Dennis Jensen (Tangney, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In my speech on the report of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Primary Industries and Resources on the role of the government to assist Australian farmers to adapt to the impacts of climate change, I would like to address the real implications of the government’s CPRS—and no, it has not gone away; it has just been put aside while it is inconvenient and while it is convenient to fiddle the books to make the budget look better than it otherwise would. Pastoralists, graziers and farmers right across the country have played a big part in setting our nation’s course. Australians have great respect for people who work on the land. The esteem in which Australians hold farmers cannot be underestimated. Farmers are seen as trustworthy, honest and hardworking, so when it came time to oppose the CPRS and basically the ETS their voices were heard clearly and without contempt.

Farmers more than anyone else on earth know precisely the nature and frequency of changes in weather and climate. These changes show up in their annual income. There are bumper crops because of rain at the right time; crop losses through droughts, storms and floods; the production and survival of calves, lambs and so on due to benign weather; and stock losses because of droughts, floods or unseasonably cold weather. Farmers know whether we are having the hottest, coldest, wettest or driest season because the weather pretty much rules their lives.

The Productivity Commission report of 2005 entitled Trends in Australian agriculture states:

Agriculture is characterised by substantial volatility in output over time, with fluctuations in climatic conditions, such as droughts, substantially impacting on output in some years. Over the last three decades, agriculture has recorded the highest level of volatility in year-to-year output growth of all industries (more than two and a half times higher than the average for all industries).

Despite that, agriculture plays a much bigger role in Australia’s exports than might be expected given its output share. In 2003-04 it directly accounted for around 22 per cent of Australia’s total goods and services exports.

Speaking as a nonfarmer, I imagine what would help farmers most is factual information about short-, medium- and long-term weather patterns. We hear a lot about El Nino and La Nina effects. Only relatively recently meteorologists decided that Australia’s weather patterns were more determined by the Indian Ocean dipole than by the Pacific, the El Nino and La Nina influences. Therefore, there is still a lot of work to be done to determine the actual causes of weather and climate changes. One thing I can tell you is that there is very little evidence that man-made carbon emissions are causing these changes. I and others have asked Australia’s Chief Scientist, Professor Penny Sackett, for such evidence. None has been forthcoming.

Another thing I can assure you is that, despite assurances that agriculture will be somehow exempted or made a special case, farmers will be in the firing line. There is a graph on page 170 of the Garnaut report headed ‘Direct emissions intensity of Australia’s agriculture industry compared with selected OECD countries’. It shows Australia as being the second biggest emitter after Ireland of tonnes of CO2, at more than twice the average. The problem with exemptions is that they are illogical. If you really believe that carbon dioxide is the problem, how can you say to certain sectors, ‘Well, your CO2 is okay but their CO2 must be reduced’? CO2 is either dangerous or it is not. The IPCC and organisations which seek to control economies by the limiting of CO2 emissions insist that it is and that increased man-made CO2 emissions have caused global warming. There are parts of the Garnaut report which, if removed from the carbon dioxide obsession, are still quite useful. It refers to research into adaptation technologies. According to Garnaut, in 2006-07, 22 per cent of all government expenditure on research and development could be attributed to research into plant and animal production and primary products. However, the general idea that farmers need to be flexible and adapt to changes in consumer demands and government policies, technological advances and innovation, and emerging environmental concerns is not new. Farmers have been doing that very successfully.

The Productivity Commission research paper Trends in Australian agriculture 2005 states:

Australian agriculture has undergone considerable change over the last few decades. Thanks to rapid productivity growth, agricultural output has more than doubled in this period.

I wonder how Mr Garnaut thinks farmers achieved this amazing success, if not for flexibility and the ability to change and adapt. Farmers have been doing it pretty tough compared to other sectors of the community. The Productivity Commission report shows the ratio of prices for each sector to an all-industries price index. The changes in relative prices have contributed to the decline in the share of GDP accounted for by agriculture.

In summary, Australian farmers have been doing everything that they possibly could to ensure their farming sector is productive but, in pure economic terms, are being overshadowed by the growth in services and mining. In addition, farmers are not affected just by market vicissitudes that impact on markets but by the added variation in weather and climate. Despite this, agriculture will suffer from any form of carbon restrictions taxation or whatever other political imposition the government finally decides upon.

This ETS will provide limited protection for our trade exposed industries and, given the level of protection in certain large markets given to their local farmers, this added limiting of overseas markets could prove devastating. Despite vague indications that agriculture may get special consideration, the agricultural sector has not been provided with a certainty that it will be excluded from the scheme. As I said, that would be illogical if you are a CO2 purist. Even if there are allowances made for methane emissions from politically incorrect cows and sheep, farmers are still affected by costs on input such as energy, fertiliser and chemicals. There is not one shadow of a doubt that electricity costs will rise suddenly and substantially—and that goes for your super tax on profits with the mining sector, I have to add.

Fossil fuels are generally the cheapest, most reliable and most plentiful source of energy the world has ever seen. As I reflected in parliament recently, it is precisely that cheap and accessible energy that has enabled human progress over the last few centuries, including agriculture. One example is that farmers in Tasmania will face an increase in their electricity costs of over $10,000 by 2020 according to the government’s own modelling. This means that the 3,000 farmers in Tasmania, who collectively employ one in five Tasmanians, will face a huge rise in their electricity prices without any compensation. Everyone will feel the impact of Labor’s ETS but regional communities will be hit hardest of all.

