POLITICIANS need to listen to farmers when it comes to forming agriculture policy writes TONY BURKE
If there is one thing I've learnt these past few years, it's that Australia's farmers don't need politicians to waste their time on party politics and slogans.
In every paddock and every shed I'm asked about what I believe and what are we delivering for the future.
The core principle has to be - whether your agriculture minister has grown up on a farm or in a city - that no government will have greater expertise about a property than the farmer who works that land.
That's why we had to move on from the old AWB monopoly and let farmers choose who would sell their wheat.
It is also why we increased the funding for research and development and introduced the FarmReady program so farmers can have access to the best science and tools to work out how it best fits on their land.
I don't believe it is OK for some of the research and development corporations to be inefficient or to create their own bureaucracies by paying each other obscene salaries.
It might work well if you're being viewed as being part of some agricultural club but I don't know how those practices can be justified to the farmer who is forking out levies.
For too long we have accepted a culture where no one was allowed to criticise the way drought relief was being delivered.
Everyone knows that it wasn't fair for people facing identical conditions to receive massively different treatment, either because they lived on the wrong side of a line which had been drawn on a map or because they had made tough business decisions and managed their risks during the good times.
Which is why, on the first of July this year, the Government started a 12-month trial of new drought measures in Western Australia which covers about half of the state and represents a fundamental shift in the way governments help farmers to prepare for future challenges.
The trial prepares farmers for the future rather than reacting to the past.
The trial allows us to carefully check that it will work for farmers.
I have formed very strong views about the importance of biosecurity. Day one of the job was a baptism of fire taking office in the middle of the equine influenza outbreak.
While the full cost will never be known there seems little doubt the industry took at least a $1 billion hit.
We need a rigorous set of systems and protocols which are followed and checked based on risk.
It's not simply a case of throwing money around, our systems need to be managed and constantly audited.
I remember clearly the scare campaigns which were pedalled about Labor before the last election. Farmers were lied to and told we would ban live exports and conduct an audit of every farm to tell producers what to grow. None of it was true.
The next round of scare campaigns won't be true either, but I think three years on there shouldn't be much doubt about what Labor believes and that we see farmers at the centre of agricultural policy.
The Labor Government has delivered on all the 2007 election commitments in the areas of agriculture, fisheries and forestry.
- Tony Burke is the Federal Agriculture Minister
