and all those corporate and business regulations. Just because someone is buying my wheat, that does not mean that they are a different company or entity to someone who is buying my sheep or my wool or buying iron ore or coal or steel or selling me milk and bread at my shop. There is a certain level of business proficiency that they have to comply with or they cannot do business in Australia. The wheat industry is no different to anybody else when it comes to doing business.

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Senator JOYCE—You know the problems in Western Australia, for instance, that Mr Forrest had in getting access to the rail lines. Would you be prepared to, and do you have the capacity to, fight the same sorts of battles that he has fought over the years to try and get access to the receival point if you felt that you were excluded from the market and were being held to ransom by those with the receival mechanisms?

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Mr Peacock—I would just put it in my own storage. Again, we are seeing all of a sudden with a deregulated market that I do not have to go and buy a 2,000-, 3,000- or 5,000-tonne silo anymore. We are bringing silo bags in from Brazil. I can store 10,000 tonnes of my wheat on my farm at the moment, with no capital infrastructure, at about $5 or $7 a tonne. That is going to keep the CBH monopoly reasonably honest, I presume, because—although I do not think they have gotten the message yet—people are going to put their own storage in and we are going to do business. And I see that as another advantage for my community, because instead of me carting my wheat 60 or 80 kilometres to the central receival point and putting it on a rail line, I will put it on my farm, to the benefit of my local trucking contractor, who struggles to make a quid to maintain his infrastructure in the off-season. He has got to have a lot of capital tied up running trucks to keep me happy at harvest time and carting fertiliser. If I put in that in on-farm storage, my community is going to become a lot stronger, because he is going to have a job all year round carting my and my neighbours’ grain off our farms.

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Senator JOYCE—What peak bodies are you gentlemen members of in Western Australia?

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Mr Halbert—The Pastoralists and Graziers Association.

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Senator JOYCE—How many wheat growers are there in that organisation?

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CHAIR—That might be a question for the PGA later on today.

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Senator JOYCE—You talked about transparencies of what a person is holding, and I think it is extremely crucial that you know. Do you believe the legislation is sufficient enough in requiring those who are holding grain to be transparent in what they are holding and what they are doing with it?

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Mr Peacock—From my brief understanding of the legislation at the moment, I do not believe so. I think that that issue can be quite easily solved. At the moment, an independent auditor assesses my wool and my meat. If I sell sheep to Roger Fletcher, it is not one of his men that assesses and determines the quality standard. For my wool, the AWTA, an independent body, does that. But at the moment one of the largest acquirers of grain, CBH, are also the people who test and assess my grain. That offends me. It leaves open the conspiracy theory—and that might be all it is. For every load of grain that is logged on their system, they know who owns it and whether it has been sent to one acquirer or another. If they did not do it, they would be stupid. I presume every night they get on their computer and have someone analysing that. So the conspiracy theorist in me says that, if Joe Bloggs is accumulating a lot of grain in the Esperance port at the wheat bin of Lake Grace at the moment, it would not be hard for CBH to get onto their people in the local area and say, ‘Get on the phone and say to these five big growers: “We’ve got a helluva of a good price on wheat today—$20, $30 or $40 a tonne,”‘ and all of a sudden that purchaser’s supply is cut off. I am presuming that if that individual can log on to the CBH or the grain pool system every day and say, ‘Look, Brooks have got 2,000 tonnes of grain in Geraldton and I’ve got 4,000 tonnes here.’ And they do not need to know necessarily the quality or who is supplying them with that grain, just roughly where that grain is being accumulated and how much is warehoused and how much is allocated. I presume that takes a lot of it out. In my opinion, it frees the system up.

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Senator JOYCE—I know we would have different views on the single desk. That would be apparent; you would know that. You would say that in this legislation, two of your main issues are: that transparency of what the receival people hold must be dealt with, and making sure that we do not just replace one monopoly with another one.

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Mr Peacock—Yes, and I think that gets back to the licensing. I presume a licensing regime can make it as complicated or as simple as it needs to be. And I presume the more complicated they make it—the bigger the offices, the more staff, the more cars, the more frequent flyers, the more time in the Qantas Club—the more difficult it becomes.

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Senator JOYCE—So you want the ability, if someone has got accreditation and they play up, to take it off them.

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Mr Peacock—I do not think that is my job. That is what we are employing this body to do, isn’t it? That is what you guys are entrusted to do.

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Senator JOYCE—It is not in the legislation that we can really take it off them. We can stop them from getting it, but we cannot really get rid of it. For example, if I was to be corrupt in my exposure to triticale, you cannot take it off me, because it is not nominated in the legislation.

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Senator O’BRIEN—A company’s record under clause 17(c)—

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Senator J