Gavin Pearce (Braddon, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Health, Aged Care and Indigenous Health Services) Share this | Hansard source

Congratulations to Sisters Creek agri-businesswoman Melissa Duniam, who has been awarded the 2023 Tasmanian AgriFutures Rural Women's Award. Melissa has been recognised for her groundbreaking and fascinating work in human resource development. She's the founder of Leading Rein and uses equine-assisted learning to empower people and teams. Participants in her courses improve their leadership and team management by learning how to interact with horses. Their challenge is to learn how to communicate and to lead horses using nonverbal communication alone. This, in turn, makes them better leaders of human teams.

Congratulations also to Belle Binder, who was awarded the AgriFutures Encouragement Award for her work changing the culture between farmers and seasonal workers. Like Melissa, Belle has reimagined a different way of doing things. Her business, LeftField, is dedicated to changing the culture of seasonal worker programs with the development of mutual respect between workers and their employees. Belle's Calm Your Farm workshops—and I love the name—provide growers with tools and information to help them with employee retention, which in turn helps them retain their workforce of skills. Congratulations to both Melissa and Belle; they are representative of a wonderful young agricultural entrepreneurial spirit in Tasmania, and I wish them all the very best in the future.

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