CORRECTED VERSION

OUTER SUBURBAN/INTERFACE SERVICES AND DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE

Inquiry into sustainable development of agribusiness in outer suburban Melbourne

Melbourne—12 May 2009

Members

MrG. Seitz / MrK. Smith
MrM. Guy / MrD. Nardella
Chair: MrG. Seitz
Deputy Chair: MrK. Smith

Staff

Executive Officer: MrS. Coley
Research Officer: MrK. Delaney

Witness

Mr Alan McKenzie
Landowner.
MrMcKenzie was sworn in.


TheCHAIR—Alan, the procedure is you take an oath or affirmation because all evidence you give here is under the Evidence Act and the Parliamentary Committees Act and parliamentary privilege, which means nobody can sue you outside. But if you say it outside it is a different matter. What we are trying to do is about 15, 20 minutes of presentation and allowing some time for committee members to have a bit of discussion, questions and debate with you on issues they want to clarify. In due course you will get a copy of Hansard. After you take your oath or affirmation would you please state your mailing address. Thanks.

MrMcKENZIE—My address is 68 Bulla Road, Bulla.

TheCHAIR—Thank you. Give us your presentation.

MrMcKENZIE—Gentlemen, I am probably going to come from a bit of a different perspective to what John's presentation was. Mine is going to revolve around the practical constraints of farming in the area.

TheCHAIR—Hands-on stuff.

MrMcKENZIE—Hands-on stuff. It has been brought about with lots of presentations to councillors, to politicians and to parliamentarians over time, and we are talking probably 30 to 40 years. The council's submission is something that was a bit of a surprise to most of us inasmuch as that up until now we have been talking about agriculture in the area and now the councillor admitting that agriculture is probably finished. However, over the last 15 years we have seen—the aspirations of all of our planners talk about farming in the area and that is exactly where it finishes. It does not go any further than talk about the requirement to have farming in and around the metropolitan area, but there has been no support whatsoever for the continuance of practical farming methods as we have seen them. We are not talking about having five or 10 acre blocks of intensive agriculture, we are talking about substantial size areas like you have in the rest of the city of Hume outside the urban areas.

When you start talking about a little vineyard or you talk about a lavender farm somewhere, that is all right for that little block of woods but let us look at the total area. What I am going to present to you is some of the impediments that we have had to put up with over time to do with farming and it will be reflective in the diminishing use of the land for agriculture. As you drive from here today and had to Sunbury this afternoon you will see lots of land that you will not know what has happened there. I know what has happened there. Most of it has ceased to be agriculturally viable and therefore is not used for any agricultural production at all.

MrSMITH—Alan, can I ask, what do you run, what do you do on your farm?

MrMcKENZIE—Up until this last couple of weeks we have been doing beef cattle, wheat, barley and canola, and because of the drought we built our numbers of the herd up to about 180 breeders about six years ago, a fortnight ago we sold all the breeders.

MrSMITH—What would be?

MrMcKENZIE—Beef. They have all gone. We have kept the vealers. The basis for that was we bought feed two or three years over the last 10 years and the reality is you do not get paid to feed them. We were paid more for our vealers, and our vealers have been some of the better priced ones at the market, but we are getting less and less for our vealers since 2001 when they peaked and we are now down to, what, $650 for a steer at the market, compared to $740 back in 2001. When you start looking at those sums and you start saying, 'You've got to buy the feed,' the feed is one cost; the actual feeding out is another cost, and the labour component of that, plus the cost of the vehicle to go and do it on a daily basis until the grass grows sufficiently to stop doing it. That is why we decided to sell the beef herd. We are going to try and put more land in crop because we think that might make better use of the available moisture we have. That is yet to be judged.

A couple of things: let us start off with rates, for example. We have been putting up with rates that have been increasing by 10 to 15percent annually for the past eight years. When you go back to council and ask them to spell out those figures for the rural area of the City of Hume there is no justification. In the pamphlets they produce for the urban people they will be gladly championing the fact that they have reduced the rates to a four or a fivepercent rate increase for the urban people. When I have asked them to pull the figures out for the rural side of things, 'No, we can't do that.' It has never been convenient for us to pull out anything to compare for the rural side. When I have also asked over the past, I do not know whether it is eight or 10years, I have been on numerous committees with the council, on the Weed Rebate Committee and other weed committees, I have asked them to go through and look at other methods of looking in detail at the other municipalities in Victoria to see how they rate their farms to be more fair and equitable.

Let us back to what happens—as we seem to do with our planning schemes, we send some people to England to look at what has happened in England, and they seem to forget that England has no farm rates as such since 1929, I think it is. They might rate the house but that is all. Additionally, in England these days they also get a subsidy from the EU. I was talking to one of the fellows that I am working with doing the cropping, he was in Ireland this year, went to a cattle sale, the cows are about 400 kilos, seven to eight hundred pound each.

MrNARDELLA—Not bad.

MrMcKENZIE—Not bad return. If we can get that here we probably would not be sitting around here talking about farm viability and—

MrNARDELLA—That is $A1,600.

MrMcKENZIE—Yes, thereabouts, and that was about three months ago. That brings it back into a bit of perspective. All these things I am talking about are probably beyond winding back because we have gone too long with it now and it has caused too much dislocation within, say, the City of Hume anyway on the rural areas.

