Bruce Scott (Maranoa, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise this morning to speak on the Primary Industries and Energy Research and Development Amendment Bill 2007. This bill will lead to the improvement of eight statutory rule research and development corporations. Obviously, with my electorate of Maranoa, I have a very strong interest in research and development in the agricultural land management and stewardship areas.

This bill will provide for performance and accountability improvements. It will also ensure that these groups are better placed to enhance the important partnership between industry and government. Of all the changes stipulated by the act, it will further strengthen the delivery arrangements of research and development in rural industries. This can only be of great benefit to all agricultural industries in Australia. I repeat once again the importance of the partnership between science, industry and obviously the implementation of research after field trials with the farm sector.

Six of the eight research and development corporation industries include cotton, fisheries, forests and wood products, grains, grape and wine, and sugar. Smaller and emerging rural industries are covered by the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation. All of these sectors, with the exception of sugar, are industries that are represented in my seat of Maranoa, which I might add covers some 50 per cent of the land mass of Queensland.

I would first like to specifically talk about the benefits of research and development in the cotton and grain industries and the impact that is having on the farm sector in my electorate. If time permits, I want to touch on the beef, wool and wheat industries and a little later perhaps on the land management natural resource area. Research and development assists in minimising the effects of pests and predators on crops. For example, in the cotton industry, Bollgard II is the name of the cotton that has been bred and genetically enhanced to produce a toxin that has the potential to kill the helicoverpa species of insects. It has now been commercially available for three years. Unfortunately, not many of the producers in my electorate, particularly in the Darling Downs, have been able to make use of it over the three years because of the extreme drought and the lack of available water for irrigation.

There are two genes that occur naturally in the environment that are a toxin specifically to the helicoverpa species. These genes have been introduced to the regular cotton plant to provide the plant with protection from helicoverpa that normally attack the cotton plant, which would reduce the yield. It would reduce the yield dramatically if it was not sprayed over the top with insecticides.

The introduction of Bollgard II has significantly reduced the need for the helicoverpa and heliothis pests to be sprayed by over-the-top insecticides. ‘Over-the-top’ is a spray applied to the plant either from the air or by a land based vehicle to remove these pests. Other, secondary pests such as mirids, green vegetable bugs, whitefly—which is one that has emerged in the last 10 years—and aphids all still need to be monitored and treated if they reach certain thresholds within the crop, particularly if those threshold levels are at an intensity that would cause damage to the plant and obviously damage to the potential cotton production.

Plant breeders and researchers are constantly trying to breed new varieties of cotton that are more tolerant—and this is terribly important—of our harsh environment, especially varieties that require much less water to produce the same amount of lint and seed as the currently available varieties produce. That is a particular challenge for research: to have a plant that will produce the same or improved amounts of cotton lint and seed as you can get from existing varieties. That is obviously very important, given that the drought is an issue for all as water available now and in the future will probably become a more expensive commodity. Through research we have to find not only water efficiency measures that will lead to how efficiently we can use water but how efficiently a plant can use that water. It is not just about the efficient transport of water to a farm, around a farm or the recycling of water that is not used and how it can be reused; it is about how important it is for a plant itself to be able to utilise water and produce improved yields with the given amount of water.

It is also important for pesticides and herbicides to be developed which not only are environmentally friendly but also provide for more efficient and economic delivery of those herbicides and pesticides. Whilst we would all like to think that we can live without some of these herbicides and pesticides in many of our rural industries, it is just a fact of life that we will probably always have to have some of them if we are to maintain our current levels of production, and obviously we would like to see these levels of production increased on an economic basis. Roundup Flex is one such herbicide that is a herbicide tolerant, genetically modified variety of a cotton crop. Roundup Ready is currently in its last year of commercial availability. What will it be replaced with? The new technology Roundup Flex has now been commercially available for the first time this year. Once again, it is not able to be used very widely in my electorate because of the drought, but obviously research does not stop, nor does the need to continue this research to gain an advantage in reducing the number of sprays used on a crop, as well as genetically improving the plants themselves.

I want to point out the importance of what has led to a reduction in the control applications of spraying herbicides and pesticides on, for instance, cotton—particularly on new genetically modified crops such as Bollgard II cotton. In 2001-02, at 13 sites across Australia, Bollgard II cotton needed, on average, 2½ sprays across the crops to control pests and other insects that were attacking the crop, compared to conventional cottons—in other words, not Bollgard cottons—which needed about 10 sprays. That is a dramatic reduction in the number of sprays that had to be applied to the crops in 2001. These sorts of results are constant. In terms of total insect control applications in the periods 2002-03, 2003-04, 2004-05 and 2005-06, the differential between Bollgard II and the conventional cottons is similar year after year, which demonstrates the importance of research and development and, obviously, the development of new technologies and new genetic strains of plants—in this case, cotton.

