Barry Haase (Kalgoorlie, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a great pleasure to rise this evening to speak to the report of the Standing Committee on Primary Industries and Resources, entitled Farming the Future: the role of government in assisting Australian farmers to adapt to the impacts of climate change. I open by backing all of the comments by our chairman, the Hon. Dick Adams. Your chairmanship has been greatly appreciated. You led us through some troubled waters rather well and I believe we have given the industry a report which will give guidance in matters of climate change and how the very nature of adaptability is the key to successful and sustainable profit-making in the future.

I say ‘profit-making’ because, after all, that is what it is all about. We purchase land and maybe choose to pursue agriculture as a way of making an income for our families and, consequently, the nation. If we, as a result of changing climates in parts of Australia, find that we cannot use that land productively for the pursuit of making money through agriculture, then we need to be sufficiently well-informed and adaptable to change. That is what this report is all about: adapting to climate change.

My participation in the committee’s investigation was always a little troubled by the very fact that we were debating something I did not particularly agree with and that was ‘climate change’ as opposed to ‘weather’. But I was very happy to be part of a group who were investigating what is happening in agriculture and horticulture today—dryland, irrigated and natural environment—in regard to addressing adaptability.

I was quite impressed to find that the agricultural industry out there is very receptive to change. Even though we report about the recalcitrance of those involved in agriculture in relation to adapting and overcoming generational fixation on particular methods of farming, we found, and I was impressed with the fact, that there are so many people running sustainable businesses who are pushing the envelope constantly in finding a way to make their land more productive by adapting to the latest that technology has to offer and embracing change. If one is going to be successful and find that their farming practices, their use of land, is a sustainable and finance-producing operation, they firstly these days have to embrace change readily.

One of the areas that I was most impressed with was the ability of the industry today to embrace some of the most revolutionary methods of bringing depreciated country back into a productive state. Rehydrating, I found, was almost a buzzword, the idea being to slow the passage of water down through country to push it back underneath the surrounding floodplain country to rehydrate that country and make it more productive. However, I was very conscious of the fact that those very productive methods of sustainability are totally at odds with practices that I find in other states, in other soil and climatic conditions, where the very opposite is practised and embraced as revolutionary new techniques for farming that particular soil.

In closing, I wish to express my thanks on behalf of the coalition to the secretariat. I think you did a great job in keeping the cats together and guiding us through the whole process. Farming the Future is a report that I would thoroughly recommend to members of industry and members of this House.

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