Janelle Saffin (Page, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in support of the report, Farming the future, and particularly the 15 recommendations. I was very pleased that the Standing Committee on Primary Industries and Resources took up this issue, which is about helping farmers with adaptation to climate change. It puts the farmers front and centre stage, as they need to be, as we as a nation grapple with the impact of climate change.

Before I turn to the report, and the 15 very specific and well targeted recommendations, I would like to say some things regarding climate change, the basis of the committee’s report to assist farmers. My seat is a rural seat. It has a long and beautiful coastal strip that goes from Ballina to Evans Head, Iluka, Yamba, Wooloweyah and Angourie, which has some of the best beaches and one of the world’s top surfing beaches—out of the top 50, it is No. 10. So it is a beautiful coastal strip and a rural seat. As members could imagine, it is a population that is concerned about climate change and has been very actively involved in those particular debates. Even when I was first elected as the member for Page, the mayors who have the coastal strips in their areas approached me and talked about the need to have some certainty around planning and development in the coastal areas. They were very pleased to see the report. They were also very pleased to see another report that came out of this place, the report on coastal areas and climate change.

I accept climate change as a fact and a lot do. I accept climate change and the current events that are happening to be as a result of human activity. And, yes, climate change is a naturally occurring phenomenon and has been around for a long time. But the evidence is clear that the exponential rate of what is happening with climate change and the major events and more extreme events are due to human activity.

I know that this week there has been a lot of attention given to the fact that CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology have said that global warming is in essence unquestionable—that is, it is resulting from human activity. That is not new. These institutions have been saying that for quite some time. It is on their websites; it is in their reports. In fact, they have been leading agents in this debate, and whenever I have been talking about climate change I refer to them. These two institutions are trusted by I would have to say nearly all Australians and they are ones that farmers turn to. Now that a lot of us, not all of us, are connected and on websites, we go to the Bureau of Meteorology website, or BOM, daily. It is a daily event in my office because I live in an area where we do have a few extreme weather events and we have floods and we have droughts; we have the extremes in the whole Northern Rivers and North Coast strip. So it is something that we look at all the time to see what is going on. They really are trusted. Farmers and people on the land and people everywhere go to those sites.

You have people like Dr Megan Clark, the head of CSIRO, saying this week that we are seeing significant evidence of a change in climate and saying:

If we just take our temperature, all of Australia has experienced warming over the last 50 years. We are warming in every part of the country during every season and as each decade goes by, the records are being broken.

We are also seeing fewer cold days, so we are seeing some very significant long-term trends in Australia’s climate.

Dr Clark further is reported as saying that scepticism is a healthy part of the scientific process and has been considered as part of the climate change debate. Indeed it has, but she says that we also know that the rapid increase that we have been measuring was at the same time as we saw the Industrial Revolution, so it is very likely that these two are connected. When we look at climate change and look at the scientific evidence, the whole basis of science and the scientific method is that it is not 100 per cent but it is something that is stronger than the balance of probabilities, and in a legal sense, which I can refer to, it would be something beyond reasonable doubt. It is beyond reasonable doubt that we do have climate change.

In referring to the 15 recommendations I will make some comments on particular ones. The first one is the committee’s recommendation that the Australian government support rural counselling and support groups such as Rural Alive and Well and place funding for such groups on a permanent and regular basis. That is a very welcome and important recommendation. Rural counselling and support groups do such a wonderful job in country Australia; in my area they certainly do. I can remember when they did not exist and I can remember that people lobbied for them to be set up. Some were set up as extensions of our local counselling that happened in our health services, one in particular in my area. It was very welcome. We also have rural financial counselling, which is very important, and they work closely with the rural counselling. They sometimes are the first port of call in engaging people who do need ongoing counselling support. Rural financial counselling is very important indeed. In fact, next week I am attending as a guest the annual dinner of the Rural Financial Counselling Service New South Wales, Northern Region, which will be held in Casino. It provides a very important service in non-metropolitan areas.

I would like to comment on recommendation 3, which calls on the government to invest in research funding in the following high-priority areas: soil carbon sequestration; soil stabilisation and pasture improvements; soil water retention strategies and water use efficiency; landscape planning and natural resource management; and risk management. I would like to see within recommendation 3—and I am sure it is meant to cover this—a broader definition of soil carbon sequestration, because the sequestration of carbon is not just in soil; it is in all plants. That is an important area of research and study—Plantstone, as we would refer to it with the old fashioned name, but I am aware that name has also been patented by a couple of people at Southern Cross University. So, when we look at soil carbon sequestration, we should look at it more broadly and include the plants.

As some members would know, bamboo actually has the highest take-up of carbon, followed by sugar—this is from research in one particular area with one particular farm. Some time ago, the honourable member for New England, Tony Windsor, and I jointly hosted a session in Lismore with Southern Cross University, people from industry and farmers on the particular issue of plant sequestration and soil sequestration to get more information into the particular communities and to have more discussion and debate. Some of that was covered by The 7.30 Report, particularly the research aspects at the farm. I am sure that when the recommendation says ‘soil carbon’ it is broad enough to include looking at it in its totality with the plants.

The report also talks about rotational grazing. That is not new; that is something that farmers have been doing for a long time. In fact, it is a very ancient practice. I sometimes think that, with the advent of modernisation and different techniques, some of those tried and true practices fell by the wayside. Again in my area, I recently attended a day that looked at rotational grazing and biodynamic farming et cetera. It was organised by Trevor Wilson. It was a very good day that was well attended by over 100 people who came from a wide region and mainly from farming backgrounds. It was really informative for me because I was able to sit there and listen for a few hours to people who do this and who, by doing it, have not only improved their pasture but increased their income as well. They were not revolutionary techniques; they were the tried and true and tested techniques. So any more attention that we can give to this in this place—and we are making recommendations to government—is a good thing. But we only have to look to the farmers themselves.

Recommendation 6 is an important one. It states:

The committee recommends that the Australian Government, as part of its overall response to issues affecting agriculture and climate change, increase its investment and support for research into energy efficiency in the agriculture sector and the development of alternative energy and alternative fuels on-farm, particularly in regard to:

• Biofuels;
• Biomass from agricultural waste; and
• Biochar.

One of the things that would be really advantageous in Australia to help us in this area would be something like a biofuels institute and getting some more work done with CRCs. I have had some involvement with that with Southern Cross University, where I am on the governing council. Part of that debate is food versus fuel and I know that debate has to happen, but we do not have to get locked into either/or. There is room for all of it and that is a very important one to be looking at.

There is one other recommendation I wanted to turn to. Recommendation 15 says:

The Committee recommends that the Australian Government place funding for local and community organisations engaged in the work of supporting farmers in adapting to climate variability and climate change upon a permanent and regular basis.

Hallelujah! Wouldn’t that be good? Often one of the problems people do face in local communities is ad hoc funding. That has been a feature of all governments, not any particular government. Some may do it more than others, but it has been a feature of all governments. To get the organisations that work, and that are deeply engaged in that area—

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