Australian Year of the Farmer
Mr VAN HOLST PELLEKAAN (Stuart) (12:04): I, too, join my colleagues in supporting the member for Schubert and his very important motion. This is a very important issue, not only for the electorate of Stuart but also our state and the nation. Unlike my regional colleagues here, I have never been an active farmer. I do not have a farming background, but I certainly did grow up in a family where my father was, and still is, an agricultural economist. He has been an agricultural economist for over 50 years. I grew up with that influence and certainly the knowledge, understanding and insight of how important primary production is for our state, particularly farming.
It is important to point out that farming is a word that is used quite generally and broadly. Of course, it means cropping and grazing. Importantly, in the context of the Australian Year of the Farmer it should also include pastoralists. However, when we talk about farming in South Australia we really are talking about people who operate orchards, dairies, piggeries, vineyards, apiarists, aquaculture and horticulture.
I think our state has a marvellous opportunity in years to come with the extensive development of horticulture around our regional areas. It is certainly something that even city members of parliament would be very familiar with. It has been a mainstay of Adelaide, particularly in suburban areas, although it is now not there because the land has been taken up with housing. However, I think a large part of regional South Australia will have a great opportunity to develop horticulture.
I would also like to comment on the Seawater Greenhouse project, which is a marvellous project near Port Augusta, where solar energy is used to pump and desalinate water from the Upper Spencer Gulf. That water is then used to grow at present just tomatoes in a trial site, but it certainly can be expanded to any other fruit and vegetables that can be grown in a greenhouse. It really is a marvellous project that I understand is doing exceptionally well in the pilot stage. It has the opportunity to be developed far and wide.
I now turn to environmental responsibilities. Nobody in this house would be unaware of the fact that, as every year goes by, as we should, we are more and more aware of our environmental responsibilities. I would like to congratulate South Australia's farmers for leading in that area. There is nobody more aware of or responsible for environmental sustainability and protection of their own land than people who use it for primary production and who plan to use it for primary production for generations and, potentially, centuries to come.
I really would like to congratulate our farmers, as the member for Schubert said, particularly the younger generation that is coming along, not that the previous generations deliberately did things incorrectly. They used the best technology and the best knowledge and were as responsible as they could be and should have been at the time, but our current generation of farmers have improved significantly on it. I am very optimistic that the next generation and the one after that will be better and better again. Farmers and the farming industry as a whole need to be congratulated for that.
They are under pressure. Our farmers are feeding our state, our nation and the world while their land is put under more and more pressure. Farmers take responsibility and succeed when pressures, both environmental and space-wise, are growing, and also the demand for their produce is growing. I think they do a marvellous job in that area.
No doubt, some people find efficiency a curse. Every time a new piece of technology is available from Australia or somewhere else in the world, if you do not have it you start to fall behind, but of course it is a benefit as well. Farmers who do have the capacity to use the latest and greatest technology available in the world will be the ones who succeed. They know that far better than I do.
Keeping up with efficiency is very important. It does not matter whether you are broadacre cropper trying to put in thousands, and in some cases tens of thousands, of acres or whether you are an apiarist, who might on a weekly or monthly basis be moving beehives around the countryside, being as efficient as possible and using the best technology and knowledge available is certainly what is going to keep people successful.
As people in this house know, my great passion is regional development. I would like to highlight the fact that there are hundreds—this is not an exaggeration—of communities just in South Australia who rely upon farmers for their survival. They benefit from farming, they need farming, but they are not all farming only communities. Many of them benefit from lots of other things, some of them from tourism, some from other industries. However, without our farmers we would instantly lose hundreds of communities.
Whether you are a country person or whether you are a city person—we cannot all live in Adelaide, we cannot all work in city offices—all of South Australia benefits from having a vibrant and successful city of Adelaide and all of South Australia benefits from having a vibrant, successful and sustainable regional South Australia as well. So, thank you to our farmers for contributing to that.
Of course, in relation to exports, our state started as, and still is, and probably forever will be, a state that requires exports for the vast majority of its wealth. Of course, included in that are mining exports, but farming and agricultural exports still do play an enormous role, and that will never, ever change. Wheat, wool and other commodities sustain our state enormously.
In that vein, it would be remiss of me not to express my concern, my dissatisfaction, my anger in some stages at the state government for continually reducing the funding to PIRSA. That is a great shame and incredibly short-sighted. It hurts our state, it hurts our regions and it hurts Adelaide as well. It really is very short-sighted. We must be on the front foot of research and development in our state, and those decisions taken by our government over the last decade are completely unacceptable.
Again, just paying tribute to our farmers, people underestimate how easy it is. I know there are a lot of people in Adelaide and other capital cities who just look at it and say, 'Well, look, if you're born into a farming family and you've got lots of land and if you get some rain, it's all going to be easy.' People do not realise the risks that are involved. It is incredibly hard to grow products that rely upon overseas markets.
Our farmers are price takers. They can grow the best crops, they can do a marvellous job, use all the technology, be environmentally responsible—everything they might like to do—but if the world prices collapse it is all for nothing in that one particular year. Of course it is true as well to say that there are a lot of benefits out of their control. If world prices are fantastic, they do very well, but to have weather out of your control, and to have prices out of your control, puts an enormous strain on farming families and farming businesses that people do underestimate, and I would like them to think seriously about that.
There is also of course the enormous capital investment. It is not just the land but, as the member for Hammond mentioned, in many cases, millions of dollars of equipment is required to be at the cutting edge of technology and efficiency, and that does not come easily. You put that into the context of any other type of business you like. To be a price taker, to have volatile world prices that will determine your income in a particular year, to have weather that you cannot rely on and you cannot predict to determine your success in your year, with all of that left open, you still have to have millions of dollars, very often, invested in machinery and equipment and land. Otherwise, even if those other factors—the prices and the weather—line up, you are out of luck anyway. You are just not in the race if you have not done it.
To our farming families, to our farming communities, to farmers across our state and across our nation, we depend upon you for our economic success. I congratulate you and thank you for everything that you do for us.
Comment