Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for External Territories) Share this | Hansard source

In fact it is twice as much as is produced by the Ord, as my friend the member for Brand points out. That is not commonly understood or known. Mangoes are $60 million to $80 million; melons are $50 to $60 million; and over $40 million of Asian vegetables are produced each year. Vietnamese and Cambodian farmers alone are turning over more than $60 million in produce. This is a good story—a really good story—and I know these farmers are incredibly proud of it. Their success is driven by hard work and by the most important fact, which is that they are connected to their markets.

We know here in this place, or we should know, that market driven cropping is the only way forward for horticulture in the north. Rural area farmers are very concerned that, in the instance of the Northern Territory government, planning will limit the potential for expansion of their industry. And I am afraid that, sadly, the conservatives in this place and elsewhere, and particularly in the Northern Territory government, seem to have little understanding of the potential of this industry—and not only its current value but its future potential. Recent planning documents do not even identify existing farms, let alone zone potential horticultural areas that could provide future economic growth to the farming industry.    

That should be an issue of concern to us. I hear a lot from the government benches around developing northern Australia—water, dams and the like—but these very important issues around planning, around understanding what there is and how to exploit the existing capacity to produce more, are not properly understood. There seems to be no real appetite to get that understanding, and that is a matter of grave concern.

Decisions have been made which have affected farmers around issues to do with labour. There is no understanding of this labour market, of the need for itinerant workers and how they should be paid or the hours that they can work. They are being penalised by decisions that have been taken by this government. That is a sad indictment of a government which purports to understand the importance of economic development and economic growth in northern Australia. In this particular instance, they have not only shown their ignorance; they have failed to understand and listen, or even open their ears to the possibility of listening, to the demands which have been properly made of them.

As NT Farmers CEO Shenal Basnayake said recently:

… with the expected increase in population in the Darwin region and with some parts of the Litchfield subregion already being developed for residential purposes, farmers were coming under increasing pressure.

'If we see what the government is doing, inviting investors in agriculture, we need to give them product that they want to invest in,' Mr Basnayake said.

'You need to make sure those things are available.

'They’re not going to invest in 2.02ha blocks.'

And they are not. Whilst urban encroachment is an issue, the fact is that there have been farmers who have sweated their guts out for a long time now, producing a great deal of wealth for the north and for themselves. But it is not only there that we need to think about the potential of the north, and the Northern Territory in particular.

I want to refer to a very innovative group of people in Wadeye. The Ngepan Patha is a highly functional women's group in Wadeye, and they have undertaken a very important initiative. They are involved in art, material design and production business, and they have added a new and potentially game-changing initiative to their commercial portfolio. This is important. They have been working in with the prawn aquaculture industry in the development of a natural cooked prawn preservative that has potential for considerable added value to that product. This is a women's group, working in Wadeye in the Northern Territory. The local plant is indigenous to several regions in the north of Australia. Originally known colloquially as the 'billygoat plum' and these days more commonly known as 'Kakadu plum' in the Northern Territory and 'gubinge' in the Kimberley, it can be processed to produce a powder. The powder appears to be much sought after by major prawn producers. This plum powder extends the life of cooked prawns from three to 10 days with no loss of quality or taste. It consequently is valued at $450 per kilogram. About 10 kilos of plum go to make one kilo of the powder.

The careful development of this initiative by working with a research facility, major commercial and investment entities and most particularly with the local Wadeye community is producing very good results. Ngepan Patha coordinator Margot and her team need to be congratulated for their work. I know that they are working in conjunction with people in the Kimberly who are working on the gubinge, and they are working around setting up a cooperative enterprise to exploit the possibilities of this particular product.