Research commissioned by the New South Wales government into the regional impact of Labor’s scheme found that regional centres would be hardest hit. Regional communities in WA, such as central Western Australia and the Kimberley, would bear the brunt of Labor’s ETS. This pretty bleak output was reinforced in the June 2009 ABARE study which looked at the effect of the CPRS on the economic value of farm production. It confirmed that there will be increased costs of electricity, fuels and freight. It also said that farmers may face lower farm gate prices for their goods from downstream processors.

The production of fertiliser and chemicals is an energy-intensive process. Therefore, domestic fertiliser and chemical producers will face significantly higher input costs. Amazingly, ABARE says that, because there will be international companies also producing these products, competition will prevent price rises. The problem for Australian companies is that, if their costs are increasing but they cannot increase prices, financial oblivion surely beckons. Then we will have no local chemical and fertiliser companies and farmers will be at the mercy of overseas companies without the protection of a local producer.

The ABARE report also highlights the difficulty of assessing the economic impact of the CPRS, because no-one has any idea what the real price of carbon might be. The government estimated that the initial price in 2011 would be $10 per tonne. The price after that will be determined by the domestic permit market as well as rules around access to international markets and will not be known until after the scheme commences. ABARE also says that its analysis assumes an emission price equal to that projected by Treasury, increasing on average by four per cent a year.

In summary, agriculture may initially be exempt from paying for its direct emissions but will be impacted upon by other sectors, principally energy, but that exemption may change at any time. The cost of carbon may start at $10 a tonne but, because the price is not attached to anything real, the price in one or five years is anyone’s guess. If that sounds like economic vandalism and the height of stupidity, you have it in one. All of the economic assessments I have read include such uncertainties. In other words it is a matter of, ‘We will try to guess what impact this will have, not knowing how exempt or not your industry will be and what the carbon price will be.’ It reminds me of the old story about the farmer who won Lotto. He was asked what he would do and he replied, ‘Keep farming until it is all gone.’

Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I listened with interest to the member for Tangney’s 15-minute discussion on Farming the future: the role of government in assisting Australian farmers to adapt to the impacts of climate change. Unfortunately, he did not actually glance at the report in front of him. I will try to correct that, having been one of the members of the committee that did work on this report, a committee which involved people from the National Party, Independents, Liberals and the Labor Party, a broad group of people. But the member for Tangney obviously did not take the time to engage with the report when he was standing up in the chamber giving his diatribe.

I probably did agree with his first three sentences where he talked about the role that farmers have played in Australia. But after that he went off on a bit of a flight of fancy that did not have much to do with the real world that we live in—the real world that involves real facts from real scientists who have provided peer-reviewed information that insists that climate change is real. That is the first fact that I wanted to bring the member for Tangney back to. The report we have in front of us understood that very clearly. Even though we dealt with a range of farmers over a range of areas in Australia, from very wet to very dry and everything in between, farmers understood that the climate is changing. It is not just variable; they understood that the climate is changing.

I too am familiar with the Garnaut report. I am not a scientist or a farmer, but I do understand the basic aspects of science. If you keep increasing the heat in a system then something will happen. If you look at page 26 of the Garnaut report and just look at the measured trends of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide—which have been measured with varying degrees of accuracy, but certainly quite accurately from the 1800s to the 1900s—there is just a clear progression. It makes scientific sense to me that if you keep increasing temperatures then something will happen. If you look at some of the other graphs in the Garnaut report, you see what Australia’s role is in terms of being one of the 20 largest greenhouse gas emitters. Even though we are a small country, our per capita emissions mean that we have a particular responsibility to the rest of the world to show some leadership.

Why is that so? If you look at the history of Australia, we have always been particularly susceptible to the variations of climate—temperature, rainfall and the like. Obviously the Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders were able to adapt to these harsh variabilities, whether they were fisherpeople, hunter-gatherers or whatever. If you look at the first white settlers from 1788 on, they came with European sensibilities and farming practices. They were reasonably advanced compared to the rest of Europe, but they still ended up sowing the wrong crops at the wrong time. They quickly had to learn how to be Australian farmers rather than European farmers. They had enough ingenuity. Even though the First Fleet nearly starved to death, they eventually worked out how to survive.

Australian farmers, from those days to now, have always been at the coalface or the cutting edge when it comes to coping with climate change. I think ‘the cutting edge’ is a farming term, but both the coalface and the cutting edge are expressions that are out of date because the minimum tillage farming used by modern farmers is nothing like the farming that I grew up with, as we saw on some of our field trips. It was incredible what they were doing with GPS guided ploughs. They use minimum tillage so they are able to minimise disruption and produce incredible crops. In terms of our productivity gains over the last 50 years, farmers have held their heads high. They have been at the lead in the economy in terms of making sure they can produce lots of crops, take them to the world market without the subsidies of the Europeans, the United States and a few other countries, and hold their own. From what we saw from the field inspections and from the peak bodies that we interviewed in the committee, we certainly will be able to hold our own in the years to come because they understand climate variability and they understand climate change.

This report brings together that intersection that we need for the future. You will always need the individual ingenuity of farmers. We always need that and the strong, financially secure farmers do that. We also need the market forces so people who make money out of innovations—fertilisers, ploughs or whatever it is—can take those innovations to the market and sell them. That is one of the ways that we bring in innovation, but we also need government support and guidance and some of the peak bodies to look at opportunities that come with climate change. We have seen it. The peanut board saw that climate change was going to bring rainfall variations and said, ‘In the long term, we need to find other places to grow peanuts.’ They said, ‘There will be rain and reasonably available land in the Northern Territory and it suits peanuts, so we will go there.’ If you are sitting at home as a farmer down in Kingaroy or something like that, you might not necessarily know that. So that interaction between the peak bodies, the market and government support seems to bode well for a bright future.

