22 February 2009
DAFF09/85T

Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries & Forestry, Tony Burke Interview with Helen Dalley, Sunday Agenda, Sky News

E&OE

SUBJECTS: Victorian fires, Queensland and NSW floods, impact on farmers, impact on consumers

Helen Dalley: Today the nation will remember those who died in the Victorian bushfires, most killed when the perfect firestorm ripped through their communities with cyclonic force on Black Saturday. But even as we mourn, the Federal and Victorian Governments, and the residents themselves are starting to rebuild the communities devastated by those fires. 

Agriculture Minister Tony Burke has just returned from a visit to farms and recovery centres in Victoria and the inland sea of water that was once farming land in Queensland and he joins us now.  Tony Burke, welcome to Sunday Agenda.

Tony Burke: Hello. 

Helen Dalley: Now, you’ve just been on this tour a couple of days in Victoria and Queensland.  Let’s start with Victoria, I understand you met a number of farmers, a beef farmer who’d lost a lot of his fencing and had huge fodder problems, and also orchardists whose apples were as black as passion fruit.

Tony Burke: That’s right.  For a time there people understandably weren’t turning to the damage to their businesses because they had to deal with the human tragedy.  Now people are starting to begin to work their way through the damage to their businesses and the very beginnings of that recovery.

So it’s an extraordinary time and a difficult time for them. And there’s been a consistent story put to me by almost every farmer, which is all the bits that were insured were the bits that have survived. And overwhelmingly where the destruction has hit have been losses that fall directly to the farm business.

Helen Dalley:  Yes. So are they intending to rebuild, a lot of those farmers that you spoke to?

Tony Burke: It’s not just them rebuilding, it’s the community helping them rebuild.  Consecutive days I’d go from farm-to-farm and find an army of volunteers there ripping out the old fencing, re-staking the young apple trees that had survived. And so you find this contrast on any property between the utter destruction and this army of volunteers from neighbouring farms that survived, farmers from different areas.

There was a couple touring Australia who started in Sydney 18 months who I met on a farm in Gippsland who were ripping out fencing. That’s helping with the grieving process, helping with trying to establish some level of optimism. One farmer, when I mentioned the optimism he was showing, he just looked straight back to me and said: “Well, Tony, that’s all we’ve got left.”

Helen Dalley: So were you surprised by that sense of optimism and also no doubt a sense of humour?

Tony Burke:  Oh that’s right.  I mean the optimism did surprise me because you know the level of grieving that people are going through. You’ve got some sense of that from what you understand from the news before you get there. But the optimism took me by surprise.

Part of the optimism is being clung onto and pushed forward in the absence of there being much else. The volunteer assistance has been incredible, because farmers generally are not people who will ever ask for help and so a lot of the volunteers ...

Helen Dalley: They’re very independent and they’re sole kind of workers, aren’t they?

Tony Burke: That’s right. And the classic example of this was cheques for farmers in the Queensland floods and their determination straight away was to sign them over to Victoria. 

Helen Dalley: It was extraordinary, wasn’t it?

Tony Burke: Yes. And so that sort of independence has people very reluctant to seek help.  And so a lot of the volunteer organisations haven’t been waiting for the request, be it Rotary or be it whatever group has done the coordination or the Victorian Farmers Federation. They’d just rung the farmer that morning and said, “There’s going to be 30 people, you’d better let us know which fencing you want done first.”

Now, it’s a mammoth task, and a few days of volunteer help doesn’t get you over the length of the recovery. But there’s no doubt on the ground that sort of assistance started straight away.

Helen Dalley:  So what will get them over those months of recovery that it’s going to take?

Tony Burke: Nothing can undo the damage. And the full extent of the damage to businesses and farms in Victoria, for example, we don’t fully know. Depending on what follows in the next few weeks it could be worse again.  Bizarrely, the worst thing that could happen for most of these farmers in Victoria now would be a really heavy downpour, because we’re not just talking about a fire that took out trees and fences.

There was an area that I went through in Gippsland where there was just no undergrowth at all, just black trees sticking up and I asked what the level of undergrowth had been there previously.  They said: “Tony, it was a metre high and you couldn’t see through it.” But that’s all gone completely. 

If we get light rain and enough to start sparking some regrowth then that’ll make a big difference to the recovery.  A heavy downpour would take all the soil away. It’ll all go straight into the river systems.

Helen Dalley: Yes. But they still do need rain in parts of Victoria to actually really douse those fires.

Tony Burke: That’s right, where the fires are going. But in the areas that it’s been through if we follow with a particularly heavy downpour there’ll be years of topsoil that’ll just wander off the property.

Helen Dalley: You met with members of the Victoria Farmers Federation.  You also went to the Traralgon Recovery Centre and met a number of people there including the firefighters. What sort of stories did they tell you and what sense were you getting towards the end of the second week after this disaster happened?