I spoke earlier about the NT farmers and what they are doing to represent the interests of the broader horticulture and farming community across the Northern Territory—horticulture is producing a tea-tree up north at Ali Curung, around Katherine and in the Darwin rural area. But this particular group of Aboriginal people in Wadeye are not being properly recognised. What we have heard about Wadeye in the past has pretty much all been negative, but here we have got a group of people with initiative to develop a new enterprise using local produce harvested by themselves and made into a commercial product which has a real impact on the potential shelf life of prawns. That sort of integrated approach to developing the north is something which we need to properly understand more. There is a lot more activity happening in the region than that, of course.

I also now want to talk about something which I am very committed to and very concerned about, and that is health issues in remote parts of northern Australia, particularly in Aboriginal communities of my own electorate. Recently, I had the great opportunity to accompany Professor Brian Owler from the AMA around a number of communities over a couple of days. I hosted him. We visited Kintore in the west, and Urapuntja and Ampilatwatja in the east. Our purpose was to talk to health professionals in Alice Springs, Baker IDI and Flinders University. These discussions were about what the health status was like.

We learnt a great deal, and the great deal that we learnt was a matter of great concern. At Urapuntja, for example, we were talking to the people from Baker IDI, and they pointed out to us that the highest incidence of type 2 diabetes in the world is in this region. And shockingly, they had identified a seven-year-old girl with type 2 diabetes. If that does not worry everyone in this chamber and everybody who may be listening—not that there are too many, I suspect, given that the broadcasting light is not on—then understand this: the implications of this on the government's expenditure are enormous not only on health directly but also in other areas such as housing and education. Yet when we talk about these issues more generally, we ignore the interconnectedness of them. We do not see the whole; we see a part. If we want to address this issue of diabetes, the impact it has on end stage renal failure and the high incidence of renal disease in Central Australia and elsewhere, then we need to get back to a very basic discussion about what is required.

When we were at Kintore, and indeed in Alice Springs, we visited the Purple House. The Purple House is a renal treatment facility set up by people, in the first instance, from Kintore, the Walungurrucommunity, who auctioned paintings, raised $1 million and with support put two renal chairs in their own community in the Western Desert—not commonly understood in this place, nor appreciated. Now they operate in a number of communities, not only in Central Australia but also in Western Australia, providing patients with end stage renal failure the capacity to be treated in their own communities. But when we ask this question and we talk about the importance of putting this infrastructure in place, we then have silly debates going on around this place around what our primary concerns should be and where the money should come from when fundamentally we have no choice. If we want to alleviate poverty, and if we want to address the health needs of these people I have identified and Professor Owler was able to talk to, then we need to do a great deal more than we currently are.

We need to understand that we require an integrated approach across portfolios. For example, if we want to address issues to do with FASD in education in the Northern Territory, we should not be relying on the education department to do the diagnosis. It requires the participation of health professionals. Yet we know in Central Australia there are insufficient health professionals to do more than one diagnosis a month. We know that this is an issue reaching chronic proportions in some communities.

We will never address issues to do with preventing chronic disease until we understand the importance of addressing maternal and child health transition to early education, and making sure healthy children are made healthy adults. Otherwise, what we are going to have in this place in 25 to 50 years' time is the next generation of people standing up here, as I am today, complaining about the lack of infrastructure for the support of diabetes and renal failure, and the failure to understand the importance of preventative health measures to stop these things happening in the first place—to stop the onset of these chronic diseases. If we do not do that here then we are abdicating our responsibilities as Australians. We have a responsibility across this parliament to understand the importance of this. We should not be arguing about the money; we should be making sure the money is made available. If we do not make sure the money is made available, what we are committing ourselves to is ensuring that this generation of people with chronic diseases are going to die young—and the next generation, who are in their early teens today, will die young.

If we ever want to close the gap, we have got to change our minds and do things very differently from what we are doing currently. That requires a lot of hard work and a lot of thought and it means getting out of the silos of particular portfolios, understanding we need a whole-of-government approach to these things and appreciating that it requires investing money. Let us not argue about it. It needs to happen—otherwise, as I say, the plight of these people which exists today will not be alleviated.

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