The member for Tangney, in his rambling discussion, mentioned the CPRS but forgot to mention the fundamental problem with the history of the CPRS as told by the members of the Liberal Party. I was in the chamber; I saw how people voted on the CPRS legislation. Apart from one bloke from the seat of Wentworth, everyone I saw was on the other side of the chamber. Everyone in the Liberal Party voted against the CPRS. They voted against bringing in a price on carbon. When the legislation went to the Senate, I held out some hope that at the Copenhagen climate change summit we might be able to stand up and show some guidance to the world, go there with a bit of certainty and say, ‘This is what we might do.’ I was hopeful. Young, optimistic, I thought—

Government Members:

Government members interjecting—

Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Well, maybe not young! But I was optimistic. I thought we might go to Copenhagen and see humanity’s finest hour. That is what I hoped. Instead, in the Senate, apart from Senator Sue Boyce from Queensland and Senator Troeth from Victoria—

Chris Hayes (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Responsible people.

Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Responsible people, courageous people: on the very day that Tony Abbott got his anti-climate-change ticket up and rolled Malcolm Turnbull, they crossed the floor. When I looked over at the other side of the Senate, I could see the five Greens sitting with the National Party and Liberal Party climate change skeptics. It was a shameful moment.

So we went off to Copenhagen, and a lot of great things came out of Copenhagen, but it was not humanity’s finest moment. People forget the good things that came out of Copenhagen. We got a commitment from all world leaders to hold an increase in global temperature to below two degrees Celsius. That is a commitment important to every Australian farmer, especially the marginal farmers in South Australia beyond the border. It is an important achievement: farming will continue in South Australia because of the hard work done in Copenhagen. I remind people that the two countries that worked hardest to achieve that consensus were Australia and the United Kingdom. That is something we can tell our grandchildren. We held our heads up high. We had dark moments in the Senate and on the floor of the House of Representatives but we did achieve something in Copenhagen. There is also a framework to keep track of what we are doing so that we can measure what is going on in terms of production and so that the climate change sceptics, the Lord Moncktons and the like that have grabbed the ears of those opposite, do not hold sway.

The other big thing is that, obviously, it is not enough to just be committed to something; you have to put your money where your mouth is. That is what happened. All the leaders agreed on the finance necessary to support the emissions reductions and particularly the adaptations that are necessary in developing countries. We have had the benefits of the Industrial Revolution, but some of those developing countries have not. Rather than just saying, ‘Tough luck—there’s no more space at the table; you’ll just have to suffer and burn up,’ thankfully, the world’s governments had enough soul to say: ‘No, we’ll do what we can. We’ll find the finance to ensure that you can make some adaptations.’

So they were some of the good things that came out of Copenhagen. If you listen to talkback radio and some of the misguided people on the other side of the chamber, from the way they misrepresent the Copenhagen conference you might think it did not achieve anything. The reality is that the Copenhagen summit, led by the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, Minister Wong, Gordon Brown and a few others from the UK, was able to achieve some wonderful things. While it was not humanity’s finest hour, it was maybe not its darkest hour, as it is painted by some people.

To return to the Farming the future report from the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Primary Industries and Resources, it was incredible to travel around the country—although I was not able to go to Western Australia or some of the other field centres that the committee visited—and talk to the farmers and see the simple things they are doing to ensure the future of farming. For example, they are putting in something as simple as harvestable trees, which put carbon into the soil but also give a good timber yield every 20 to 25 years or something.

The innovations were incredible and it was quite comforting, as someone from the bush, although I now represent a city seat—even though the Brisbane Markets are in my electorate—to see that the farmers are well and truly ahead of the fact that Australia’s climate is changing, and we need to be prepared for that. It is not a matter of knee-jerk reactions and short term goals—‘It has rained this year; it will be a drought next year.’ Instead, the committee saw time after time that Australian farmers are ready to adapt to climate change. Obviously there are some recommendations there as to how we might further their preparedness, how we might further their readiness. I am sure that the government will consider those. I was quite comforted by what was happening on the farms we visited. I commend the report to everyone, and especially to the member for Tangney, as it demonstrates how prepared and how far advanced our farmers are.

Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am pleased to speak on the Farming the future report. I am drawn to the comments of the member for Moreton. I would consider, even though he might publicly bemoan the lack of passing of the ETS, that privately his opinions might not be quite the same, given that had we passed the ETS we would be implementing a $14 billion tax a year on industry to go with the $9 billion resources tax that the government announced only two weeks ago. In fact, if he feels so strongly about it, of course the government can go to a double dissolution election on it. He and his colleagues may well wish to do that, but I suspect not.

I am not a member of the Standing Committee on Primary Industries and Resources, but I do have a longstanding interest in these matters. As a farmer before I entered this place, involved in agripolitics, and having a long involvement in the agricultural research community as a farmer representative, I have been looking at this report with great interest. I was particularly drawn to its chapter on research and extension. I was recently at a Canberra dinner, hosted by the Australian Institute of Agricultural Science and Technology. I was privileged to hear an address by the respected agriculture journalist Julian Cribb. He informed us that while the world was focussing on eight to nine billion people in 2050, in fact he believes we will have 11 billion people in the world by 2060. Surely this is an alarming figure. It will be one of the great challenges of the next 50 years and, as far as addressing the greatest moral issue of our generation is concerned—the Prime Minister used to talk about this on a regular basis—feeding this world of 11 billion people will indeed take some topping.

