Joel Fitzgibbon (Hunter, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

He is a Monaro farmer. We must help them embrace holistic grazing methods and embrace biological agriculture. What they don't want or need is more debt. What they don't need is more political spin. What they don't need is wasteful exercises, like the relocation of the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority and the establishment of an unnecessary Regional Investment Corporation. Right there is about $100 million of taxpayers' money that could be invested in helping farmers adapt to harsher weather conditions.

We can't continue to ask more and more of our natural resource base when it is in decline. As we grow towards a global population of some 10 billion, we should be asking ourselves how we are going to feed all of those people. It is clear to me that we won't be able to unless we deal with the decline in our soil and water resources. Indeed, we should be asking ourselves how we're going to feed 40 million Australians by 2050 if our natural resource base continues to decline. We owe it to future generations to change our course, to focus more on value and less on volume, to ensure our natural resources are directed to the activity that produces the best return, both for our farmers and for our broader economy. Most of all, we need to do it in a sustainable manner. We can't keep asking more and more of our natural resource base and expect not to run into problems in the future. This should be an absolute priority for government. This should be the key approach to drought management—not short-term fixes, not drought tours for the 6 o'clock news, not measures that do nothing to assist farmers to take that different course. This needs to be our focus. It was certainly the focus of COAG, and it should be our focus now.

The question becomes: how do we help farmers better embrace those best-practice farming methods? I've given this much thought, and a few weeks ago I announced that a Labor government would direct our research and development corporations to play a major role in that effort. Our research and development model is a Labor architecture from the late eighties and early nineties. It's a good architecture. It's in need of some regeneration, and if we are given the opportunity we will revisit the structures and operations of those research and development corporations. They will remain co-funded by government but we will ask them to do more on this front. They are big organisations, they are well-resourced, they have the expertise and they already do extension work. They are already helping our growers and producers and our horticulturists to embrace better methods, but the work is underdone. Extension has been withdrawn, largely, from the agriculture sector. It was once largely the domain of the states. They now have largely withdrawn and the Commonwealth hasn't filled the vacuum.

I think there is a great opportunity for the Commonwealth to do just that and to build upon what our research and development corporations are already doing by further progressing the science, further progressing the best practice and making sure those practices are getting down onto the farms where they are most needed. Research and innovation is not very helpful if it's not getting down inside the farm gate. That's where we need it to be. I invite the government tonight to think about that proposition.

We should have a bipartisan approach to this matter. We should have a bipartisan approach to agriculture more generally. There is no more important sector than the one that feeds us and the one that puts the clothes on our back, and we should be doing this together. We should be doing it most energetically. Together, we should be doing all we can to assist farmers facing what is a shocking, protracted drought, close now to becoming the worst drought in the history of European settlement. While there are things we can do short term—and I thank the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Australians who have so generously donated from their own pockets to various drought appeals—we won't fix this problem, we won't properly deal with this problem, we won't properly do the right thing by the farm sector if we don't take that long-term view, if we don't embrace that long-term strategy, if we don't go back to the COAG agreement and start to rebuild collaboration with the states and properly delineate the roles of the states and the Commonwealth. If we don't do all of that, we won't reach our objectives.

We've lost five years and that is a very great shame, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be starting now. We should be starting urgently. We can't wait for tomorrow. We should be starting tonight. Minister Littleproud, unlike the member for New England, has acknowledged that the climate is changing. I think he has acknowledged, too, that there is a need for mitigation. But he has certainly acknowledged that there is a need for adaptation. I think all of us in this place have an opportunity to do good things, despite those lost years, and we should be starting to do that tonight and tomorrow, because the way the weather patterns are looking—as members know, the Bureau of Meteorology is not predicting any substantial rain either in the spring or in the summer—things are going to get worse, not better. It is too late, having lost five years, to enhance the capacity of many of our farmers to deal with drought. But it's not too late to start again, and we should start very, very quickly.

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