27 March 2009
Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry Tony Burke's address to Northern Territory Cattlemen's Association Annual Conference, Alice Springs
E&OE
I want to acknowledge both Roy Chisholm, the outgoing President, and the incoming President, Rohan Sullivan, as well.
It’s good to be back for the second year in a row. I’ve got to say, it’s a very tough crowd, a very, very tough crowd.
I remember having a day out at Kilto Station with Jack Burton about five months after I’d spoken to you last time. He said, “Your speech went down really well.” I said, “Mate, I didn’t know. No matter what I said, everyone just sat there with their arms folded, watching me.” I’ve never had an audience with so little feedback during the course of the speech, as I did last year. But I was told later it apparently went OK, which I was very pleased about.
Hopefully now you’ve seen some markers to give a bit of foundation to some principles that I put down last time about my view of this industry and my support for this industry. I imagine part of the arms-folded and, “Let’s watch this bloke”, was whether or not you would see enough truth behind the words I was saying. Well I hope now you have.
I’ve just come back from the Middle East where I’ve spent time dealing with my counterpart ministers there, dealing directly with purchasers of live animals, and visiting some of the feedlots that our sheep go to. And as many of you would know, last year I did a similar trip to Indonesia. I had an opportunity in Indonesia to visit the feedlots and to see a whole lot of the work that’s being done there.
You also would have seen, then, in the Budget, that we extended the Keniry funding through to 2011-12. You also would have seen that when I had the chance to take the major national agricultural television program to any part of Australian agriculture when they wanted to do a visit with me to a farm, the property that I said I wanted them to come with me to was out to the Riveren Station, out to the Underwoods. If I was going to get a chance to use that Landline platform, I wanted to use that again to indicate to the rest of the nation my support for the rest of this industry.
So hopefully by now the message is becoming clear, I am fair dinkum about my support for this industry. And for a large number of reasons. One of them is I think it’s about time you had a minister who spent his whole time opening up markets rather than shutting any down. I think you’ve got a right to see that sort of confidence. And the people who are buying from you, it’s about time they were able to see that sort of confidence in the Australian market. And I’m very happy to be able to provide that to the people who purchase from you, and be able to give those assurances to their governments.
Now the thing that’s changed around the world, and it became really clear to me over these last few days in the Middle East, is a year ago when people were talking about the GFC, they weren’t talking about a global financial crisis, they were talking about a global food crisis. And in Australia we see it all a bit differently. When we think about a global food crisis, we think about the need for foreign aid. We also think, for some of the wealthier nations, there’s an export opportunity as well for us.
For nations that are importers of food, a global food crisis is a significant political issue for them as well. And the fact that they want to be able to have markets that can be long-term guaranteed suppliers of food for them is a really important domestic issue. For us to be able to provide that assurance is something that means a lot to those governments and means the opportunities that are there for long-term contracts become something that is a very real option.
So there’s different ways that I get to play a role in trying to nail those principles down. The first thing, as I say, is making sure that my job is to open up markets, not to shut them down. That’s why we extended the Keniry funding as well. I want to have a continued conversation with the Australian people to show how the animal welfare standards are consistently improving.
I saw that in Indonesia with the knocking boxes that are being put in place there. I saw that with the work with the shadecloth over the sheep and the different work that’s being done throughout the Middle East, with the little trolleys that have been developed so that sheep at sail aren’t being dragged across the ground. All these sorts of things that have been done under the Keniry funding allow me to have the conversation with the Australia people at whatever time live exports becomes some sort of a central campaign issue for people again.
There will always be some people who will use their opposition to live exports as a way of hiding the fact that they’re just against farming. There will always be some of those people. I want to make sure that when some of the animal rights extremists try to run a campaign, I’m able to present a good story on your behalf explaining to the Australian people why they should continue to have confidence in this trade. The extension of the Keniry funding allows me to be able to do that.
Concluding the MoUs with different nations also allows me to do that. While I was there, I signed off the one with Saudi Arabia. We’re very close with Bahrain in being able to conclude the MoU there as well. And that provides an extra foundation there for the future success of the industry.
I’m very alive to the concern that any industry, for long-term success, needs to be able to spread its risk. And I am very alive to the concern that it is in the interests of yourselves that we get more options beyond Indonesia for the cattle market. And that’s something in the next year ahead that I certainly hope to be able to pursue more effectively as well.
The next thing that needs to be done – and this is in the context of the global food security debate at well – is to be able to make sure, not just that we’re continuing to produce food, but that food once produced is able to move more freely. The most substantial free trade agreement that has yet been negotiated by Australia so far is the one with New Zealand and the ASEAN nations. There’s good improvements there for the beef industries and good improvements there for live exports. And so that having been concluded there is again, another layer, another part of the building blocks for a strong future for the industry.
I know there’s always concerns at times of change. And there’s concerns about where the whole climate change discussion is going to take the livestock industries. I’ve been determined to make sure that we don’t just hang around waiting until 2013 to find out whether or not agriculture is going to come in to any [carbon pollution reduction scheme], without actually being able to make sure that we are on the front-foot between now and then, so that whatever the decision is, we are well-positioned.
And that’s why there’s a range of types of research that you can do into finding ways of reducing emissions from the mouths of livestock. But I’ve made sure that the R&D money that we’re putting in, for a start, is a lot more than was planned to be put in. We promised an increase to $15 million in that area. I got challenged in Parliament, actually, for breaking that promise. But I wasn’t fussed about breaking a promise of $15 million and replacing it with one worth $46.2 million, and more than tripling the funding that we’ve dedicated to that area of research.
