Tony Windsor (New England, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

As with other members of the Standing Committee on Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry I would like to commend the committee secretariat and also the chairman, the member for Hume, for the way in which he has conducted this committee not only for this inquiry but other inquiries that we have embarked upon as well. I listened with interest to the member for Barker and I thought he made some interesting comments on his own background and how that embraced what is happening in his part of the world at the moment.

I will reflect on my background because there are some similarities. I went to the Farrer Memorial Agricultural High School, and I am pleased to say that the committee as part of its deliberations visited that school and I think received some very good evidence from people at the school. I then went on to the University of New England and studied agricultural economics and did a number of other things after that when I was involved in the farm sector. I am 56 years old—I know I look a lot younger—and during that period of my life there was a degree of optimism in agriculture. In the last 15 to 20 years a degree of pessimism has developed. To give a parallel: my elder son, who is 24, went to the same high school, attended the same university and did an agriculture business degree and a degree in natural resource management and cotton production, is now flying a helicopter for a mining company in Western Australia. I think that encapsulates the situation. Obviously there are tremendous opportunities out there. He was the top boy in agriculture in New South Wales. That is not suggesting a big loss to agriculture but I think it says something about how young people are making decisions about their future. Obviously money is an important ingredient in that decision, and the drought and other issues are having their impact as well.

Having young people in agriculture is very important, but I think my age group is about the average age for farmers—the member for Barker being a good deal older. One of the things that I would like to say relates to the policy mix and the way in which government sells the agriculture message, the food production message—and in a sense this also represents the community. I think there are a number of things that we really do have to take on board. Firstly, the policy mix that state and federal governments have had over many years has essentially centralised population. The economic centralist view is that the most effective way to service the greatest number of people in the lowest cost per unit is to put them in a feedlot. That is what we are doing in a sense by concentrating people into our major urban areas, because it is cost-effective.

Just today in the main chamber we had a debate about the cost of urban land and the cost of people living there. What we have done in our policy mix is move people towards those scenarios, and in a sense we have developed an artificial economic base that cannot afford the removal of pressure from our major metropolitan areas because the price of land, the price of accommodation, the price of property and the debt ratios that people have in those communities is so unsustainable that if it actually returned to the real price we would have an economic collapse, and obviously governments would lose their places as well.

The basic question we have to ask in terms of the issues that were raised here today about the role that agriculture plays in our society and the basic question that governments have really got to ask in terms of the policy mix is: do we want agriculture? Do we really want agriculture, or does it provide a cluttering up of the inland that requires roads and other infrastructure to be provided and river systems to be irrigated from et cetera? If you look at the policy mix of the governments, you can see that it is really sending a message that we do not want agriculture. It is making it harder and harder for agriculture to exist. When we look at the sorts of things that the farm sector can do to come to grips with a corrupt world market in terms of most of our grains and most of our products, government policy—federal government policy in particular, but also the states—has been anti the development of agricultural pursuits.

If we look at the renewable energy sector, for instance, we see that anybody who moves into the ethanol or biodiesel sector as of now, under government policy that will come into place in 2011, will be taxed for producing renewable energy. It is this debate that really encapsulates the problem that agriculture has. Because agriculture in Australia has to compete in a world market, and because it produces surpluses, it has to do so at a very cost-effective rate. The profitability for those people in that sector is being eroded, and that is why young people are not going back into the agricultural sector. So I think we in this parliament really have to have a serious look at whether part of that surplus food production that we generate out of this country should be transferred into another market—the energy market, the fuel market. That has a whole different driver in terms of a price regime and could in fact really be a profitability driver for agriculture as we know it, not only in the grains sector but also in the sugarcane area.

The other area in which I think we have been negligent in the current climate change debate is the carbon debate. The Prime Minister put in place a task force to look at carbon sequestration, carbon marketing emissions et cetera. Agriculture was not even included in that committee. The accumulation of humus and organic matter in our soils and some of the new technologies in terms of pasture production are an ideal carbon sink, and we should be looking at the opportunity that agriculture has in terms of entering another market—not only the food market but also the carbon market. There are enormous opportunities there now that carbon trade is starting to take place in the states.

No-till agriculture, where humus and organic matter have advanced, where the infiltration rate of soils has improved, where the soil quality has improved and where soil erosion has decreased are all things that are part of what we should be looking at if we really want to bring agriculture into the new century and address its future in a positive way rather than leaving it back out there, as government policy has tended to do, as producers of food have to face the world market at any price—a corrupted world market price and an artificial domestic cost structure. Blind Freddy can see that that will mean that the farm sector and our young people, whom we would like to encourage into that sector, are going to be marginalised in terms of their profitability base.

Another issue is agroforestry. Even in the $10 billion plan that the Prime Minister is currently talking about, we again have a range of mixed messages. A few years ago we were being encouraged to plant trees because it was going to drop the watertable and improve salinity. Now, in the fine detail of this plan that has been cobbled together on a very small piece of paper, in my view, we see that farm forestry or agroforestry is going to be reinvestigated because of its possible interception of water from the Murray-Darling system. Those are some of the issues where we need some clarity in terms of the long-term nature of agriculture. One of the earlier speakers mentioned managed investment schemes. These are the issues about which we really need to get some long-term certainty in place so that people can make commitments to the agricultural sector.

Briefly, Cotton Basics was raised here earlier. It is a very good training package and can be used as a model for other areas. The agricultural colleges are something that we really have to revisit. Once again, I commend the chairman, the member for Hume, and the others involved in this committee, particularly the people behind the scenes who made a massive contribution. (Time expired)

Debate (on motion by Mr Neville) adjourned.

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