Feeding the population is not just about things like widespread famine, as calamitous as that would be; it is about the security of the world as we know it. Most wars are caused by economic disadvantage—nothing sharpens the bayonet like starving children. At the same time as this demand increases, we will continue to lose the most productive land on the planet to urban sprawl and land degradation, and there will be increasing competition for water resources. The planet will need to double food production while at the same time we expect to lose up to 30 per cent of our arable lands. Australia has both an opportunity and an obligation to be a big part of the solution. We must unlock the untapped potential of this land. We are traditionally a supplier of food to the world. Our regional security will rely on us expanding this role.

Those who believe agriculture is a sunset industry are wrong. They are wrong, they have to be wrong, because if agriculture is not a new horizon all else will fail. Collectively, the agricultural industry and parliaments have allowed governments to steadily reduce public investment in agricultural science. The road to discovery is very long, and we are still reaping the benefits of the investment of the sixties and seventies into agricultural advances. Certainly many of our scientists were trained in this time, when the prospective career paths in agricultural sciences were more attractive. Currently our agricultural training courses are well undersubscribed, and, without wishing to offend anyone, we struggle to attract the top students.

There will be simply no alternative: Australia and the world will have to start seriously investing in agriculture again. Five million dollars of research funding was cut from the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry budget last year, and this year another $80 million has been taken away from Caring for Our Country. In my state, South Australia, the South Australian Research and Development Institute can expect no more than standstill budgets in the foreseeable future. We must spend more. We must invest more heavily. We must promote the industry as the progressive future we need. For that we need more research and development funding in order to address this imminent threat to food production. Investment in R&D is the backbone of agricultural industry, but it has been diminishing in real terms for 25 years.

We have had emergency drought aid around Australia for some years now, with mixed results. In some cases it has done what it was supposed to do and supported good producers through a tough patch. In others it has distorted the market and stopped good young farmers from investing in the industry. The Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, Mr Burke, has signalled the government’s intention to move away from exceptional circumstances support and has announced a pilot program in Western Australia targeting farm planning and efficiency. I wish the program well, as at least it aims to increase productivity and efficiency, but much more will be needed for our farmers to remain profitable and the world to avert a food crisis.

The key to farmer and community prosperity is production advantage—to be the best cutting-edge farmers in the world. As we deal with climate change, the pressures from international trade, the rising costs of doing business in the Australian economy, the likely rises in inputs, and the weakness of the American dollar which will continue to reduce our competitiveness, the best possible chance we have of avoiding the periodic requests for assistance to the agricultural industry is to make sure we have a profitable sector. The best way to ensure we adapt to the impacts of climate change is to make sure we have a profitable agricultural sector. The best way of doing this is to provide the scientific horsepower to drive adaptation and the adoption of new technology.

Disturbingly, we are held hostage of the green left, who tend to oppose any advances in technological agriculture as being somehow bad for the general public—as if starving to death would be a good outcome. At the current time there are still bans in South Australia on growing GM products, when the rest of the nation has moved on. Indeed, the rest of the world is moving on and we will soon see widespread adoption of this technology in China and other parts of Asia. We simply cannot limit technology; we must support and amplify it. Unfortunately at the current time we have the handbrake on.

Australia’s agricultural research, development and extension effort is declining at the very time growers and rural industries need research to provide solutions to the challenges of the world’s growing population. Less funding directly impacts upon production capability, food security, natural resource management and the ability to cope with seasonal variation and climate change. Recommendations 3, 5, 6 and 7 in this Farming the future report all ask for extra research funding—recommendation 3 for soil sciences, recommendation 5 for greenhouse gas science, recommendation 6 for new technologies, and recommendation 7 for weather forecasting. I sit on the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Innovation, which has just completed a report on long-term weather forecasting. That report also recommends greater funding in this area—science to assist agriculture to predict and adapt to climate change.

Agriculture has maintained productivity growth of about 2.8 per cent during the past 20 years but it is starting to slow, a trend that Geoff Thomas, the President of the Australian Institute of Agricultural Science and Technology—who was the host of the dinner I attended—believes is directly linked to the slowing down of research. He said another major threat to Australian agriculture was the shortage of agriculture graduates. Mr Thomas said:

This is at a time when Australian growers are being expected to maintain or increase productivity in the face of unprecedented cost and environmental pressures and rapidly worsening terms of trade.

I welcome this report into farming for the future, particularly the chapter on research and extension. Its conclusion at paragraph 6.53 actually says that research funding in Australia is at a bare minimum to drive the industry. So this report is not a signal to kick back; it should actually have the alarm bells ringing, because, as I pointed out, in four other recommendations it asks for increased research spending. If Australia does not meet its challenge to increase food production, if it does not make its farmers profitable, the world in the end will not be secure and it will become increasingly insecure if it is not well fed, as indeed will our farmers.

Dick Adams (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I seek leave to speak again without closing the debate.

Leave granted.

