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

Last night I had the great pleasure of attending the AgriFutures Rural Women's Award event in the Great Hall. There were 600 of us there, celebrating the best and finest of Australia's young female entrepreneurs in the agricultural sector.

The award winner was Tanya Egerton. She's from the Northern Territory and she started up a not-for-profit organisation that is opening up op shops on remote Indigenous communities, bringing in clothes from outside, letting the ladies from the community run the op shop and then put those profits back into their own communities. It is highly commendable, as are the other six finalists' projects—everything from putting Australian tuna back into tuna tins in Australia, which we used to do in Port Lincoln, in my home electorate, and we no longer do, to people setting up complementary health services in rural areas.

Of course, one of my favourites is the one that comes from my electorate. Nikki Atkinson lives in a small community not so far from Port Augusta, at Wilmington, in what we would call Horrocks Pass. She has established a fashion label and is making beautiful woollen wedding gowns out of superfine merino wool that they produce on their property. It's called Horrocks Vale Collections. In fact, she'll be taking her collection to London in the next couple of weeks, to a huge bridal exposition there. So good luck to Nikki. The reason I harp on about Nikki a bit is that she comes from my home town of Kimba—in fact, my home community of Buckleboo. I went to school with her father and have watched Nikki grow up. Both she and her parents are personal friends.

I'm driven to also inform the parliament that there were three SA finalists vying for the award last night. One of the others also came from my home community of Buckelboo. In fact, she grew up on the farm alongside mine, and her brother now leases part of my property. Susie Williams lives down in the Fleurieu Peninsula and has started up a platform delivering news services to agricultural communities.

So it was tick, tick, tick—there were seven ticks last night. It was a great celebration of agriculture and of the females that work and make a real difference in agricultural communities. I'm one of those people who managed to establish a successful farm on the back of the knowledge that the way for your farm to succeed is to marry a schoolteacher or nurse, who provides off-farm income. I'm not the only one that's chosen that pathway! But those women that join us in the job of feeding Australia are wonderful, and they excel.