Federal Nationals’ leader David Littleproud has addressed the National Farmers’ Federation.
This is what he had to say.
On behalf of our great nation, we say thanks for all that you’ve endured and all that you’ve achieved. Put in perspective what you’ve endured. Fires, floods, droughts, cyclone, this little thing called COVID-19. It was you. It was you that paid the bills. It was Australian agriculture, it was regional Australia that paid the bills for the last two years, kept this nation going while many other industries were put under a doona, you kept on producing, and producing at record levels. And I’m proud to say that our legacy as a government will hopefully continue on with the new government.
Agriculture shouldn’t be partisan. The opportunity to get to become the Australian Agriculture Minister is to leave a legacy, to leave a legacy that’ll endure beyond governments, beyond parliaments. And that’s why I’m proud to say that we supported the NFF’s ambitious goal of $100 billion dollars by 2030.
We want to make sure we back that, not just with policy, but with cold hard cash. And we took together an Ag 2030 plan that went to the key elements, the key drivers that were going to drive agriculture and drive regional and rural Australia. Particularly when you look at the challenges we faced in trade. We invested record amounts over $300 million in modernizing our trading platforms, putting more agricultural counsellors on the ground in over 22 Embassies and High Commissions around the world.
Having that government-to-government connection to get market access, commodity by commodity, but making sure that you, the producer, had the opportunity to send your product around the world. Embarrassingly, the Department of Agriculture in our export division was still using carbon paper up until about a year ago, but bringing us to the 21st century with an IT system that goes beyond the exporter, but goes to the farm gate that is giving produces the opportunity to have their own profile about what they produce, how they produce it, and how that would connect to international markets around the world.
That’s a smart way of doing things. That was a key investment in understanding that you paid the bills but you needed the tools to be able to do it. So proudly that investment will continue on and the department is moving as quickly as they can to ensure that we don’t even have, not just boots on the ground, but we’re giving you the technology to be able to take advantage of those markets.
15 free trade agreements are put in place around the world. In fact, I’m proud to say now the UK and India will come into effect hopefully in the coming couple of months, working through the challenges of the EU. But understanding we’ve given you the opportunities to diversify and we learned that lesson the hard way. We learn that with China and the coercive actions that they put on many of our producers, and I’m going to single out, particularly the wine industry, for their courage of standing up to a bully with guts and saying we will not yield that.
We will protect the values and principles of this nation, our freedoms, our democracy, and we won’t have someone tell us how to do things in this country. There’s been over a hundred thousand Australians that have lost their lives protecting those values and principles and we weren’t going to take it backwards and nor did the wine industry, despite losing $1.2 billion overnight.
And I’m glad to say that last week the Chinese ambassador reached out to me and we had a very constructive and candid conversation and I’ve always said that dialogue is the best way to resolve any difference. But we’ve now moved to a situation, I said to the ambassador, the best way to resolve this is not just through dialogue but for us culturally, as Australians, to build on that foundation of dialogue is to see intent, intent of actions.
And we’re going to come up in the next month to a milestone in our relationship with China – 50 years. It’s going to be a unique opportunity for those actions that were taken against Australian agriculture to be removed. And the Chinese ambassador, I’ve got to say, handled himself impeccably and took on all of the points that I gave him in a respectful way.
And I’m hopeful that that continued dialogue will give tuition into the future, but it has to have actions. We also made big investments for Ag 2030 around biosecurity. Over a billion dollars of extra money was put into biosecurity and export controls. This is about making sure we protect Brand Australia and I’m pretty confident that in the future that our ports and airports, people movement, is going to be protected. Embracing new technology, 3D X-ray scanners, we put into every Australian post facility.
Now every one of the 144 million parcels that go through Australia Post go through a 3D x-ray scanner that uses artificial intelligence designed here in Australia. That picks up organic matter, that picks up plant matter. And we started a trial with New Zealand, where your bags will go through one of those scanners at the airport and as we move to digital declaration cards, we’ll know what’s in your bag before you end.
And if your declaration doesn’t match up to the bag and the scan of the bag, we’re coming for you, we’re going to be ready for you. I’m proud to say one of the best things I did was lift the penalties of those that wanted to try and flat our biosecurity laws. Even during COVID we sent 15 people home.
They wanted to flout it, foreign nationals, they’ll pay an increased penalty, which we took up from $444 to $2,664 on the spot and they get back on the plane, they came home, they’re not welcome back to three years.
That’s the strong messages we want to send and we extended it to also international students. I’m glad to say to them, we don’t care that you might have to do your degree online because Australia’s biosecurity and Australia’s environment is far more important than the selfish actions of mum packing a bit of meat in your bag that could decimate the Australian agricultural sector.
Those are the strong actions we took, but work to do on our ports. We’re going to go from around five to eight and a half million containers by the end of the decade and unfortunately the 3D x-ray scanners don’t work with metal containers. But we put out a science challenge and the exciting thing is that the chief scientific opposite believes we can use air samples through the vents of these containers to be able to pick up minuscule particles of air vapor, of insects of organic matter, that would allow us the information to act quickly.
But we spent $15 million now being able to track containers back four years. So we know that a container that might have been sitting in a paddock in Sudan three and a half years ago, but in fact came here from Italy, which is a low risk country, which we normally would’ve just passed and waved through.
But because we have the knowledge of knowing that container was sitting in a paddock somewhere that is high risk, then we deploy the resources to make sure that we have a down good inside. That’s common sense. We’re working with the big companies to streamline their ordering process. Partner agriculture is actually intertwined in the ordering process. Big companies like Bunnings, they know six months in advance what’s coming into this country and that’s going to give us extra capacity and capability.