I thank the honourable member for Grey for his contribution on the report of the committee which I chair. I think it was a very good report and I think we were able to pull together many good recommendations on the needs and the future for farming in Australia. As I mentioned in my tabling speech, this report set out to look at the current and respective adaptations to the impact of climate change on agriculture and the potential impacts on downstream processing. It also considered the role of government in augmenting the shift towards farming practices which promote resilience in the farm sector in the face of climate change, and promoting research, extension and training which assist the farm sector to better adapt to climate change. The report covered a pretty broad area of changes that are currently going on and also gave us an insight into the barriers to change for the future. For instance, one submission noted:

Rural research development and education will need to be greatly increased if Australian farmers are to remain profitable, sustainable and internationally competitive. Research and knowledge creation will not achieve the rates of change and adaptation required from Australian farmers without mechanisms to ensure its effective communication and adoption.

I think that sums up a lot, including what the honourable member for Grey, the previous speaker, was saying: we need to have a lot of research and development but also education and getting that out there into the farming sector. The barriers in this case were the lack of ways of getting innovative ideas out into the community. The CCRSPI submission states on page 16:

Over the past decades successive governments, both state and federal, have reduced funding to rural extension networks and shut rural research stations. This has greatly reduced the capacity of governments to assist farmers to adopt new R&D and to be able to demonstrate and commercialise new technologies and practices in the field.

Others raised the point that adoption of improved practices takes time. One of the best ways to foster and accelerate the adoption rate of improved practices is through incentives and investment which reduce the barriers and risks, often financial, of adoption. A triple-objective practice/improvement/incentive program would well position Australia’s agriculture for whatever mix of emissions, carbon trading and international agreements are to be implemented in Australia. Equally importantly, this would improve Australian agriculture’s overall resilience by improving productivity and sustainability. One could say the same applies to the forest industry that is going through some restructuring traumas at the moment, especially in Tasmania. So the message was that there were currently no good pathways by which the research organisations or innovative individuals could share their knowledge in a cooperative way. Most of those pathways have been privatised, so the spread of good news can only be gained if you have the funds to pay for it or if you know where to look.

Professor Frank Vanclay and Mrs Aysha Fleming identified a number of social and attitudinal barriers to climate change adaptation:

Resistance to change is not just about individual reactions, it is a broader social issue. This means that resistance does not occur within an individual’s head, or because of an individual’s personal characteristics—education level, personal motivations or situation, skills or beliefs. Resistance is created by common perceptions, norms and values held in society.

They also go on to say:

If climate change is perceived as being too big to influence, because climate is something intangible, invisible and seemingly out of human control, it can lead to rejection. Climate change is dismissed outright, and can lead to feeling overwhelmed or hopeless.

So, sold badly, it all becomes too hard and farmers, like many others, are not equipped to really find out how it will affect them.

Communicating a clear and consistent message on climate change is a prerequisite to successful adaptation. Governments at all levels need to undertake to deliver this message in a manner relevant to the experience of farmers, for whom managing climate variability is a long-term and everyday experience. Part of this is in understanding the decision-making processes of farmers. Another part is the creation of positive messages about how adaptation can improve business resilience, maintain or increase productivity and promote personal and social welfare. Then there are the social implications, which are highlighted only too vividly in the Rural Alive and Well submissions and discussions. There need to be options, ways forward and ways out without losing your life savings or your dignity. Remember that people have sometimes been on their land for many generations. They explained to the committee the importance of reaching out to vulnerable members of the rural community and providing support. A key role of the service was to make connections with the support services provided by government and help people access those services.

One problem the service faced was the silo mentality of governments and bureaucracies; another was the lack of secure funding for the service they provided. The essential ingredients of the service they provide are intervention and building personal connections, giving people a sense that they are not facing the trials and tribulations of life alone. The consequences of such an approach were highlighted at a meeting with departmental officials and farmer representatives in Geraldton in Western Australia. The creation of a strong social support network in the region involving strong peer support and pre-emptive strategy allowed the farming community there to get through a period of severe drought in 2006 and 2007 without one instance of suicide. The success of such services, which were highlighted in Tasmania and Western Australia, shows that we should be concentrating our assistance packages in difficult circumstances to smooth the exit routes and provide support and networks where change can be managed.

I believe in and support the extension of funding periods to allow stability for these services as well as ensuring that the methods of information sharing can be further investigated and maybe allow a return to state governments employing a new breed of extension officers to assist with opportunities through new ways and new thinking. We in Australia are more fortunate than many in the Western world in that we have the skills and resources to manage change as long as governments recognise the need to support and fund given the upheavals that come and go. The federal government has proved itself in successfully boosting the economy during the economic downturn. Now I believe it is the turn of the rural sector to be assisted in dealing with the changing circumstances which are bearing down on it. Climate change can be managed if understood. Its impact varies across the nation. We must be ready to ensure our rural industries are flexible and able to adapt to the changes from that as well as being able to minimise the risk of their impacts, such as through drought proofing and crop and stock variation.