The Roundup Flex plant is also able to have glyphosate, which we also know as Roundup, sprayed directly over the top of it for its entire life without damaging the fruit on the cotton plant—a tremendous step forward. Once again, this has come from research and it is delivering the benefit of being able to use Roundup Flex. This technology has meant less herbicide usage in general in the cotton industry.

I know in my electorate of Maranoa, Emerald particularly was a community that was very concerned, 15 to 20 years ago, about the level of herbicide sprays being used in the production of cotton in that area. With new technologies, new strains and new herbicides, the reduction in the numbers of sprays that are used has been dramatic. This has been a result of all the research that has gone into it. I know the communities and the growers are certainly much happier with what research has been able to deliver for that community.

The other important result of research is that there are now fewer residual herbicides used in cotton fields because farmers are able to control weeds that are susceptible to glyphosate throughout the life of crops without having to apply a herbicide with a long residual cycle. Once again, this is an important aspect of research because it has not only reduced the numbers of sprays but has also reduced the residual sprays that had been used in the past. That is another very positive step forward.

There are companies that are working at the fringes of genetic technology regarding insecticide and herbicide insertion of genes but we all know that that is very costly. It would cost a great deal of money—money which has not always been available—to continue with this research at the present time. I am sure that as time goes on it will become economical to look at this area of research, particularly in relation to many horticultural and agricultural crops.

I want to touch on grains research because, as I have mentioned a couple of times in my address, one of the worst droughts on record is affecting farmers right across Australia. Obviously my electorate has a very large number of farmers in it, so the development of drought resistant crops has been crucial to assist farmers’ ability to grow crops. They have been using new farming technologies and new strains of grains, particularly wheat and barley—cereal crops—and other crops so that they can sustain some production, even in dry years or drought years such as we have now, and particularly with long fallows.

Research into wheat goes on at the Queensland Wheat Research Institute in Toowoomba. A lot of field trials are conducted across my electorate. In fact, when I was farming actively many of the field trials in the western Maranoa took place on my property, so I had a direct involvement prior to coming into this place and was able to witness first hand the benefit of research. I saw the different strains of wheat—wheats that were more drought tolerant—using some of the genes that had been identified in places like Syria, including ICARDA, the research station outside Aleppo. Researchers were able to insert these genotypes into some of the Australian wheats to give our wheats more drought tolerance.

I will never forget that in the early part of that research the Mexican dwarf wheats were used but in our really dry times in Australia they were very dwarf wheats. They would produce grain but often they would be less than a third of a metre in height, which made it almost impossible to harvest the yield that they would produce in the worst of the worst droughts. So, by removing the dwarf gene from the strains of wheat and putting it into strains of wheat that had a longer stem, researchers were able to get the benefits of drought tolerance bred into a wheat that would be sustainable in our environment. I had many years of watching these trials conducted on our own property in western Maranoa so I certainly come to this debate with some practical experience in relation to wheat research.

In relation to sorghum—another crop which we grew on our property—particularly hybrid sorghums, research has gone on very successfully recently in my own electorate of Maranoa, at the Warwick Hermitage Research Station. That research is into green leaf technology. Farmers are always battling droughts, dry times and the availability of water. We all feel for them in these times of extreme drought. As a plant starts to die because of the lack of available moisture it is important that the plant does not die off. When a plant starts to die off the first thing that happens is that the leaves lose their green and turn brown. The leaf, of course, is a very important part of any plant because what it absorbs from the sunlight and from the atmosphere goes to the overall health and wellbeing of the plant. This green leaf technology has meant that the sorghum strains that they have bred have been able to withstand long periods of no rainfall and the plant still has an active capacity to produce grain if rains occur late in the season. So this is an example of research benefiting the grain sorghum industry. Because of this research many of these crops, if people have been fortunate enough to be able to plant, have produced a yield.

I want to touch briefly on the sheep and wool industry and the importance of research in that area. We all know there has been a worldwide campaign to get consumers around the world not to buy merino wool from Australia because of the practice of mulesing. I am opposed to those groups because they have little understanding of the impact of a flyblown sheep on production. The wool industry, to its great credit, is now developing a replacement for the surgical procedure of mulesing that will ensure that sheep can be run without having to be mulesed. If this new product is successful, it will result in the animal having the same sort of protection from flystrike in the breech that mulesing has provided for the wool industry for many decades.

As a former wool grower and practitioner who has used the surgical procedure of mulesing to ensure sheep were not flyblown, I certainly welcome this research and I congratulate the wool industry for it. They know that, if they do not take on this research, the lobby organisations around the world will continue this pressure—very wrongly, and for which I condemn them. I believe that by 2010 we will be in a situation where mulesing can be phased out and replaced by this new procedure that I am sure will be acceptable even to these extreme lobby organisations.

Time does not permit me to talk about the beef industry and land management systems, which are also important research areas. Suffice to say that the beef industry has been at the forefront of breeding cattle that are more tolerant to ticks and heat stress in northern Australia. I see my time has expired. I look forward to continuing some comments on this at a future time. (Time expired)

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