David Littleproud (Maranoa, National Party, Minister for Agriculture and Northern Australia) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Mallee for her question, because she, better than anyone, understands the importance of not just agriculture but agricultural trade to regional and rural Australia, particularly to those 334,000 Australians who work in agriculture. Three in four of every one of those jobs relates to trade. I'm proud to say that we are continuing to invest in that. The account figures today prove the importance of increasing our production, which has gone, for the first time in our nation's history, to over $70 billion, and the agricultural GDP has gone up by 44 per cent from the September quarter last year to the September quarter this year. That's an amazing result in the face of bushfires, droughts and floods.

We've also increased our exports by 47 per cent.

While we're increasing production, we have to find a market for it, and part of the Ag2030 plan is investing significantly in our export markets—$330 million put aside to increase market access. And that's not just the free trade agreements; that's actually about the market access, and that's putting boots on the ground: 22 agricultural counsellors and five surge counsellors looking at market access commodity by commodity, breaking down the technical barriers. In fact, they've improved over 53 market access agreements, maintained 111 and improved another 55 market access agreements. Some of that has been seen as the first boatload of barley going to Mexico to go into their beer; over 700,000 tonnes going into Saudi Arabia; getting better market access for India, Pakistan and Nepal; and getting longer shelf life agreements for our meat into Saudi Arabia.

We're also putting more scientists within the agricultural department to ensure that we get through the risk assessments quicker to be able to meet their requirements to get that market access. It's very important. And for the first time we have a national agricultural representative to go to international fora to be able to articulate that agricultural production systems here are different to those around the world and therefore we should have different methods of being able to produce the best food and fibre in the world.

We're also trying to streamline and modernise our trade export platforms. We have 330,000 export certificates printed out every year. We're now digitising them; we are making sure it's done once. And those that want to apply to get an export permit, instead of doing 20 paper based applications they will do one online one, and we'll get out of their life and allow them to get on with the job that they do.

We're also modernising through industries—working with the red meat sector, putting in place 40-year reforms around the modernisation, using technology so that they can use Google glasses to do inspections by our department and cutting the costs of the red meat industry by $45 million a year. That means more jobs in regional Australia. Our Ag2030 plan is about growing agriculture and growing the future for regional and rural Australia.

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