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

I would like to acknowledge the contributions from the member for Mallee and the member for Farrer in this debate on the Farm Household Support Amendment Bill 2018. There were a lot of important ideas and also observations from their experiences. I think all of us in this chamber who represent farming communities and communities that have lived through these intense drought experiences that we've been seeing multiply and amplify in recent years would really identify with and feel an emotional attachment with a lot of the issues that have been raised and discussed.

But I would say that I am disappointed. I am particularly disappointed in the leadership of the Nationals in these last five years. As soon as a drought passes, it's almost like, 'Rightio, that's over and done with—no need to worry about proper planning for the future anymore.' It takes me back to the old Army golden rule that you always hope for the best but you plan and prepare for the worst.

I don't think any sentient human being now can deny the threat that is being presented to our rural and regional communities by climate change. These circumstances of drought are definitely intensifying, deepening and becoming more variable, with fewer predictable situations. I've often said my region of Eden-Monaro is like the canary in the coalmine in many ways. If you look at, for example, our ski industry in the high country and you go and talk to the Snowy Hydro people, you will see their data is unequivocally showing that the ski seasons are crimping in at both ends, and the snow levels are going higher. We are at risk of losing a $2 billion industry that's half the economy of the Monaro. On top of that, our farmers—including the fruitgrowers over in the Batlow area, the famous Batlow apple growers—really depend on a very predictable weather pattern situation. That has been completely distorted and difficult to do in recent years, and of course the drought affected the high country. It's affecting it right now and putting our farmers in the high country under severe stress. On the coast we have this increasing risk of salination and the like and also changes in rain patterns.

So there's been a lot of intense distress. I'm pleased to say that at least, out of that last big millennial drought, the farmers in the high country formed Monaro Farming Systems and for the first time aggregated. That enabled them to look after each other a bit better and swap more ideas. But, most particularly, it allowed them to work more closely with the CSIRO, who helped develop a modelling tool, called GrassGro, to give them the ability to plan ahead for their properties over a 50-year cycle. It enabled them to do their paddock and beast management and it gave them something to latch onto, which was really important for their mental health.

But what disturbs me is that, when we were in government, we were right on the trailing edges of that millennium drought—2008 and 2009 were particularly bad final years—and we did look at the exceptional circumstances regime. I think everybody would accept that it wasn't satisfactory. In my region, I had some people who were on one side of the boundary of the exceptional circumstances regime experiencing the same weather situation as the people over the other side of the harsh line drawn on the map but not getting exceptional circumstances relief. Again, I had a lot of farmers complaining to me that exceptional circumstances didn't distinguish between successful farmers—good farmers—and farmers who were in trouble not because of drought but because they weren't particularly good farmers. The farmers were raising these issues with me.

As a consequence, we sent this issue to the Productivity Commission, which I think was a good way to look at it. We wanted to really get down to the nitty-gritty of how we were going to handle these droughts at the same time as we were addressing climate change policy. The review that was done by the Productivity Commission also led us to form the intergovernmental agreement using the COAG process, trying to address these issues on a national level, because we couldn't accept the patchiness of the state-by-state approach for a national issue. That led us to form the Standing Committee for Primary Industries and Resources and the Standing Council on Primary Industries—very important mechanisms that were working their way forward. They of course produced the review, which included the Intergovernmental Agreement on the National Drought Program Reform. It made some particularly important findings and comments, including an economic assessment of drought support measures and an assessment of social impacts of drought on farm families and rural communities, using an expert panel and a climatic assessment by the Bureau of Meteorology, and it conducted pilot studies. There was a focus on the relief that's needed and the mechanisms—and we're talking here about the farm household support arrangements as part of what they were reviewing—but more particularly they were looking at the key objectives:

… assist farm families and primary producers adapt to and prepare for the impacts of increased climate variability—

and—

… encourage farm families and primary producers to adopt self-reliant approaches to manage their business risks

This is really the key. Most farmers and farming families will tell you that they want to find ways to deal with the challenges they're facing that don't involve just a draw on the taxpayer to get them through these situations; they want to get ahead of the curve.

Added to the situation of trashing those arrangements that we put in place through COAG, which pointed the way of having to develop policy to address that longer-term issue and the management issue of these farms, we've seen more recently, in these last five years, the damage that's been done to the APVMA by the decentralisation policy. We've lost 30 per cent of the scientists in of that organisation. Evidence that we've heard says that the organisation has been set back seven years, and really it's the APVMA that helps design research and implement science into the management of these changed circumstances—how we can deal with managing the different types of pest situations that come from drought conditions. As an example of that, further down in the high country in my region we had a plague of wingless grasshoppers, and the science told us that was largely caused by the dieback situation. The parasitic nematodes that used to keep the numbers of the wingless grasshoppers down were not there because of the loss of forestation in our region, and it led to the plague of wingless grasshoppers that completely devastated farming land in that area.

