Barnaby Joyce set a new record last night by calling upon his Treasurer to change a Budget measure 24 hours after it was delivered.
Speaking on the ABC's 7.30 Report last night, the Agriculture Minister conceded that drought affected farmers will receive no benefit from the tax depreciation changes until 2017.
SALES: Farmers won't be able to claim the new tax deductions on fencing and water until their 2017 tax returns. A lot of them are hurting right now though. Why couldn't those measures come in immediately like the small business tax concessions?
JOYCE: That's such a brilliant question I've been following it with the Treasurer today and I hope to do something to truncate that time frame into a more immediate form and do it in the very near future.
SALES: Was he receptive to that?
JOYCE: Oh yes and it's logical if we talk about it during the white paper. The reason this happened is because they were agricultural white paper initiatives. The depreciation for silos, the fencing, and the water reticulation they were announced in the budget and the time frames didn't match up. We will now make them match up and we'll do that when we release the white paper. What it obviously means is that those time frames will come into the more immediate term.
Since his well publicised drought tour in February last year, Tony Abbott has continued to raise false hope amongst desperate farming communities by giving them political spin rather that real and practical assistance.
He used the Budget to once again re-announce his failed Drought Concessional Loans program and as usual, inflated its offer by talking about the value of the loans rather than the cost to Government.
Many farming families have now been three years without rain. A tax break providing assistance in 2017 will surely be too late for many.
THURSDAY, 14 MAY 2015
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