Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

If there is a view that an increase from $35.1 million to $39.1 million in two years is in some way less than other expenditure and a reduction against CPI, there are rates of CPI being projected by the coalition which, I think, do not reflect what their shadow minister for finance or their shadow Treasurer would be saying is the case. But, Member for Gippsland, if you believe that the CPI is going to be running at those sorts of proportions over the next two years, by all means run that argument. But I do not think your economic spokespeople are matching that argument at all.

In terms of Landcare, the member for New England went a little bit further and just asked: where is government policy taking Landcare? I dealt with a lot of these issues in a speech I gave to the National Landcare Conference in Adelaide. I believe Landcare in the future has to work on three pillars: food, environment and climate. I think those three pillars provide the basic framework for the work of Landcare, where work that has now been going for 20 years for the challenges of the past—whether they be soil degradation, salinity or soil moisture problems through drought—will also deal with a whole lot of climate challenges that we will be facing in the future.

There have been areas where government policy in the first two years of government fell short and which we have acted to fix. Initially, when we got rid of the local facilitators, a number of members of parliament—including the member for New England and, I acknowledge, the member for Corangamite—argued vigorously with me that that was an error. We responded to that and we reinstated the facilitators on a local basis.

Secondly, there are the community action grants. We had no small grants program. The only way to be able to access grants was to largely work in with a big project through the catchment management authorities or whatever the NRM bodies are called in the various states—certainly for the member for New England it is the CMAs. There were many small groups that felt they were shut out and could do good, practical work with smaller amounts of money than were being made readily available, so the community action grants were introduced.

On the issues surrounding the Liverpool Plains, a large number of those in terms of final policy carriage, to the extent that there is a federal involvement, go to issues within the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts, through the water portfolio, because the issue of quality of downstream water is something that, to the extent it rests with the federal government, rests with that portfolio. But certainly, within the arms of government, my department does feed in information on those issues.

In respect of this, though, there is an issue which was raised by the member for Mayo—which I have skipped; I am sorry. He refers to fertile soil, which is a similar argument to those about the changes in land use. This is something which does not rest at a federal level, and it is being dealt with very differently by different states. Tasmania, for example, has zoned agricultural land in particular ways to be able to make a zoning decision about preservation of fertile soil. One of the particular features of Australia since white settlement has been that people move where the soil is at its most fertile and then put cities over the top of our best soil. It has been an ongoing practice. Some states are now starting to deal with that in new and creative ways, but I do not want to pretend that land zoning is a federal power; it is not.

Finally, on the science of soil carbon, the work that we are doing on soil carbon is less than we had hoped to do. There was an extra $50 million on the table as part of the package surrounding the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme for research and development in agriculture, a good part of which was to go to soil carbon, coupled with a system of incentives whereby farmers would get cash for good work in soils. Some of that is now off the table because we were not able to secure passage of that legislation. Certainly, with the funding that we have available, there is more work being done in soil carbon than there ever has been before. It goes in two ways. One is in terms of measurement—not simply measuring the improvement in the soil but measuring how much carbon still finds its way out. The second is working out ways of integrating that with farm practices. There has been one simple rule that I have put over the programs there under Australia’s Farming Future: when research and development are being done into carbon sequestration, I want there to be an alignment between improved carbon levels in the soil and improved productivity. Regardless of where any other policy gets, if you get a productivity dividend, that is the best way of making sure you get uptake by farmers.

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