Tony Burke: Well, certainly at Traralgon it’s not just the farmers that are at the recovery centre, there’s also people who live in more residential accommodation and have lost their homes. One home that we went past actually had a sign up, ‘Renovator’s Delight, Large Skylight, Charcoal Interior.’ 

Helen Dalley: The black sense of humour -- it warms your heart, really, doesn’t it?

Tony Burke: That’s right, yes. I went down and spoke to the bloke and said: “Oh, is this your property, I saw the sign?”  And he said: “Yeah, my wife put that up, she’s got a better sense of humour than me.” 

Helen Dalley: Yes, trying to see some sense of humour in it.

Tony Burke:  That’s right. There’s also places like the recovery centre which are trying very hard to make sure that people keep their safety now, too. 

Helen Dalley: How do you mean?

Tony Burke: Well, a lot of these properties would have had asbestos in them - so to make sure that people don’t go there and start cleaning up their home and find that the challenges on this day of mourning aren’t being repeated 20 years down the track.

Helen Dalley: But also as we understand it a lot of the trees may have burnt-out hollows. They still may not be safe until perhaps SES gets in there and cuts a few down.  Some of those areas are still not safe to go into, are they?

Tony Burke: That’s right. There’s some real dangers that are still there. And there’s a natural desire from people to want to start that sort of clean-up straight away. I mean these are the farmers who helped fight the fires. They then are now going through the grieving with everybody else and they want to be part of the recovery straight away, too.

But there’s some safety issues in how quickly you engage with that and making sure that the State authorities are doing parts of the clean-up where for safety’s sake it really needs to be done by them.

Helen Dalley: All right. On the financial side there’s the first round of assistance; $25,000 grants to farmers and small businesses as well as interest-free loans.  Briefly, how do people quality, how do they access those?

Tony Burke: For those there’s a financial authority in Victoria set up by the State Government that people make the applications to, but you go to a place like the Traralgon Recovery Centre and you’re in a hall and it’s not a matter of waiting to find the government agencies, they’re all sitting around on tables there. 

Helen Dalley: But that’s for the people who come into town and we know that some residents haven’t come into town, they haven’t left their houses yet.  So is that going to be a problem for them to access it?

Tony Burke: Well, as much as possible the services are getting out into the communities.  Certainly there are some people … when I was at Traralgon there was a farmer there who’d come in for the first time, he hadn’t left the property until then. So every effort is being made to make those connections.  But you’re right, Helen, these connections don’t happen automatically and some of them are taking longer than we’d like.

Helen Dalley: All right.  I do want to talk about Queensland.  Now, you travelled by air and you got to see a large area, that is what 120 kilometres or something, at its worst is covered in water. 

Tony Burke: At its peak this flood was the size of South Australia and there’s still places that you go to where you’re looking at a flood that’s horizon-to-horizon.

Helen Dalley: But fortunately from that peak it has started to come down, hasn’t it?

Tony Burke: It’s started to come down.  One of the things that the farmers there were explaining to me, because I was right up into the Gulf country there, they know that they get floods but they haven’t had a flood like this one. And some of the implications of a flood so vast are quite different to what they’ve normally deal with. 

If you have a flood for a couple of weeks when the water goes you can get extraordinary regrowth, but when land is being covered by water for six weeks the impact when the water goes is actually bizarrely identical to drought. Nothing survives and the soil will dry out relatively quickly because there’s no growth to cover it or to keep it in. 

Helen Dalley: So it will be like drought when the water does finally does go down.

Tony Burke: For the areas that will have been covered for six weeks, that’s the expectation.

Helen Dalley: Alright. Really briefly, because we’ve almost run out of time, is it the case that the damage from Queensland and the damage to food production and therefore the economy will be greater damage financially than in Victoria?

Tony Burke: We think so. It’ll take the first muster in May or June before we know exactly what the cattle numbers are.  And some cattle, the stronger ones, can swim for a couple of weeks.  But certainly most of the calves of the last season will have been taken out. And you’ve got to remember, Queensland is the calf factory for the Australian beef industry so there will be some very significant challenges in total beef numbers.

The full extent to that we don’t know yet, but we do expect it will be tougher than in Victoria.  We won’t expect an immediate price impact on that out of beef. 

It’s not just the beef areas in Queensland though. Sugar cane’s taken a 20% hit in parts and a number of our fruits, our stone fruits. Similar with apples down south, there’ll be a number of fresh produce items where if people are willing to put up with more blemished fruit the next couple of months, that will certainly help the farmers to do the best with the produce that has survived.

Helen Dalley: Alright. So all of us shoppers in un-flood damaged areas, we really shouldn’t be quite as picky as we usually are.

Tony Burke: If there was ever a time to be picky, it’s not the next few months.  People don’t just want government assistance or the money that the communities raised, ultimately they want their businesses to work and as consumers we can really help make that happen more quickly.

Helen Dalley: Tony Burke, we really appreciate you coming in today on this National Day of Mourning. Thanks for joining us.

Tony Burke:  A pleasure to be here, Helen.

ENDS