Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Minister for Agriculture) Share this | Hansard source

I appreciate the question, and I also commend the work done by the honourable member, especially in the backbench committee of the coalition, a very active and diligent committee that has within its continual purview the issues of agricultural Australia. It is of great assistance in the task that we have before us.

Research and development, of course, is a vital cog. We have to be at the forefront. We have a quality product, and unless it is seen by the world as a quality product it will not get a premium price. As an analogy, I always ask people who they think the biggest beef exporter in the world is. They generally get it right: they will say it is predominantly Brazil. But it is not exclusively Brazil; at times India is the biggest exporter of beef in the world. They do not get our prices, because of the problems they have with biosecurity and disease. This is why we have to be at the forefront of this.

That is why I have been happy to be part of some of our matched funding of GRDC in the last 12 months and to announce, I think, $12 million for further PhD students at Toowoomba in research into grains. I think it was about a year ago—it might have been close to a year ago—that we were at Curtin University to announce in excess of $100 million in further research and development into the grains industry there. Recently, the coalition has had a $100 million research and development process afoot, and it was with great pleasure that we announced the first tranche of that, which was $26.7 million for a range of research and development projects, such as Smarter Irrigation for Profit, which involves the Cotton Research and Development Corporation. That received $4 million.

I will just dwell on that one for a little, because Australia has the highest yields of cotton in the world, and a large section of that is because of the co-location of the RDC for cotton, which is in Narrabri in the seat of Parkes—and it is great to see the member for Parkes here—and the people who actually grow the cotton. This means that, with people such as Dr Guy Roth, we are at the forefront of this industry. There is that immediacy in getting the technology, delivering it back to the paddock, finding the problems from the paddock and dealing with them at the RDC.

This is one of the reasons that the coalition has always had a strong belief in decentralisation and also in the creation of centres for excellence, one of which is our Cotton RDC. I do not believe that this nation is only capable of doing it once; I think we can do it in numerous settings in other places. We are working with the GRDC and FRDC, and we are in continual negotiations because we want to make this a transition in which people partner with us. I believe at the start there were some hesitancies but now people are signed on and they are all wanting to be part of it.

What we have, as a classic example, with the GRDC are discussions about the parts of GRDC that can go to sections of our nation, obviously including places such as South Australia, Western Australia and other areas. I believe that this is what we have to do. When I go to Knoxville and the University of Tennessee, I see people who are expert in the cotton fields. When I go to the University of Georgia, I see people who are expert in bovine genetics. I do not have an expectation that everything I need to see is in Washington and I do not know why that should be the case here. We should be trying to create centres of excellence because we can affect the culture of a regional centre more than we can affect the culture of a large city like Canberra. It was possible in the past but now it is so big, so diverse and so dynamic. I do not think you will ever affect the culture of Sydney with an agricultural RDC.

All of these things get better bang for their buck if they are in areas where it is more pertinent to the industry they are dealing with—as was the case with the department of mines at a state level when it was moved by a state Labor government to Maitland, as it should have been. That is where the mining is. That is why the department of fisheries in New South Wales was moved to Port Stephens. It makes sense; that is where the fish are. The department of agriculture is in Orange and I do not think anyone thinks that was some sort of obnoxious decision. (Time expired)

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