<strong>Northern</strong> <strong>Territory</strong> Cattlemen’s <strong>Association</strong> IncorporatedAdvancing and Protecting the Interests of Cattle Producers in the <strong>Northern</strong> <strong>Territory</strong>Changing AttitudesAddress by Australian Minister for Agriculture, Fisheriesand Forestry, the Hon. Tony Burke (abridged)<strong>NTCA</strong> Annual Conference <strong>2008</strong>Within a few days of being sworn in, Kevin Rudddecided that he and I were going to visit Matt andAnna Ahern’s Angus stud out at Roma. I remember thefrustrated journalists complaining that, “There’s justno good shots”. And I said, “Why are they not goodshots?” I’d only been in the job a little while and wasstarting to take it personally. Some responded,“Oh, the ground’s too wet. We like to see that it’sdusty. We like to see that it’s tough.”There’s a strong mindset generally amongst the Australiancommunity that if it’s an optimistic story, it’s not an agriculturalstory. If it’s a story of hope and times looking up, or of promisingeconomic opportunity, then it mustn’t have anything to do withagriculture. It’s an attitude that, after seven years of drought, hasbecome very much entrenched and of itself, I think, a threat.We don’t encourage young people to a sector if we keeptalking it down. We don’t encourage investment in a sector ifwe pretend that it’s got less economic opportunity than what’sactually there. And it’s important, when you’re conductingdealings with your customers overseas that, with the full supportof the Australian people and Australian Government, you areable to talk-up the full level of optimism, of long-term contracts,economic opportunities and high quality product that we areable to deliver.Future challengesTwo key challenges – climate change and a shrinking world – willframe much of the policy the Government brings forward inmaking sure that agriculture is well set-up for the future.There will not be a FarmBis program after 1 July <strong>2008</strong> - butthere will be a $130 million, four-year program called Australia’sFarming Future. This will have three parts – one worth $15million to do with R&D and productivity research, another worth$55 million for climate change adjustment programs, and thebiggest worth $60 million which will be the Climate ChangeAdaptation Partnership Program. Any training program within aclimate change future-focused framework will be eligible to applyfor that. So will there still be on-ground training of farmers?Absolutely. Will the sorts of FarmBis programs that you’ve seenin the past – where you can argue probably close to a majorityof them were dealing quite squarely with some of the challengesthat come to us with climate change? Yes, that will still be there.Some FarmBis programs will no longer be funded.But nobody for a minute should think that the concept ofproviding on-farm training is going to take a back seat. It’s not. Itwill be picked up in a program called Climate Change AdaptationPartnerships. The Caring for our Country Program also dealswith climate change. One issue I’ve had raised many times isthe frustration of people who are doing good land managementprojects, who in order to get the money have to apply to NHT,put in a separate application to Landcare and a third applicationmaybe direct to the local Catchment Management Authority,and you end up for the same project having three separateapplications that cross over different parts of it, each of whichhave a completely different counting mechanism of paperworkthat you then have to feed back to justify the grant for theLandcare project.I’m interested in Government supporting your work as landmanagers and as Australian producers. I’m not interested inwasting your day on form-filling. While we’ve kept the separateappropriation of those different programs, we have streamlinedthe form-filling so you have a single application process throughto Caring for our Country. That money should then be allocatedthrough a different section of Caring for our Country – be it NHT,be it Landcare – so the bureaucratic paper is our problem, not yours.Reviewing Exceptional Circumstances (EC)The NFF has been calling for a long time for a review and lookingat how we can work on drought preparedness better, and it’s takensome time to find Members of Parliament who can go forward,and there’s a political risk in it – if you stick your neck out, it’s aneasy whack whenever you’re reviewing something as sensitive asdrought policy when people are going through tough times.But what happens if we change nothing is an unthinkableoutcome. If we’ve then got policy settings that are all aboutproviding assistance for people in one-in-twenty-, one-in-twentyfive-yearperiods, and a severe drought is unlikely to be viewed asan event that rare – that’s one of the things that climate changehas brought us.So in any review, we’ve started with the first principle. Andthat is that anyone currently on EC assistance is quarantined.No rules change under them while they’re in an EC-declaredsituation. I met with the State and <strong>Territory</strong> Ministers up in16<strong>Northern</strong> <strong>Territory</strong> Cattlemen’s <strong>Association</strong> Year in review 2007-<strong>2008</strong>
<strong>Northern</strong> <strong>Territory</strong> Cattlemen’s <strong>Association</strong> IncorporatedAdvancing and Protecting the Interests of Cattle Producers in the <strong>Northern</strong> <strong>Territory</strong>
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