I hope the report is found to be useful in this ongoing discussion and I look forward to the government’s response and assistance in putting the recommendations in place. It was a pleasure to do the report. It was about a year’s work for the committee, who worked hard through its visits and through its meetings with people in Canberra. There are several points that I would like to touch on. One concerns recommendation 3 of the report where we touch on soil stabilisation and pasture improvement using such methods as having annual pastures instead of open soil, pasture cropping, putting wheat straight into a pasture and rotation grazing, which has probably been around some time but is new in many areas whereby people only graze a paddock for a couple of days and move the stock on so that the grasses grow and are not eaten right down. That is a whole new concept coming into play there. There is biodynamic farming and minimum- or no-till cultivation and controlled traffic farming. Of course no-till or minimum-till agriculture farming as to moisture, as I think they call it, is on the Liverpool Plains. It is quite interesting to see the way that they have gone about that. I think they claim that they retain two per cent extra moisture in the soil by not turning the soil and keeping the old stubble on top of the soil, therefore the following crop grows straight into the soil. It has its issues which they are continuing to deal with as they move into that sort of new concept. Controlled traffic farming is where you take the tractor or the machinery along the same wheel lines down the paddock every time so that you do not compact the soil and therefore destroy many of the good things such as the micro-organisms et cetera in the soil. You would also be wasting fertiliser and seed if you were to put them in areas which got chopped up by wheels.

These are emerging opportunities for rural Australia. Getting the position right globally is important. Getting manufacturers to make wheel alignments so that contractors can buy the same wheel line-ups for that sort of work will take some time, but it is important for the future of agriculture in Australia. Soil water retention strategies are important, as I said, to reduce the cultivation of soils and to retain moisture in them.

Again I would like to thank my colleagues on both sides of the House, who worked so well with me, and also the member for Hume, my deputy, and the staff of the secretariat who bravely stepped at times where others feared to go.

Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this report titled Farming the future: the role of government in assisting Australian farmers to adapt to the impacts of climate change and begin by commending the Standing Committee on Primary Industries and Resources, the committee’s chair—the member for Lyons—and the secretariat for its work on this very important national issue.

Since European settlement of Australia, our farming sector has been crucial to Australia’s prosperity and the wellbeing of the Australian people. Animal farming, cereal crops, horticulture, wine growing and vegetable growing are major industry sectors that underpin the economy of communities around Australia. I understand that, on the latest figures available to me, which were the figures for the year 2008-09, agricultural exports alone were worth $32 billion to our nation.

The income generated from these farming communities in turn has a flow-on effect on numerous other industry sectors as well as being of critical importance to Australia’s balance of trade net position. Furthermore, the production of quality agricultural products has been and will continue to be critical to the good health and health costs of the nation.

Since World War II, employment in the agricultural sector has been in decline, primarily because of automation. If you travel around Australia—and certainly in my own state of South Australia—there are many country towns that 40, 50 and 60 years ago were fairly prosperous small communities. Many of them today are very much in decline and some of them have effectively closed down altogether because we need fewer people to carry out the farming operations that, years ago, were carried out by entire families, and certainly many more people were directly involved in the industry.

What we have been seeing in recent times, however, is not only a threat to employment in the agricultural sector but also a threat to the productive capacity of the sector. There have been several factors which have contributed to these threats. Climate change is undoubtedly the most significant of these factors, with the last decade being clear evidence of the impact to Australia’s farming sector of climate change. Rising temperatures, heatwaves, droughts, floods, tornadoes, cyclones, fires, disease and pests are all associated with climatic changes and all can have devastating effects on farming.

On the issue of pests, only yesterday the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry outlined a government response to the locust plague that farmers around Australia are facing right now. It is a plague which is seeing the eggs being laid right now and which will break out into a full-blown plague perhaps in spring, right at the worst possible time for farmers. Having recently travelled through the Riverland areas of South Australia and Victoria, I saw for myself what that locust plague is doing and the number of locusts already affecting farms in those areas. It is truly frightening for those people whose livelihood depends on producing a product which can literally, in one or two days, be entirely wiped out.

All of those kinds of risks have been faced by the farming community for years and years, but there is no doubt at all that those risks, as a result of climate change, are now more unpredictable and likely to be more frequent. We saw only last year in Northern Queensland the effects of the floods. We heard stories from members of this House who represent constituencies in those areas about the devastation to farming communities as a result of those floods. We are told by the scientific community that those floods are likely to occur more often and be more unpredictable. It is that kind of unpredictability that makes farming even more risky than ever before. In that respect, the farming community of Australia and the farmers themselves understand weather as well as anyone. They understand the risks they are taking and in the past have been able to adapt to them and cope with them. But I believe it is going to get tougher and tougher for them as our climate continues to change in a way that we have never seen before.

The severe impacts of climate change on the Australian farming sector were recognised by former Deputy Prime Minister Tim Fischer as far back as 2001. He noted at the time that the impacts would increase in the future. How right he was. That was a decade ago. It was a decade before we saw effectively one of the worst decades in our history in respect of drought in this country and a decade where the farming sector was truly put under severe strain as a result of that.

Of course, there has been much more research on and a better understanding of climate change over the last decade. The evidence continues to mount that we will face more extreme weather events in the future, that global temperatures will continue to rise and that rainfall patterns will change. We have seen in the last century alone an increase in temperature here in Australia of 0.7 degrees, most of which occurred in the last 50 years. The trends suggest that by the end of this century temperatures will have increased by another one degree. In fact, although I do not have it with me, I noticed a report in one of the newspapers—it was yesterday, I believe—which talked about temperature rises over the next 200 years that will make some parts of this earth almost uninhabitable. Those are certainly long-term predictions and things may well turn out to be different to that, but they are certainly warning signs and ringing alarm bells that we should be taking note of. If we do, we may be in a much better position at the right time to respond to those changes because we might have adapted to them or in some cases we might have been able to prevent them. All of these changes have impacted and will continue to impact on the farming sector, as I said a moment ago. I am sure that farmers will be at the forefront of providing the appropriate adaptive mechanisms.