All of these are things that the APVMA helps with, and what we've done is cripple it through this decentralisation process. Also, of course, we saw other issues like getting rid of the inspector-general in relation to live exports. We know that is a really serious issue; it's put us back to square one and we're facing revisiting these issues with live exports. Every time we have one of these incidents and those videos, meat consumption goes down. The butchers tell me they can't sell the meat anymore. So there are a whole range of flow-on effects from not getting to grips with these issues, and getting rid of the inspector-general mechanism was a really retrograde step.

On top of that, we saw the issues that emerged around the Murray-Darling Basin Authority. It seems that those growers and the allegations of mishandling and corruption et cetera in the northern edges of the Murray-Darling Basin were more of a priority than those farmers who were living downstream—the farmers all the way through southern New South Wales and South Australia. It didn't seem to matter what was happening to them, whereas, when we were in government, we put a lot of effort into water efficiency measures as a long-term solution to some of these issues. That included the need for farmers to pick up new techniques in irrigation—lining irrigation channels and covering them using pipes et cetera. We heard the member for Mallee talk about that as a step forward in his area. With the issue of drip irrigation, I was in the border portfolio with Senator Wong and we travelled all over the Murray-Darling Basin. I remember visiting an almond grower who had a perfect situation for drip irrigation with permanent plantings, and he said he didn't trust those lines, because he was worried about them getting clogged. Well, Israel—and the rest of the world that has faced these kinds of arid, water management situations—has been very productive and very efficient and has shown good results from adopting those types of techniques.

Along with what we invested in government in water efficiency measures, there were also a lot of other benefits. We have to make sure that farmers can diversify and insulate themselves against these conditions but also adopt better methods to get through drier times and keep their soils healthy. One of the measures that assisted them that we introduced was the Carbon Farming Initiative. That allowed farmers to get involved with methodologies that would help sequester carbon while at the same time introduce better health to their soils by getting carbon back into their soils. There was a lot of opportunity for them to diversify their income through adopting measures under the Carbon Farming Initiative. One of the things that I was looking at in particular was getting our farmers to aggregate in, perhaps, a forestry co-op where they could have portions of their properties dedicated to re-forestation and have a broker who could organise the whole arrangement of the methodology and approval and give them another stream of income on their property. There were so many possibilities in that Carbon Farming Initiative and in sequestration.

Now we are seeing good, smart farmers like Charles Massy, a farmer near Cooma in my electorate, who has a PhD and is a very progressive and innovative farmer. We had a great meeting in Yass just a few weeks ago. A lot of farmers from the region turned up to hear about his regenerative farming techniques. We've heard a bit before about natural sequence farming. There's been a bit of controversy about that, but some of it is quite sound in terms of how we rehydrate the soil or maintain or slow down water through the landscape. But, certainly, what Charles Massy has been doing through his regenerative farming techniques is very important.

It's about government really getting behind the science, the experience and the knowledge and arming farmers with the ability to survive, to prosper and to be able to conduct and plan models for their properties over a long period of time. One of the things that I mentioned last night was the no-till and stubble management approach. All of these things could be included and passed on. I'm fortunate that my family, who have all been dairy farmers for 170 years now down in the Bega Valley, are part of an aggregated farming group in the Bega Cheese co-op, which is now no longer a co-op but still operates like it is. Through that, they formed the Bega environmental management system. They were able to apply Commonwealth funding to develop and improve the management of their environment and to restore health to the soil as well. It also enabled those farmers to communicate with each other and pass on science and ideas. Bega Cheese also helps make sure that that happens through the benefits of its commercial operation and spreading that benefit to farmers.

We saw this so-called listening tour happen just recently, and it didn't go down too well. Obviously they were coming to talk to farmers about issues like farm household support. I welcome the fact that it's been extended by a year, but that still doesn't deliver certainty to these farmers. It seemed from the reports that came back that farmers were singularly unimpressed by what was going on. People like Harry and Jack, who greeted the travelling circus, and John and Joy Haycock at Trangie, for example, were very unimpressed by the visit. I talked about this idea of hoping for the best but planning for the worst. We've seen the reverse of that in some of the approaches taken by this travelling circus. Mr Haycock said he couldn't understand why that leadership group was there if they didn't have anything to announce. He said:

On Sunday night we had hope, now we know they're going to do nothing, when you take hope away people get desperate, they’d have been better off not coming.

…   …   …

I've voted Nationals all my life at state level, never again.

I think that's one of the reasons why, when I was standing at the Gundagai booth at the Cootamundra by-election, there was a 43 per cent swing away. It was 43 per cent. You can see the erosion. If the Nationals are going to ignore what's going on out there, they will get more of what happened in Orange and more situations like Tumbarumba. Tumbarumba absolutely went red-hot in support of me in the last campaign because of this issue. The Nationals are ignoring what their farmers are saying. In the last big survey of farmers—1,300 farmers in a Farmer Climate Survey—nine in 10 farmers surveyed said they were concerned about damage to the climate and about climate change and 88 per cent of them said they wanted their politicians to do more about it. They really are upset about this. There'll be some argument about what causes climate change and all those sorts of issues, but this is the result of a farmer survey—88 per cent say their politicians should be doing more. They accept that there is climate change and that there should be something done about it.

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