Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to make some remarks on the Farming the future: the role of government in assisting Australian farmers to adapt to the impacts of climate change report from the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Primary Industries and Resources, a committee that I used to be a member of. I commend their work and the good people who make up that committee. This report is important to my electorate and there are some messages around climate change and farming that I would like to deliver to the House today.

People often think of farmers as being climate change sceptics and I appreciate that because, when I talk to the farmers in my area, they can be ambivalent about climate change and they can be concerned, curious and bewildered. It is not fair to say that they have turned their back on climate change. It is not fair to say that they reject the science out of hand. But, as they are very much at the cutting edge of what is going on and it is their livelihoods and families that are on the line, it is totally appropriate that they be healthily sceptical.

I think that when the government has responded to the challenge of climate change it has gone about in somewhat the wrong way. It has labelled many of the agricultural programs that we used to see in rural Australia as simply attaching to climate change. The issue of being soundly environmental—of saving energy, saving water and conserving soils—seems to take a secondary order of preference to climate change, and everything is up in lights under this big banner of climate change. The problem that farmers have with that is that they do not necessarily see the link between a grand, global strategic discussion and what they are actually doing in their back paddock—even though there very definitely is a link, and it is an important one.

So I have been disappointed to see some of the programs that the government has rolled out and the rebadging. When you look at the detail, I acknowledge that the content of some of those programs is valuable and useful to farmers. But what I noticed in a previous farming life and in the previous government where I had more contact with the agricultural portfolio is that we are losing a lot of our on-ground research extension and development. I note that recommendations 9 to 12 of the committee’s report focus on the research and extension—and I really want to commend that. That is a really good thing.

It is not just the role of federal governments to manage research and extension, but over the years we have seen the role of state departments of agriculture—which have often been rebadged as departments of climate change, too—their on-the-ground, practical role, vastly reduced. Consequently, there has been a vacuum and we have not really had enough agencies, enough funding or enough organisations to take the research and extension work up to farmers in the way that they really need to have that done.

I note the good work of the catchment management authorities in my area—the Murray Catchment Management Authority is one in particular, as is the Lower Darling and the Western Murray. The catchment management authorities have been left to pick up the ball and run with it on a lot of these projects. One of the ones that they are running in my area concerns some comparisons between different farms to try to evaluate the degree of climate change adaptiveness and the farming practices. What it comes down to is what the farming practices are that are being used and how they might best respond to climate change.

An example that I was told about recently concerns a selection of three different farms—one that would be using a rotational grazing and a mixed farming enterprise; one that would be using continuous cropping with stubble retention and minimum tillage; and another that might be using very old-fashioned plough, plough, plough farming methods—and looking at how soil carbon could be sequestered and the effect on the total farming enterprise from these different types of farming activities. You might think that this is something that we already know and that the science is already settled on, but it certainly is not because, in every different area of Australia, farming practices and responses are completely different depending on the soil types, the landscape, the rainfall and the level of technology that is employed.

By having these simple, practical demonstrations and experiments in an area and then publishing the results to all farmers and, most importantly, allowing farmers to actually look at the demonstrations, look at the on-site work and talk to each other about what is going on, you will spread the knowledge far better than grand plans and scientific programs. With all respect to the CSIRO and our other organisations, I do not believe that the work that they do is rooted sufficiently in practical farming. The response that many farmers have to multimillion dollar CSIRO studies and the glossy brochures that accompany them is, ‘What does this really mean for me? How does this affect my farming enterprise?’ I can hand any farmer that I know one of those glossy brochures and they can turn to any page in it and they can find a glaring error. That is because they know what they are doing and they understand what is required of them in their family farming business. And if they have survived the last 10 years of drought, I can pretty well say that they do what they do very well indeed.

Research and extension are the keys to helping farmers adapt to climate change. Because the state government has vacated the field to the extent that it has, the federal government has an obligation to step in. But, after the election of the current government, we saw a cut to the research and development corporations and the complete elimination of one of them: Land and Water Australia. That funding was and still is, though reduced, a very valuable source of funding direct from the federal government that receives a matching levy contribution from farmers—so they are strong stakeholders in it—and results in practical, on-the-ground projects that make a real difference to farmers.

There is a list of recommendations in this report and I am most attracted to the ones that relate to extension. I note that the previous member spoke about the risk of living on the coast and the problems with climate change and rising sea levels et cetera. That is something that nature may or may not produce, but in the area that I represent, the southern Murray-Darling Basin, other forces of adversity are at work. They consist of the Minister for Climate Change, Energy Efficiency and Water, the water buyback that she is imposing on rural communities and the complete lack of response to our urgent representations about looking after the social and economic effects of those water buybacks—the so-called triple bottom line—and the resulting devastation these Rudd government policies are generally having on farmers in western New South Wales.

When a committee such as this looks at farming for the future, and I know that they looked at the role of government in assisting farmers adapt, it is certainly appropriate to make some remarks about how governments could get out of the way in examples where farmers are struggling against drought, low or zero water allocations and the accumulated effects of 10 years of this existence on their bank balances when government policies are making it more difficult. And I do not want to just throw brickbats without throwing some bouquets. I thank the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry for extending exceptional circumstances across nearly all of my electorate and recognising that farmers simply cannot move into profitable situations once rain falls—and it has been patchy in some areas. Farmers do need that extended support, and that comes in the form of interest-rate subsidies and household support, which is a fortnightly payment through Centrelink. Without that we really would not have managed to get through the last five years. I appreciate the fact that the minister for agriculture accepted the recommendations of the National Rural Advisory Committee and extended exceptional circumstances for a further 12 months, starting on 1 April this year.

However, one area east of the Hume Highway, in what was the old Hume rural lands board but is now a livestock health and pest authority—it is hard to keep up with the changing names in the New South Wales government—has been taken out of exceptional circumstances. I met with the minister for agriculture and I have been encouraged by his willingness to have another look at this. Although he is not personally responsible for the inclusion or noninclusion of zones into exceptional circumstances—the National Rural Advisory Committee advises him on that—he said that if New South Wales comes forward with a case to his department then whatever can be done will be done.

We really do need that to happen, because that particular zone of my electorate of Farrer east of the Hume Highway, containing the towns of Holbrook and Tumbarumba—which is just outside my electorate; it is in the electorate of Eden-Monaro—has been badly affected by drought. There has been a very poor response to the small amount of rain we have had. The area has quite acid soils so it does not recover easily. The temperatures are about to get quite a lot colder—it is the upper Murray—and the area around Tooma was very badly affected by fires a few months ago and was completely burnt out. I appreciate that exceptional circumstances cannot necessarily respond to bushfires, but that has added to the significant load that farmers must bear in this situation. I do hope that some help and support can be given for that remaining zone of western New South Wales to be included back into exceptional circumstances and that we do get the support we need. Meanwhile, I commend the report Farming the future to everybody. It is an important contribution to the public policy debate in this area.

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