In my own state of South Australia those effects have been most noticeable in the Riverland region, which is the region I mentioned a few moments ago. The combination of drought, record low Murray River inflows and international market competition has been disastrous to the region. I note that the committee was unable to come to South Australia but, if in the future there is an opportunity for a similar committee to do so, the Riverland region of South Australia is certainly worth visiting in terms of understanding other aspects of the effects of climate change on the community.

The Riverland community of South Australia has a population of around 35,000. Fifty per cent of South Australia’s grapes are grown in that region. It is also a prime area for the growing of citrus, cherries and olives. Because I have a lot of friends and acquaintances who are property owners in the Riverland region, I am aware of the impact the last 10 years have had on their region. Firstly, it began with competition from overseas, when the price for what they were producing was being undercut by overseas competitors—both affecting their export trade and impacting directly on their local markets. That in itself was difficult enough to contend with. They then had the wine industry also under intense pressure from overseas suppliers and growers. We saw wine prices begin to decline.

On top of that they were then hit with the drought and low water levels in the Murray River which, in turn, meant that their water allocations were insufficient to enable many of them to produce their full quantum of crops. As a result, if you drive through the Riverland you will see long-term plantings ripped out and lying there waiting to be destroyed and you will see whole fruit blocks abandoned. You will also see that a lot of the farmers from that region have put their properties on the market for sale. All of these are clear signs of the difficulties that they have had to contend with. They have certainly done it tough. Individual farm production has dropped and we have seen families at both health and financial crisis points. In that respect I commend the committee on its very first recommendation, which talks about supporting groups such as Rural Alive and Well. I have spoken with people who act as counsellors and advisers in the Riverland region of South Australia and have heard directly from them some of the stories about the difficulties being faced by people from their region—the financial difficulties and the health impacts on families, particularly on the mental health of some of the farmers from that area. Most of those people are very proud people—they will not ask for help. They will do what they can to ensure that they survive, but at times the pressure just gets too much for them.

If farming production continues to decline in Australia it will affect not only the farming communities but all Australians. Reliance on countries that do not implement food production standards similar to the standards that are applied in Australia is a real concern to me, as it is to most Australians I talk to. I know that most Australian farmers are well informed and responsible in their use of chemicals, pesticides and fertilisers in food production. I do not have the same confidence about imported foods. What is just as concerning is that most consumers do not know the origin of the food they consume, which highlights the need to have clear labelling laws in place in Australia.

I have spoken with farmers here in Australia and I have confidence that they do understand the impacts of the chemicals they use. Sometimes those chemicals are absolutely necessary to prevent disease or pests, but farmers understand the effects of chemicals on humans who consume their food, so they take the right precautionary approaches when they use those chemicals. Regrettably, that is not necessarily the case with food grown overseas. While we have import standards in place, the reality is that we simply cannot check all the food that is imported into this country to the degree that we would like to ensure that it has not been grown using, for example, pesticides that have been banned in this country or other fertilisers or chemical treatments that we would never use. Those chemicals were banned in this country because of their effects on health, so when we consume food from overseas countries we cannot have the same level of certainty about the possible health outcomes. That, in turn, impacts on the nation’s health budget because there is no question that good food gives you good health outcomes and bad food does the opposite. If we have poorer health outcomes because of the food that we are eating, there is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that our health costs will continue to spiral and add another layer of burden onto governments trying to manage Australia’s health budgets.

If we had clearer labelling laws, at least consumers would have a greater opportunity to choose the foods that they purchase when they go into supermarkets. I suspect that, if they could choose, we would find that more of them would choose the Australian grown product. And that would in turn—getting back to an earlier argument I put—support the growers here in Australia because I suspect that most Australians would like to think that they are supporting Australian growers when they do buy their food.

There is another element to the purchase of products from overseas: because they are grown the way they are, they are grown generally much cheaper than locally produced products. We live in a society where we have two major supermarket chains that in turn dictate the price at the farm gate for all products. That is also putting intense pressure on growers. I am well aware that many growers, in order to secure big contracts with those two major supermarket chains, agree to prices that make it absolutely borderline as to whether they can make their farms viable and continue to survive. They have no option because, if they do not provide products at those prices, they do not provide products at all because the two major supermarkets are the outlets for most of the food grown in this country. So it becomes very difficult.

The combination of international competition, market domination by the supermarket chains and now climate change means that the future of Australia’s agriculture and farming sectors will be fraught with uncertainty. For those reasons, the work of the committee—in acknowledging the risks to farmers associated with climate change, outlining a series of strategies aimed at mitigating the impacts of climate change and putting in measures to assist affected communities—is in the national interest.

I particularly acknowledge the emphasis placed by the committee on the need for more research across a range of areas and the important role government has in that research. There is no question that the research carried out by CSIRO and others is of vital importance to the future survival of agricultural and farming industries in this country. I also note the section of the report that talks about farmers being involved in that research. I emphasise that point because I think there is a great deal of merit in it. Farmers understand their land and their products. They understand changing climatic conditions, and I think they understand the science behind the production of their products. Therefore, it is absolutely important that we include them in research. I commend the report to the House.

Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I commend the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Primary Industries and Resources on their report Farming the future: the role of government in assisting Australian farmers to adapt to the impacts of climate change. I particularly commend the chair of the committee, Dick Adams; the deputy chair, Alby Schultz; and, indeed, the members. This is a bipartisan report and it shows that there is a deep concern among members of this House about the effects of climate change across the country. This report deals with the effects on the farming community, and it follows a report by another standing committee of the House of Representatives—the Standing Committee on Climate Change, Water, Environment and the Arts, chaired by the member for Throsby. It reported last year to this House on the effects of climate change on coastal management, particularly in relation to planning issues.

Reports of this type show that there is an understandable and entirely proper concern among members of this House with the effects of climate change, which are real, which are being observed across the country, which will affect the lives of everybody in Australia and which do call for action by governments and all Australians. I would start with this observation. It has been noted most recently by the CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology and it can be summarised in this way:

Australia will be hotter in coming decades

Australian average temperatures are projected to rise by 0.6 to 1.5 ºC by 2030. If global greenhouse gas emissions continue to grow at rates consistent with past trends, warming is projected to be in the range of 2.2 to 5.0 ºC by 2070 …

Much of Australia will be drier in coming decades

We have already observed the average surface air temperature of Australia increasing by 0.7 degrees Centigrade over the past century, and that warming has been accompanied by marked declines in regional precipitation, in particular along the east and west coasts of the continent. These seemingly quite small changes in temperature are already having profound effects across the continent, which is, as we all know, the hottest and driest continent on earth. Even if all greenhouse gas emissions ceased today, the earth would still be committed to an additional warming of somewhere between 0.2 degrees Centigrade and one degree Centigrade by the end of the century.

These real effects are what make it necessary for all industries, including agricultural industries, to adapt to the changes that are already occurring and will continue to occur. What this report does is make a series of considered recommendations. They are conservative recommendations—they show a conservative approach—and perhaps that is why the report attracted bipartisan support. They are conservative in a way that can be contrasted directly with the crazy radical approach that has been adopted by the Leader of the Opposition and indeed by Senator Minchin on this subject.

It is a matter of extreme puzzlement as to why the Leader of the Opposition and the gang of climate change deniers that are now controlling the opposition have made climate change denial a plank in the coalition’s platform. We hear repeatedly from the Leader of the Opposition that he is a conservative. We hear from Senator Minchin that he is a conservative. They are not conservatives. The approach taken in this report is conservative. Senator Minchin, the Leader of the Opposition and the gang that they are with are crazy radicals. They are reckless in the face of the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists, not only in this country but across the world. Senator Minchin and the Leader of the Opposition want to line up with the tiny minority who are denying the science. A true conservative would say that, given the scale of the cataclysmic events that are predicted, if there is even a one per cent chance of those events occurring we should be doing everything possible to conserve the world which gives us life.

A lot of this denial ideology, which we see on a daily basis from people on the opposition benches and, in particular, from the Leader of the Opposition, is taken directly from Republican Party hardliners in the United States. It is the Republican Party of Sarah Palin. I am happy to say that even some Republicans in the United States understand what the true conservative position is. I can indeed quote from a perhaps unlikely source: the Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has fought against the climate change deniers in the Republican Party in the United States. He spoke very eloquently, using a medical scenario, which I will paraphrase: 98 doctors out of 100 say to you that your child has a particular ailment and the cure for that ailment is a particular medicine, and two adamantly say, ‘Absolutely not; we don’t think your child has that ailment and, even if your child does, that is not the cure.’ Governor Schwarzenegger said—rightly; it is what any parent would do—‘I go with the 98.’ That is simply the precautionary principle, a principle recognised in environmental science and in Australian environmental law. We do not ask for certainty before taking action to prevent environmental damage; we act on probabilities. We act on proper risk assessments, just as we do in other spheres of life.

That is why this report is properly viewed as taking a true conservative approach. It recognises that the effects of climate change are happening, even if there is some doubt about the extent of those effects. For example, it is known that one effect of climate change will be less frost and therefore there will be a temporary benefit to agriculture in some areas of Australia, but overall the likely effect of climate change will be less rain over most of the continent and greater evaporation because of hotter temperatures over most of the continent, and agriculture will become more difficult. That is why the recommendations in this report which are directed to increased research by the Commonwealth government on issues affecting farmers and agriculture are appropriate, as is an analysis of government policy generally as to how government policy can guard against the potentially disastrous effects on agriculture. All of these are to be commended.

However, on a daily basis, we have had a continuation of the Leader of the Opposition’s position that climate change is absolute crap. He was at it again last week, speaking to primary school children in Adelaide and telling them, bizarrely, that it was warmer ‘at the time of Julius Caesar and Jesus of Nazareth’ than now. Rightly, scientists across Australia have condemned the Leader of the Opposition, who should know better. The President of the Australian Academy of Science, Professor Kurt Lambeck, was quoted as saying:

… true scepticism was fine, but required looking at published data with an open mind.

“To make these glib statements to school students, I think, is wrong. It’s not encouraging them to be sceptical, it’s encouraging them to accept unsubstantiated information.”

The Leader of the Opposition is seeking to disagree with Australia’s Chief Scientist, the Bureau of Meteorology, the CSIRO, the overwhelming majority of climate scientists in Australia and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose work is supported by Australia.

I am hoping that the Leader of the Opposition will wake up, that Senator Minchin will depart and that the coalition will start to adopt a true conservative position, which is to preserve the earth which preserves us. That is why I commend the report of this committee for taking a true conservative position which acknowledges the risks to Australian agriculture and calls for action.

Debate (on motion by Mr Hayes) adjourned.