Jill Hall (Shortland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to congratulate the member for Canning on bringing this motion to the House. It is a motion of great significance. The member for Forrest, if I am ever in Western Australia, she may take me for a tour of her farm so as I can watch the dung beetles at work. I think that would be quite inspiring. Dung beetles do play a very important role in our environment, particularly within the farming environment.

I would like to also associate myself with the statement made by all speakers in this debate and the member for Hunter, too, where he pointed out the important role that the ABC plays in rural areas and in getting messages out to people. My heart goes out to the people in the ABC at Newcastle that are facing cuts at the moment.

The dung beetle is an interesting little creature. It works to improve pasture production. It leads to a greater capacity on the land. It reduces the need for fertiliser, and it has this recycling process that actually creates nutrients within the soil. It improves parasite control—I just mention the common fly—and it works to reduce the impact of the bush fly in agricultural areas. By recycling the dung, it then leads to a situation where there are fewer bush flies, and it has a very big impact with buffalo dung as well as cow dung. It is one of those species that were introduced into Australia in the sixties and the nineties that has actually had a beneficial impact. We have had others. The cane toad is an example of something that was introduced to control a problem but created a problem, but it is not like that with the dung beetle. The dung beetle has actually, really, made a very positive impact in our environment and our agricultural community.

As well as improving parasite control, it leads to greater water storage in the soil and more earthworms. It is a natural solution, and that is what I really like about it. So many cases of using chemicals in farming have led to problems. This is natural. This is nature solving the problem that exists. It is also a scientific approach. I should congratulate CSIRO, as other speakers have, because they have done a lot of research in this area. I believe that we could do more to help them with research, because, by researching these types of approaches to agriculture and then investing in them, we get really good outcomes for our community—such as greater productivity on the land—and, at the same time, we control problems that exist within the community.

Federal and state governments need to work together on this. There needs to be a strong plan of where to go from here. We need to invest, and that is the secret when it comes to agriculture and all industries within Australia. We need to invest in the research. We need to then invest in the development of that research, and then we need to invest in our rural communities so that they can grow and thrive. It is because of motions like this, which really bring such an important issue to the parliament, that we can move forward. Hopefully in the future there will be plans and investment in that agricultural research and the development of the organisations that are important to support this research—organisations like the CSIRO, and the ABC, which gets the information out there to the farming communities. We do not want cuts; we want investment.

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