Mike Kelly (Eden-Monaro, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Defence Industry and Support) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you. It is a great pleasure to be able to raise a number of issues related to research and development in primary industries. I thank my good friend and colleague for her contribution to this debate in the fisheries area. I will focus on more terrestrial issues. Labor does support the inclusion of marketing in this whole research and development area. Marketing is a critical factor for our primary producers, and I think it has been neglected in many respects. I look at my own region—and certainly when I was in the portfolio of agriculture and fisheries, travelling the length and breadth of this nation, I would see the opportunity, the potential, that we have, particularly in terms of regional branding. You have seen what the French have done over the years with their regional branding, but Australia has that potential too. We're looking at a world now which by 2050 will have nine billion people and, as we often talked, at that time, that food would be the new gold. There's this challenge but there's also this opportunity.

In particular, in our region we've seen the rise of a growing middle class—1.4 billion people moving up to demand more and better quality food. In addition to that, for example, in China you have seen concerns over the safety and health aspects of some of their produce, which is threatened by, shall we say, more lax environmental standards. The milk powder issue that arose in China recently led to a greater focus on our dairy products. And that, certainly, did hearten me from the point of view of Australian dairy marketing potential, as my family are all dairy farmers in the Bega Valley. In fact, my great-great-grandfather founded the Bega Cheese Co-op and was the first chairman. The 90 farmers down there are almost all family, because we were all good Irish Catholic breeders back then. They see this opportunity and they've grasped it. They're doing great things in export opportunities for Bega Cheese products.

They also demonstrate the importance of getting the research and development aspects right for the future productivity of farming and the management of our landscape, and that's so important. Our farmers are stewards of this landscape and the most important environmental actors in this space. There's something like over 60 per cent of the Australian landscape in the hands of our farmers. Bega Cheese founded their Bega environmental management system program for their 90 farmers back in 2005, because they understood not only the productivity benefits from managing their land better but also their responsibility for keeping the waterways and estuaries of our region as clean as possible for the benefit of our oyster growers—prominent oyster growers with world-leading brands, like the Tathra Oysters and the Wapengo oysters. They are fantastic growers in our region and they're looking to do more.

With this marketing opportunity we have in our region, there is the potential here, through the new international airport operations out at Canberra, to get our produce onto plates all around our region within 28 hours, and to continue to grow that branding in terms of the healthy, green, clean space that is going to be so important for driving Australian primary producers' opportunities in international markets. But, of course, that opportunity that's been presented by Canberra international airport has a threat posed to it. I will come back to that in a minute.

But these are the potentials we have. However, there are issues that the Nationals' Scott Mitchell, former federal director, highlighted when we were moving past the former deputy leader and agriculture minister's issues, shall we say. He is now looking to see a united team working on the substantive issues that matter to rural and regional Australians rather than populist policy issues that often have unintended consequences, and fail to deliver long-term benefits, and that's what is most important. In particular, he was referring to some aspects of the decentralisation policy, which I'll come back to.

When we talk about research and development opportunities, we've seen fantastic pioneers, and pioneers in my own region, doing wonderful things. People like Tony Coote, and I've been pleased to be briefed on his projects out at Mulloon Creek Natural Farms. This comes back to all of the experiences, lessons and proposals that have been developed in the context of natural sequence farming that had been originally advocated by Peter Andrews, has now been picked up and refined by a number of advocates, including Michael Jeffery, our former Governor-General, a former Army colleague of mine. This natural sequence farming, the restorative farming, that we've seen developed in areas like the Mulloon Creek Natural Farms is now spanning some 23,000 hectares in the headwaters of the Shoalhaven River flowing down to Tallowa Dam, which is Sydney's back-up drinking supply. All of this is not only restoring natural hydrology across the landscape, and regenerating natural ecological functions, but boosting farm productivity and improving the quality of our water catchment. I salute what Tony Coote and the advocates of this better approach to farming have achieved. More research and development in this area will be very beneficial.

We've also had some great work by CSIRO with my high country farmers, the Monaro Farming Systems group, in the context of the severe drought that ended in about 2009. They were suffering terrible mental health issues as a consequence of being unable to come up with answers of how to deal with such extreme circumstances, but they were able to team up with CSIRO, who developed a terrific management tool for our farmers called GrassGro. It enables them to put together a plan to help manage their herds and pastures over cycles out to 50 years. This gave our farmers a great tool to fall back on to give them some mental support—that there is a way to manage these changing circumstances—and to get more out of their pastures. I thank CSIRO for the work they did with GrassGro in supporting my farmers in the Monaro Farming Systems group.