Shifting farm machinery on the roads has become an absolute nightmare. I have spoken to the policy section of VicRoads about their comments to government about what they are doing with the urban areas and the main routes through the areas to allow for agricultural machinery to be shifted form property to property, or alternatively from one side of the municipality to the other, VicRoads' answer in the policy section was, 'That is not our responsibility. We don't have anything to do with suggesting things to government about, "Well, you've left a massive development go here as far as urban development goes,"' and therefore it is cars on the road which essentially means that more cars on the road means that the restrictions we have to comply with shifting agricultural machinery get increased. VicRoads have in my view abrogated their responsibility to us in the area by saying, 'We're not interested in you, all we're interested in is safe travel of people on the road and if it happens to preclude you from travelling your farm machinery down the road, that is not our concern.' That is one bit.

Go back to the Bracks Labor government time, we thought we might have been able to claim drought relief. Someone from DSE came out, drove in the driveway and he said to me, 'This is not a farming area, see you later.' That was it. That was the total consultation on the farming area. He said, 'You've obviously got offfarm income I'm not interested in even talking to you. See you later. I'm not going to waste your time.'

MrNARDELLA—Who was that, sorry?

MrMcKENZIE—DSE.

MrSMITH—How much land do you have?

MrMcKENZIE—We have 400 acres on our home property and we look after probably another thousand acres, my brother and I. At that rate we were not able to go and do anything. The interest subsidies—not only the interest subsidies but the half farm rates which have been available everywhere else in Victoria, I doubt have been taken up by anybody in the City of Hume.

MrNARDELLA—Is that a drought subsidy?

MrMcKENZIE—Drought subsidised, yes. Those are the sorts of things that have impacted upon us severely. Kangaroos in the area have become an absolute nightmares. Mobs of between two and six hundred are quite common. You put a mob of two or six hundred onto a farm of 400 acres, the grazing pressure is enormous to start off with, but it is not only that, we are finding that we have to go around and check the fences every couple of days because they are fence destroyers. It does not matter where it is, they will destroy the fence. It does not matter whether it is barbed wire. We have fences in our area that are chain wire fences around some of the commercial facilities that are 10 foot high that the kangaroos have been jumping over. You can see the top of the fences where they have landed on the top and then sprung off. It is not a matter of the type or the height of the fence, this is the damage that is occurring. As the fences deteriorate in the area, the next thing you do is you want to put an electric fence on it because that will prolong the life of the fence. The kangaroos clip that electric fence over the top of the barbed wire, you have a short and then all of a sudden you find your cattle are in the wrong paddock or in the neighbour's or are out on the road. The legal ramifications for that because of the amount of traffic in the area are enormous for us. We have to be on that all the time to make sure that—these are the sorts of things that someone living up in the bush probably does not understand or realise the ramifications of those.

The weeds in the area are an enormous issue, and not only because of the types of weeds but also the types and methods of control that we can use to control those weeds. For the past 30 years we have been using agricultural fixed wing aircraft and rotary wing aircraft to control those weeds. For about 20 years an operator used our place as a strip in the controlled zone of Melbourne Airport to use it to take off and spray weeds right over as far as Mickleham, then come back and land, fill up and go again. Last year for the first time the operators that we used, which are rotary wing or helicopters, were refused entry—not once, not twice but five times. When he went back to Air Services Australia and he said to them, 'I need to have an agreement from you people to say that we need to be able to come into this area and spray the weeds. It is the only efficient way of doing it that is cost-effective for the landowners,' they said, 'What we'll get you to do is to get in your helicopter and you fly to the edge of the controlled airspace, give us a call and we'll tell you whether we'll let you in.' After his fifth attempt he said, 'I'm not coming back,' because it was not only him—because he had a fellow on the ground already sitting waiting for him—we had the chemicals already there with the water already sitting on site. Five times that happened.

When I rang the federal Minister for Agriculture's office in Canberra and asked them to see if they could facilitate some way for us to get an agreement that those helicopters could come in—and they are only going to come in on low wind days because it is the only time you can spray—they came back to me and virtually—I was insulted—the reply was that I had to build a relationship with our local federal member here and I also had to build a relationship with our air traffic controllers at Melbourne Airport. I took that to mean that I should have a barbecue every night of the week and invite them around. I am not doing it and noone is going to do it. If we have been spraying for the past 30 years we do have a relationship with them. We are now cowboys and the operators we use are not cowboys. It was an insult to people's intelligence to have that response given to us. We are still working to try to see whether we can get a resolve of the issue, but I doubt we will.

That leaves the weed control—as John was talking about before—there are some people who are north of our municipality here who have been told that they were not allowed to use aircraft to spray their farms—and there is a 600 acre one that comes to my mind. Two years ago he was barred by the municipality from using an aircraft to spray his place. He employed some contractors to go and spot spray all the serrated tussock. The bill was $45,000. The department did not see anything wrong with that bill and neither did the municipality. My issue with it is none of the landholders in this area have that sort of money at their disposal on a yearly basis, if not on a 10-yearly or 20-yearly basis, to put in spraying one weed that is only going to last for about four years. It is ridiculous.

MrSMITH—How much would it have cost if he had used aircraft?

MrMcKENZIE—If he had used the aircraft it would have cost him about two to three thousand dollars. This is the bureaucracy that we are getting behind the scenes. On one hand we are saying, 'This is all green wedge and we can farm it,' but on the other hand we are getting both of our hands grabbed and tied behind our backs. We have to then try and farm with hands behind our backs. When you talk about benchmarking farms in this area to other farms, say, in Victoria or in the rest of Australia, you would not even rate. Probably that fellow from DSE was right when he walked in and said, 'This is not a farming area.' However, under all of the regulations and rules for planning, this is a farming area. We are on one hand saying, 'It is but it isn't; for this it is, for that it's not, for the other thing it is, for something else it's not.' Even to control the kangaroos, when you go and get a permit to control the kangaroos, we have to notify all of our neighbours, every single one of them.