Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—We are hearing a lot in Australia at the moment about the importance of innovation and the ideas boom. I know I am amongst millions of Australians who love to hear these exciting stories about young entrepreneurs who start with nothing and have a big idea and end up with a billion-dollar tech company. But the reality of the economy is that a lot of innovation happens in businesses that already exist, and there are huge economic gains that we can make as a country by just adopting the technology that exists in businesses right across our economy.

One of the sectors that does not get a lot of focus in the innovation discussion is agriculture. This is a really important point because we know that as Australia winds down from the mining boom the so-called dining boom is an area where we might be able to see a lot of jobs and productivity growth. There are a lot of important things that will help us make this industry a critical part of Australia's economy. We have this global reputation for clean and green foods, and the reality is that for hundreds of years this country has been very good at producing food and other agricultural goods. One of the challenges facing the sector is that, when we look at the data, productivity growth in the sector has slowed. That means that we are not getting better at farming as fast as we were in the past. If we are going to see this industry flourish to its full potential, we are going to need to do something about that. That is why the Minister for Agriculture asked the member for Grey, as chair of the committee, to look into how we can promote innovation in our agricultural sector.

The committee was asked to look at three big things. The first was efficiency practices in agriculture, the second was new technologies that farmers might be able to adopt and the third was barriers to those new technologies. I heard so many incredibly exciting things through the course of this inquiry and I just want to outline some of the things that I think are going to be really interesting to people who are as intrigued by this sector as I am. We heard that scanners are being used in the wine industry that remotely scan along the front of grapevines and are able to test plant quality and soil quality, and through that water and pesticides can be distributed remotely according to the quality of the plants. We heard on enormous cattle farms the great potential for the use of drones to help manage large properties. We heard about the potential for autonomous vehicles—trucks that do not have drivers and machinery that is able to be remotely programmed or computer programmed to till soil without anyone being present. We heard a lot about exciting developments in genomics—things like breeding plants that will be more appropriate for different climates. That could mean that we can farm parts of this country that have not been able to be farmed to date.

A fifth point concerns some exciting things with the use of big data, which really means that we will be able to collect information on farming practices and outcomes on hundreds of thousands of farms across the country and use that information to help farmers build best practice. In the old days we heard a lot of farmers talk about how they used to share information about best practices. It tended to be down at the pub talking after a day's work or over the fence. But this is a completely new way of doing things, where we could have really solid fact-based information about what is working for farmers in different parts of the country and targeted approaches to spreading those best practices. There was absolutely no-one on this committee who was not blown away by the huge potential for innovation in agriculture, and there are certainly a lot of exciting things happening in the sector.

We heard some pretty concerning things about barriers that are preventing farmers from taking on these new technologies at the moment. I just want to mention two of them that really stood out in the hearings that we held. The first is about world-class telecommunications facilities. I am pretty confident that that was the consistent takeaway of everyone working on a farming business who appeared before this committee. The reality is that despite all of the exciting things that we heard about farmers are just not going to be able to adopt them without telecommunications that fit the bill.

We heard about people that have no mobile phone coverage on large parts of their property. We talk about the exciting potential of big data, but the reality for these farmers is that they cannot even make a phone call from one end of the farm to the other. We heard about farmers who have to get up in the middle of the night to download invoices because that is the only time that they have the bandwidth able to do it. Again, the idea of bringing on these very high-tech solutions that are going to require massive amounts of upload and download is a fantasy for these farmers.

Finding more workable ways to fix these problems is absolutely urgent. The member for Grey talked about some of the steps forward that have been made. It is a bit disappointing that the government has made the decision to walk away from some of the most significant aspects of the National Broadband Network. It would not have given every farmer in Australia 100 megabits per second, but there were real ways that farming telecommunications would have been achieved that we probably will not see under the new model.

I want to say something about the importance of human capital, because, while much of the discussion of the committee focused on the actual technology, what we really need here are people who understand it, can see how it can be used in their farms and are able to introduce it. We heard a lot about the fact that there are a lot of young people who are coming into farming and trying to establish themselves on the land and, in particular, about the critical role that women play on farm businesses these days. We heard wonderful testimony about the transition that women in farm life have made from being the wife of the farmer to today being real business partners. One of the things that I took from this is that there is huge potential here for us to make much better use of those women. There is some evidence that young people and women—those two big groups—are really good adopters of new technology, and if we can harness their enthusiasm for doing things a bit differently then we might be able to see our way through some of these problems.

There is a lot more that is very fascinating in this report. Can I say to the parliament, to the committee: of all the reports I have participated in as a member of parliament so far I think this is the most inherently fascinating and the most readable. I really encourage people at home who are interested in this area of innovation in farming to download the report and have a look.

In closing can I thank the member for Grey, who has done a fantastic job chairing this committee through this 44th Parliament, and the other committee members. I want to say a special thank you to the committee staff: the secretary, Peggy Danaee, and Anthony Overs, Renee Toy, Sarah Codrington, Ashley Stephens, Georgina Horsburgh, who were all ably assisted by Morana Kavgic and Kathleen Blunden. As the member for Grey noted, they really stepped their foot on the accelerator to get this finished in time and they have produced a wonderful report. We are very grateful for their support and their hard work.

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