Judi Moylan (Pearce, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a great privilege to be able to raise some matters of concern not only to my constituency but to the whole country—and that is concerns for farmers and food producers and the importance of food security in our country. I think it is fair to say that many Australians—many of us, in fact—take for granted access to an abundance of fresh food. Agriculture has long been the cornerstone of our nation, so we have never really questioned our farmers’ ability to produce the fresh food that we all have access to. Indeed, such is the abundance of food production in Australia that much of it is exported to other countries.

I think it is quite concerning that many Australian children today do not comprehend where milk comes from, for example, or indeed the grain to bake their bread and provide their breakfast cereal. Many young people are unable to identify a variety of fresh vegetables. Therefore, it is vital for us as elected members of this place to ensure that everyone understands the importance of local food production and the value of farming beyond the mere monetary considerations, because this is an issue of national security and national safety.

Times have changed. Many Australian farmers have been battling drought, some for over a decade, and irrigators increasingly battle future water allocations and availability. Those broadacre farmers who have been lucky enough to receive reliable rainfall struggle with the flow-on effects of an industry going through immense change, including cost pressures—as do those who faced drought, which was an added difficulty for them to cope with. Aside from marketing changes and the vagaries of international trade and global markets, one of the largest and most alarming hurdles confronting Australian growers today—our primary food producers, indeed—are sharply rising costs. These are the costs of farm inputs such as chemicals, fertilisers and fuel. All of these are necessities in optimal food production and they have all risen sharply in price.

Australian people deserve access to local, clean, quality and, dare I say it, affordable produce, but never has the quality and safety of Australian food production been more topical, given recent events in China. However, Australian consumer choice is threatened and it does not help when people do not understand where their produce comes from or how important local food production is. It is not until we lose something, quite often, that we realise how valuable it is. To destroy and lose local farm production would be catastrophic and extremely difficult to reverse in the short term. I think that at no time in our history have we seen a greater demonstration of this than when we had the sustained droughts through north and central New South Wales when I first came into this place in 1993. We saw the flow-on impact to small country towns and communities, and that impact was very dramatic. Some of those businesses that were lost were never re-established, as was the case for many farms.

There is now more at stake for our nation’s farmers than ever before, for with higher input costs this season a crop failure would be catastrophic. When you look at the cost of the inputs and the amount of money that farmers might have had to have borrowed to plant the season’s crop, it would be a failure of major proportions. We hope that is not the case. I think we need to be doing a rain dance in this place to make sure that our farmers across the country get good finishing rains this season.

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