Sid Sidebottom (Braddon, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Good morning, colleagues. It gives me great pleasure as a parliamentary secretary with special responsibility for dairy to mention two dairy enterprises in my region which, Mr Deputy Speaker, you will be pleased about, in relation to growth. Tasmania's own dairy processor, Tasmanian Dairy Products, will celebrate the delivery of its first milk tanker on Tuesday next week in Smithton, in Circular Head, on the north-west coast. I will be there very much to celebrate. The tanker will be the first delivery of the annual intake of around 200,000 litres of milk. The milk will be dried to be sold as a powdered product to Asia and the Middle East. This is the culmination of a $70 million investment by Murray Goulburn Co-operative, Mitsubishi and our own group of farmers best described as the 'Greater Bradley Watson Group', who kick-started the idea and drove it to this fantastic outcome.

The factory is set to employ 70 people and has already provided construction jobs for around 150 over the 12-month build. The factory is built on the site of the former Gunns Timber mill, which goes to show that sometimes the closure of one business can provide an opportunity for another. The site is huge and there is the potential to expand production even further into the future.

I do not know whether you are aware, colleagues, that there is a company called the Van Diemen's Land Company in the far north-west of Tassie, at a property called Woolnorth. It was established around 1824-25 and is the largest dairy property in Australia. It is now part of—as I just mentioned regarding Tasmanian Dairy Products—the most quickly expanding dairy production region in Australia. In 1992, Woolnorth focused its enterprises on dairying. For example, it now has 25,000 dairy cows, 24 dairy sheds, 6,500 beef cattle and 2,000 sheep; it employs around 160 people and 19,000 hectares of land is devoted to it. Its annual milk solids production for 2011-12 was 5.76 million kilograms. It is now proposing to double that production, to double the conversion from beef production to dairying and to double its employment capacity from 160 to 320. In the process, it is offsetting land in terms of formal reserves, covenant reserves and voluntary reserves in order to offset the land that is going to be used for the conversion. It is a very environmentally conscious company. I am really looking forward to working with it and developing this most important area, along with Tasmanian Dairy Products next Tuesday.