But secondly, we’re not just increasing the money, but making sure that the money that we spend is directed to areas where you don’t just have options to reduce emissions. You’re actually improving productivity as well. The sorts of areas where that works you’ve all been involved in for many years now.
If you’re looking at being able to turn the animals off at a younger age, that’s effectively a way of emissions reduction. It’s also a significant productivity improvement. If you’re looking at ways of being able to improve feed efficiency, yes, that’s a way of being able to reduce emissions. Just think of emissions as another form of agricultural waste. It’s also something that improves productivity. And so I’m trying to make sure that the research goes as hard as it possibly can down that path, so that the emissions profile, as we get towards 2013, is better anyway, and whatever is done as way of improvement, is having the spin-off benefit of also being an improvement in productivity for you.
When you look at the different impacts that Rabobank just went through, the different impacts that we’re feeling in the middle of the global recession, there are many purchases that you can put off. And many industries are taking a hit because of that. The one thing that people aren’t really able to put off is their purchasing of food. And that’s part of the story in the context of increased global demand. It’s part of the story of why agriculture has been able to be one of the sectors of the Australian economy that’s continued to do particularly well at this point in time.
There’s other impacts as well which are easing some of the pressures which we would have been talking about only a year ago. One of the challenges a year ago was chronic labour shortages. Now the labour supply problems certainly are not yet 100 percent fixed. And you don’t want to be relying on a downturn to get a better supply of labour. Notwithstanding that, some of the pressures that were there a year ago are a bit easier now.
I am very pleased that, even in the context of these pressures easing, the Northern Territory Cattlemen’s Association made a direct application to my Department to say, “Well, there’s concerns about labour shortage. There’s concerns about wanting to do more in the space of indigenous employment. How can we make these two areas work together?” And how can we build on the successful pilot that was run, I think it was in 2008-09, that had ten people go through?
Of those ten people who went through the Indigenous Mentoring Program there, nine of them are fully employed on cattle stations. The remaining one would have been, but was snapped up by the Territory Department. And I’ve noticed some of the faces around here as I’ve been speaking. I should acknowledge the Territory MLAs who are present here as well. So that pilot has been very successful.
The application that came to me was for that now to go to a full program, so that instead of having ten people involved, we’re able to have 45 people involved at a cost of $350,000. I’m pleased to let you know that I’ve approved that in full. And that program is going to be able to go forward. It’s a great example of the work being done in a way that the Territory’s been able to deliver on for some time, and looking at how we can do even better in the future to make sure that opportunities for indigenous Australians are centred on being able to provide jobs and be able to provide some of the mentoring that can lead to long-term successful employment. So I’m very grateful to the Association for putting that application in. And I’m very pleased to have been able to approve that in full.
There’s challenges for the industry that will always be there. You can’t be in agriculture without being in an area, like with any business, where there’s significant risk and where the environment is constantly changing. My intention is to provide whatever levels of certainty I can, and to make sure that whatever platform the Government provides, it’s a bit higher each year than it might have been the year before. So whether that goes to the MoUs with your trading partners, with those nations; whether it goes to making sure, through the Keniry funding, that we’re able to provide a constant conversation with the Australian people showing the merit of this industry; whether it goes to the free trade agreements and the trade negotiations that take place. In all of those issues, I want each year as I come back and report to you, to be able to report progress that’s in the right direction.
But I say again what I said last year, and what I said to my daughters as I went in to be sworn in as a minister. Everyone was there in their big white cars, except I had the family with me, so we were there in a big white Tarago. And as we went in my wife Cathy said to my daughters, “This is the same road that you saw John Howard drive down when he was calling the election.” And my eldest said, “But where are the protesters?” Because when they watched the TV, with Howard going down, there were demonstrators everywhere. And I looked up ahead and there was one lonely demonstrator. It was a human being dressed as a sheep carrying a sign, “Stop live exports.” And I explained to my daughters what that was about.
And the industry is one, and I’ve got to say, of the many different sectors and commodities across the country, it’s one that I feel particularly close to. And I hope you feel that. I think the magnificence of the land on which you all work, whether it be in a family operation or whether it be in a substantial corporate operation, is very close – and I don’t want to sound too dramatic or emotional – but it’s pretty close to the soul of this nation. It really is. It’s no accident that when they wanted to create a movie called Australia, while the cattle looked a bit different to what they look these days, the land they chose was the land that you work.
And it’s an industry that Australia should be rightly proud of. It’s an industry which has a good story to tell on continuous improvement, whether it be continuous improvement of the quality of your business, continuous improvement of the genetics, continuous improvement of the markets that we’ve been able to start opening up again, and continuous improvements of the animal welfare characteristics that are out there.
And against that, at some point, we all hope it’s a long way off, but at some point – I’m quite relaxed about it – the animal rights extremist campaign will kick off again. I want you to know one thing very clearly: we have a good story to tell and you have a minister in the Federal Government of Australia very happy to stand side-by-side with you and defend the good work that’s being done by organisations such as your own.
Congratulations on your 25th anniversary. I’m sorry I can’t hang around for the dinner this time. I’ve got to do what many of you have to do from time-to-time and that’s, after quite a few weeks away, go back and introduce yourself to your family, which I’ll be doing this afternoon. But I didn’t want to miss out on being here. And that’s why I’ve come straight here from the Middle East.
Congratulations on the last 25 years. You’ve got a hell of a lot more than 25 years to come. Pleasure to be here with you.
[ENDS]