We've also seen, as I know the member for Grey referred to, no-till farming. No-till farming has been a great improvement, particularly in broadacre farming enterprises out west of my area, which is not broadacre—mainly grazing, a bit of horticulture, and also our dairy production on the coast. No-till farming has been great in those broader landscape and broadacre farming operations. By increasing organic matter retention and the cycling of nutrients in the soil, we have seen tremendous benefit. Some of our Nuffield scholars have done a great job of proselytising about these better practices around the farming community

That leads too to the opportunities our landscape offers in dealing with things like climate change. This is the greatest threat to our farmers. It's something we should not let anyone walk away from. They can also contribute to the effort of fending it off. I salute Farmers For Climate Action. They are a terrific group who are concerned about this. They also see the opportunity of diversification on their properties through getting renewable energy operations into the landscape. If you have a wind turbine on your property, the earnings from those help you get through droughts and bad times. Farmers out at Bungendore, for example, brought this home by saying that effectively got them through the drought. The 2016 Farmer Climate Survey of a large number of farmers and graziers highlighted that eight in 10 Australian farmers support more renewable energy in regional Australia. We have to do more, but farmers can contribute to this. While I agree that we cannot achieve rapid cooling of the climate as it is now, sequestering carbon in the landscape provides us with an opportunity to contribute at a faster rate to that process. Now is about preventing further catastrophic climate change and dramatic increases in temperature.

My region is the canary in the coalmine in that respect. We depend on the snow industry, which constitutes 50 per cent of the economy of the Monaro, $2 billion. That ski season is continually contracting now with the effects of climate change. Anybody sceptic on this issue needs to talk to the guys at Snowy Hydro, who will take you through the data they have amassed on that scheme. They don't care how precipitation falls, so it's not such an issue for them whether it's rain or snow, but for the skiing industry, you can see that contraction.

Across all of our industrial opportunities and farming opportunities climate change represents a massive threat. We need to get behind our farmers, who are ringing the alarm bells and have a more aggressive approach to solving this issue, which we will achieve only with a thorough ongoing policy encouraging climate trading, reinforcing the carbon farming initiatives and methodologies we pioneered, which will be a massive benefit to our farmers and another opportunity to diversify. They can do things like banding together under a brokerage to combine for, say, forestry plantings on their properties to assist with that effort and to earn themselves some extra money on aspects of their properties that are perhaps more marginal, where reforestation can occur.

I want to finish with this issue of decentralisation and make a plea to the new agriculture minister about this effort to effectively destroy the APVMA's efforts in research and development to support our farmers. No-one does more important work than the APVMA. This decentralisation policy has crippled it. The best estimate is it may take something like seven years for the organisation to recover. They've lost something like 30 per cent of their scientists through this movement and also lost the head of the organisation, Kareena Arthy. It has been crippling but, not only that, they were involved in a cluster opportunity here in Canberra by being close to the CSIRO and close to ANU. What farmers need out of the APVMA are answers to their questions of how they keep their beasts healthy, how they keep their crops healthy and how they improve productivity, so it has done them no favours trying to move them to Armidale in what was obviously a blatant pork-barrelling effort.

I plead with the government to stop this process of decentralisation for the other reason that—coming back to Canberra's international airport—if you try and take away whole departments from this area, you're not increasing jobs in regional Australia; you're stealing jobs from one part of regional Australia and putting them in another. This is the bush capital. It underpins the economy of the whole of southern New South Wales in so many respects—propping up jobs right around southern New South Wales. It is not promoting jobs in regional Australia; it is just shuffling deck chairs.

In addition to that, if we lose departments in this area, we will lose that international airport capability depriving the farmers—the cherry growers in Young, the oyster growers on the coast, our high-quality beef and sheep meat and wool growers—from the opportunity of getting their produce quickly into the markets of our region. If we can stop that and if we can hang onto that the international airport opportunity, we also need some better biosecurity operations at that airport, too, to facilitate that primary industry opportunity.

We saw an independent analysis by Ernst & Young that predicted that the relocation of the APVMA would impose a net economic cost of $23 million and involve significant risks, so there was no basis, no business case and no earthly reason why this should have been attempted. The Southern Downs Regional Council said that functions like administrative processing and call centres were more likely to be viable in regions than trying to transplant these whole agencies. The meat and livestock crew of Australia said there was 'no regional/rural base that naturally puts the company closer to one stakeholder group without making it less accessible to another.' That is to say, placing the pesticides authority in Armidale may raise the perception, and even reality, that those who depend on the authority in Mr Joyce's electorate will get a better suck of the sauce bottle than clients in the other parts of the country. The Australian Dairy Industry Council expressed:

The dairy industry has strong reservations about relocating key government bodies to regional areas where the relocation will impose additional costs … put essential relationships at risk, result in possible loss of specialist staff, and reduce effectiveness.

It said:

Relocating a government organisation to a regional town may provide benefits in strengthening regional communities, but if it is done without regard to the organisation's ability to operate effectively and efficiently, it will not be of net benefit to the agricultural sector

So the dairy industry has strong reservations about relocating key government bodies to regional areas.

The government's got to start listening to the real authorities in primary industry about the effect of their actions in this decentralisation policy. I ask them to call a halt to this insanity. They need to do proper business case analysis of policy. It's not this sort of knee-jerk reaction stuff that you might pick up in a pub in Armidale. We have to have evidence based policy and, if the government's really serious about looking after farmers, it will make sure that the APVMA can do its job. So leave it where it is, let it work with the CSIRO and let's get our farmers the support they need for productive farming.

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