I WAS amazed reading Tony Burke's opening address at last week's ABARE Outlook conference.

It appears decision-making of major agriculture policy is made by our Minister in a completely different way to how I had imagined.

By what he stated, Mr Burke bases his decision-making on individual opinion rather than a democratic majority view.

This is a very interesting disclosure, particularly when Minister Burke refers to the threats to global food security.

By his own admission, he was advised by people, "who had been around the industry for a very long time" to "find a way to deliver election promises". So Mr Burke went out and stood in farmers' paddocks and had off-the-record discussions in private with the odd farmer. This provided all the information required to make major political decisions which would directly affect farm viability, valuable export dollars and global food security.

Mr Burke brushed off the farmer wheat marketing protest outside his first ABARE conference and also the large pro-single desk rally outside Parliament House. He told a small controlled delegation that he had talked to a wheat grower at Broken Hill and based his decision to deregulate on this one grower's opinion.

At the ABARE meeting, Mr Burke said he spoke to a single wheat grower in WA and decided he must rid Australia of the wheat single desk, despite the continued strong arguments against such a decision from more than 80 per cent of growers.

He also said how pleased he was with the (shotgun) sales of wheat into countries AWB had not previously sold to. Apparently, Mr Burke had not been told that this had been at the demise of premium quality markets which had a bigger direct impact on returns to our farmers. Not to mention the dysfunction, risk shifting, reduced hedging, increased supply chain cost and damage to farm viability it has caused.

Mr Burke also mentioned a meeting he held with an individual farmer who told him, that "while EC drought support was good for some, it was hurting others".

So Mr Burke is changing future drought support - particularly interest rate support - as it has had the effect of keeping farmers on their land, which presumably was the pretext for the scheme?

Mr Burke also cast a blanket over farmers who found themselves in debt as "poor managers for the lack of drought preparedness".

He cannot remember the 1980s Labor "recession we had to have" with record interest rates and the 1991 Labor removal of the wool reserve price scheme and the enormous rationalising and restructuring these caused.

Those farmers who were not wiped out by those government decisions had only a couple of years to prepare for any drought, let alone a 10-year drought. EC support was only designed for a short droughts, not a one-in-100-year drought.

Farmers are sick of being thrown from pillar to post with conflicting corporate and regulated government ideology, then blamed and victimised when things go wrong, while we have provided Australia with reliable high quality food and export dollars.

It's time for a majority view to set policy Mr Burke!