Those are the billion dollars’ worth of investment of your taxpayers’ dollars in supporting you. But one of the best and biggest legacies I believe I left as Australian Agriculture Minister, one in which I’m most proud of, and one that I’m proud to say this new government has adopted, is the Biodiversity Stewardship program. This is about rewarding farmers for the stewardship for their land.
See I came up with this idea because I’m a Queenslander and when we signed up to Kyoto, farming rights, property rights, were stripped away from Australian farmers. Federal government gave the states $350 million to compensate farmers for the loss of the management of their land. And no one is saying we should continue on with large scale land clearing. But if you take a property right away in this country, you should be compensated for it. If you owned a house here in Canberra and you rent out the three bedrooms and the government walk in and said, sorry, you’re admitting too much, you can only rent out two, you just had your income capacity taken away and your capital value reduced.
So we were the whipping boys, for us to meet international commitment, an international commitment we have to do, an international commitment also around Paris and net zero we have to sign up to.
That’s our license to trade internationally, but we should be part of the solution. We shouldn’t be held to ransom or we shouldn’t foot the bill when farmers who steward 50% of this land should be given the opportunity to be rewarded for it financially, a world first. Where we are the first country in the world that can measure an improvement in biodiversity. The carbon farming models of the past are so 1990s it’s just about blunt instrument, about fading carbon. This is about rewarding farmers for improving their biodiversity and paying them a halo credit but significantly also making sure that when they send their product around the world, they’ll be able to put a biodiversity seal on it that will get them a premium. A premium so much so that US administration is looking to take this and adopt this technology, this science up. So where for the first time creating these international trading rules, not just living by it, we should be proud of that as Australians. I’m proud of it.
There’s now time for corporate Australia to step up and stop buying acres of the Amazon that they can’t validate but start to reward Australian farmers financially. We should be loud and proud about that. We also make record investments in infrastructure. We’re going to give you the tools, the tools to be able to continue to produce – $8 billion for dams. Most of that was in northern Australia. Northern Australia should have the capacity to responsibly, environmentally, book to develop their water infrastructure.
Southern basins have been able to do that. Why Northern Australians held out? That’s where the significant growth in Australian agricultural, the incremental growth in our more mature production systems is. But in Northern Australia, the opportunity is there and the courage and conviction of our state. Governments unfortunately have let us down, it’s illegal for a federal government or a federal politician to pick a shovel up and dig a hole for a dam in this country.
States could carry that responsibility, that ownership of resource. We were going to cut the cheque; we just had to burn some diesel and dig the hole. And it’s not just about growing agriculture, it’s about flood mitigation. You only have to look at what’s going on in New South Wales at the moment to see that that’s just common sense, to give you the tools you need. But the tools also in roads and rail to make sure you get your product from pad to a plate or on into a port as quickly as we can.
Making sure that we reduce those bottlenecks, increase the capacity of getting product efficiency into world markets to give you and the competitive advantage you deserve. We also proudly, as part of one of the other major pillars, was around giving you the Ag visa. It’s one of the biggest negotiating periods of my life when the Liberals wanted to sign up to the UK free trade agreement.
It was great. Wasn’t coming when we’re giving away 12,000 backpackers from England without an Australian Ag visa that looked to go into Southeast Asia. It’s a retrograde step to walk away from that because this was not just about having transient workforce in agriculture. This was the biggest structural change for Australian agriculture workforce in our nation’s history. This was about bringing the next generation of migrants to regional and rural Australia and give them the greatest gift any country we can give to any person, any other country in the world, which is a pathway to Australian citizenship, that’s the greatest gift we can offer.
And that was about giving them the opportunity to come and live in regional and rural Australia, to stay there and to be part of Australia agriculture. And if about 172,000 workers were required to get product from a paddock to your plate, the Pacific Scheme at best will get you 42,000 workers and you’ve got to compete with aged care, child healthcare and everything else in between.
I’m not a mathematician. I don’t think I need to calculator a work out we are a long way short, and this is a constraint on Australian agriculture that we need a solution to now and a long term into training. And when you talk about trading, one of the best investments that we made as a government was about reform to our research of government corporations. Incorporating the $1.1 billion worth of levy payers dollars and Australian taxpayers dollars into regional universities.
So not only did it build capacity and scale in regional universities, it gave our kids the opportunity to go to university and study an agricultural course and know they’re going to have a career in agriculture and in regional Australia. And making sure we got back to the values and principles of value to the levy payer, value to the taxpayer, removing the duplication.
And above all commercialization. We were bone lazy in commercializing our research and development. In fact, we have the same number of researchers as the United States, Netherland, who are four and six in the world, and we are ranked number 23. And so this is about making sure that our ecosystems, our research and development is one that’s fit for the future and fit for a modern Australian agriculture. Those are the proud reforms that we put in place and I hope that this new government continues on with them and they have with some. I respect that they have other priorities, but it’s important.
It’s important for the for the next generation because we are the custodians of this great industry and the legacy that we leave will be the one that defines their future. That’s the opportunity that lays before us. That’s the opportunity that this government now gets to have.
That’s the opportunity that I’ll continue to work constructively with this government because this should be above politics. That’s why I took the constructive decision to go to the Jobs Summit, to drive agriculture but into those other issues that really drive employment to rural Australia. Childcare in particular, and making sure it’s not just about affordability, but accessibility, to give you the workforce unit, but we’ve got a bright future. We should be proud of what we’ve achieved. There’s too much self-moaning that goes on this country that we haven’t done enough.
We have. We’ve lived up to all our international commitments. In fact, we’ve beaten most of them. We should have our chest out and a chin up that we’re Australians because we do it better than anyone else. Thanks for having me.
