Anne Webster (Mallee, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Agriculture, Drought and Emergency Management. Will the minister please outline how the innovation and research pillar of the Morrison-McCormack government's Ag2030 plan is driving agricultural growth and providing more jobs for regional Australia?

David Littleproud (Maranoa, National Party, Minister for Agriculture, Drought and Emergency Management) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Mallee for her question and her interest in understanding the role innovation and research play in Australian agriculture and in helping it reach its goal of $100 billion by 2030. Proudly, this year Australian agriculture reached $66.3 billion, when we estimated at the start of this financial year that it would get to only $60 billion—in spite of drought, fire, flood and COVID-19. Australian agriculture has been supported by the very best science and technology research that is supporting Australian agricultural jobs—all 334,000 of them. This will continue to grow those jobs—the new jobs within agriculture, the ones in research, science and technology that will bring the next generation to and keep them in regional and rural Australia.

That's why one of the key pillars of our Ag2030 plan is around investment in our innovation systems. We're doing that through cold, hard cash and making sure we're complementing the more than $1.1 billion that goes every year from the levy payer and the Australian taxpayer into research and development, to agricultural research and science. This is giving us cutting-edge tools to face up to the challenges that we here in Australia have had to endure over the last 12 months.

In particular, we've done that with a new digital platform now bringing together all the research that is being done across 15 commodity RDCs, making sure that there is a lens from one commodity to another about what they are doing and how they are doing it so that they can collaborate, instead of working in silos, so there is not duplication of research. We have a world-first digital platform for understanding what the best and brightest researchers in the world are doing here in Australia.

We're complementing that now with physical platforms right across the country—a $66 million investment, partnering with industry in $114 million, to create eight innovation drought hubs not just for drought research but for agricultural innovation research. That's partnering with those research development corporations, getting better bang for our buck. But, more importantly, it's putting these hubs out in the regions. These hubs are out in front of regional Australia, out in front of farmers, so that the adoption of that research and development will be taken up by farmers, because the research that we do is only worthwhile if our farmers take it up. These hubs already have nodes, and there are jobs that are being created in the hubs and the nodes. In particular, if you go to Victoria, from Dookie college there are nodes where we are putting men and women on the ground to extend that research and technology out to kitchen tables right across regional Victoria to ensure that our farmers know what's there and are given the opportunity to adopt it.

This is the type of environment that we're putting in place to make sure that the best and brightest are working in agriculture—the jobs in agriculture that bring our young people home not just into the traditional jobs but into the new jobs that will drive young Australians to live in regional Australia and work in agriculture.