Joe Ludwig (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Manager of Government Business in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I seek leave to incorporate an additional answer to Senator McKenzie's question to me on 15 September 2011.

Leave granted.

The answer read as follows—

All programs are costed through the budget process to project uptake and allocate funding. The costings assumptions are agreed with the Department of Finance and Deregulation before being accepted.

The modelling for the EC Exit Grant was predicated on the amount of areas with EC-declarations.

The 2011-12 budget allocation of $9.6 million targeted those farmers located within recent EC-declarations. These farmers had the shortest amount of time to recover from the effects of the recent drought.

The central part of the modelling took into account the number of EC Exit grants paid in 2009-10, and applied those results to the new target group.

Historical data of applications, grants and rejections was also used to project the budget required for the farmers located in EC-declared areas that were current on or after 1 July 2010.