Ms Rosa Lee Long

Hansard Tuesday, 8 March 2005

On Primary Industry

Most primary industries in my electorate are still doing it tough for one reason or another. Even though weather wise last year was a reasonable one and Tinaroo Dam filled to 76 per cent, we found that many potato growers had good crops but could not sell their products because of a glut on the market. After that, the mango growers, with a record high quality and quantity of produce, also found it difficult to sell because of another glut on the market as well as a scarcity of workers and trucking crates in which to send the mangoes away. The price was so low that most growers were advised to send their mangoes off for juicing. This was on top of problems for our citrus growers, who were affected by the citrus canker outbreak in the middle of last year. December and January brought good rains, further filling Tinaroo to 87 per cent and leaving the tablelands looking like a picture postcard. But February has been exceptionally dry, with only about a quarter of our usual rainfall. Today in March there is a cyclone bearing down on the coastline and we are hopeful that it will bring a deluge to fill the underground aquifer but do as little damage as possible to infrastructure. For our hardworking dairy farmers, their problems are more deep seated than how much rain they received last month. About another eight dairy farmers have just left or are about to leave the industry on the tablelands.

There has been a massive exodus since deregulation, and now there are only about 100 dairy farmers left in an area that only recently had about twice that number. Deregulation has shown no benefit for our dairy farmers nor for the consumers of milk. Deregulation has brought a massive slump in the farm gate price of milk without any benefit for the consumer, as the retail price of milk just keeps going up. It is true that recently our farmers who trade under the banner of the Dairyfarmers organisation have had a price rise of some 2c per litre, but it means little when they are still going backwards- that is, when the price that they get is still less than it costs them to produce the milk. I understand that in the southern part of the state some farmers are being paid about 10c per litre more from a different company, but we do not have access to those kinds of payments in the north.

The amount our farmers are being paid is just not enough, and it is not about efficiency. Our farms are tremendously efficient. They have weathered the slashing of around a third off their milk prices and have hung on, hoping that in the wake of deregulation some sanity would come back into their industry. But that, it seems, is nothing more than wishful thinking. The bottom line is that our farmers are still being gutted, their businesses are still closing and the consumer does not get cheaper milk. In fact, the price continues to go up- exactly the opposite of what is supposed to happen. On a brighter note, the factory at Malanda has just won a Commonwealth grant of some $1.6 million to research and develop whey, a waste product of milk, into medicinal and beauty products. This follows state government support a few years ago for the industry. These grants are well and good and appreciated, but they are not putting the vital extra cents into the pockets of the producer. The producer is still being asked to continually be more and more efficient and work longer hours without any appropriate remuneration. As they tighten their belts, the council rates keep going up, the telephone bills go up, the electricity bills go up, the cost of fuel goes up, the price of machinery goes up and the price of food, including milk, goes up while Woolworths and Coles continue to make their profits.

The primary producer can continue for only so long, and already many have lost their livelihoods and have seen generations of effort in building up their farms, herds and knowledge collapse. They are the ones who know the real impact of national competition policy, of free trade agreements, of deregulation and all of the rest that makes up this so-called economic rationalism. They are suffering this immense pain because of an economic theory that is supposed to bring benefits if not to them then at least to their city cousins, but it has not and the pain is for nothing at all. Families and communities are in agony and nobody is better off- and all for a theory that has not produced a single positive result

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