CORRECTEDVERSION

OUTERSUBURBAN/INTERFACESERVICESANDDEVELOPMENTCOMMITTEE

InquiryintosustainabledevelopmentofagribusinessinoutersuburbanMelbourne

Melbourne— 8September 2009

Members

MrN. Elasmar / MrD. Hodgett
MsD. Green
MsR. Buchanan / MrD. Nardella
MrM. Guy / MrG. Seitz
MsC. Hartland / MrK. Smith
Chair: MrG. Seitz
Deputy Chair: MrK. Smith

Staff

Executive Officer: MrS. Coley
Research Officer: MrK. Delaney
Witnesses
Department of Primary Industries
Mr Ron Harris, Executive Director (sworn), Farm Services Victoria, and
Mr LukeWilson, Executive Director, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Division (sworn).

TheCHAIR— I declare the meeting officially open and welcome our guests. Thank you very much for turning up. I will read out the information, but I am quite sure you are familiar with it. The evidence we take as a committee will be taken under oath or affirmation, whichever you prefer. That means we can use it in our report. It also gives you protection under the privileges provided by the Parliamentary Committees Act, the Constitution Act and the relevant legislation in any other jurisdiction, so whatever you say in this hearing cannot be held against you. However, if you repeat it outside, those privileges are not afforded to you. Please provide your mailing address.

MrHARRIS— My mailing address is GPO Box 4440, Melbourne, Victoria 3001.

MrWILSON— My mailing address is the same: GPO Box 4440, Melbourne 3001.

TheCHAIR— Thank you, gentlemen. We are very informal here. That was the formal part we have to go through to protect you guys and us, and so we can use a quote in our report if we need to. Basically we will get you to talk to us for a while; hopefully my colleagues will wait and ask questions at the end, but they get so eager they will probably interrupt you.

MrWILSON— We have a few slides here to help us step through some of the key points. It should not take too long.

Overheadsshown.

MrWILSON— I have this laid this out in relation to the four questions the committee put to DPI in a letter some time ago. We thought we would step through those, as they are a useful starting point. Hopefully you will be familiar with them. They are questions about the nature of some of DPI’s services in the areas of interest, some propositions about where those sectors might go and the sorts of things DPI is involved in.

In relation to the first question— does the state government have a strategy or longer term vision— the vision the government has laid out is the one laid out in the Future Farming strategy, which is the document I distributed a moment ago that was released in April last year. It lays out a vision for the entire agriculture sector. It is not specifically for periurban parts of it or for any other particular part; it is an acrosstheboard vision. That is the baseline. The key points there are that the three words— productive, competitive, sustainable— are three parts of a continuum. It is not a choice of one or the other, or two over another one; it is about policies or strategies that pursue all three collectively. I think that is the answer to the first question in particular.

I will now go through this in a little more detail. DPI strategies apply across all primary industry sectors, and that includes areas other than agriculture. That means that, typically, we do not have strategies or policies targeted at particular geography, but we do have strategies targeted at particular sectors. The method of their delivery may well be targeted by geography or by some delineation of the stakeholder groups we are trying to deal with. We will touch on some of those a bit later, in particular those relating to small landholders and the sorts of messages and approaches one might take there.

The basic proposition is about DPI seeking to enable an open, competitive environment and to remove, as far as possible, the sorts of impediments that might be facing agriculture across the board. Some examples listed up there are things like access to markets, access to resources and, in a lot of cases, access to information about how a farmer can make the best decisions possible, whatever type of business they are in. Obviously that will be slightly different for each farm business. Within that context— and it is certainly an economic developmenttype context— there are other areas that are also central to our work, including animal welfare, health and safety, the community implications of various sectoral changes and environmental concerns. Going back to those three words, productive, competitive and sustainable try to wrap up all of those and feed the strategy.

I should note that the Future Farming strategy is a wholeofgovernment strategy, so it is not just about what DPI does, but obviously DPI is a significant part of it. DPI’s interventions, the things we do in these sectors, are typically targeted at a combination of the areas of greatest impact— that is, if you are going to expend public funds or undertake some activity, where can you have the greatest impact and the greatest public benefit? There is a lot of work through DPI involving basic RandD and a lot of systems RandD— that is, looking at farming systems and the application of technologies in a system. We put in a lot of effort to achieve practice change, information dissemination and those sorts of areas and we also make some effort on regulatory tools in some areas. You have a whole combination of options open to you, but the investments made and decisions about those investments are driven by those two particular drivers.

A lot of the activities we will come to often have a mix of public and private benefits. Typically there is a lot of cofunding involved in some of our activities. In a lot of the areas my colleague will discuss the funding comes from the industry groups, sectoral groups or whatnot.

Coming to some of the impediments— and I am sure the committee has heard a lot of propositions about this from the areas of interest— the sort of common issues we see facing agricultural enterprises when they are interfacing with urban areas come under the areas listed. A lot of issues come up when there is simply proximity to urban development or urban activity, and these are often under the banner of righttofarmtype questions. That is obviously a particular perspective, but it goes to issues such as spraying, the movement of livestock along roads, road freight needs, bird scarers and various other techniques and activities that are used. Quite often there are neighbourtype interactions between the different activities that come up.

There are also issues around access to power, water and other such services. Obviously you will be familiar with the issues— particularly in the north of the state— and around Werribee and Bacchus Marsh about the level of water allocations, and part of it is to do with levels of rainfall and whatnot. But for some enterprises it is also access to the infrastructure that might deliver those things. It is very hard to generalise about that because it is very specific to the needs of the particular farm business as to what type of service or what amount or quality of water they might be seeking.

The other broad category that we do see in these areas is more general land use management questions. When you are in those interface areas you get changes in land use that for a particular farm business may not be quite next door but may involve a different neighbourhood mix, different priorities for local governments, different priorities for state government areas too, and that can sometimes present some challenges for those farm businesses. That is not to say that as a result any particular party to one of these issues has some natural claim over the other, although that is often the position that is taken, but these are the sort of issues that are often thrown in, for example, to planning schemes and other things that are held by other departments.

If I can just step through a few of the points on the Future Farming strategy, I know that the committee’s terms of reference talk about agribusiness, and I guess one could read that fairly broadly. The Future Farming strategy is more particularly about agriculture and some of the interactions with annexed sectors. It is not so much about food processors down stream necessarily but they are an interested party and some of the actions certainly impact on them, particularly marketaccess type issues.

We are quite interested in farms, farm businesses, farm communities, connected communities and the various service providers that are involved. Again, in the sorts of issues they are facing it does not necessarily matter whether you are periurban or out in the middle of the Mallee, the shape of the issue might change— and it certainly does change— but the nature of some of the issues is common. Even periurbanspecific matters are experienced outside Melbourne, so they are experienced around the regional centres— quite commonly issues of subdivision, amenity, farming, growth and those sorts of things which do not necessarily have to be quite near towns.

One of the focuses of this strategy is about arming farmers with information. It is very much about enabling the farm business to have the capacity and the wherewithal to make the decisions that are best for that farm business. It is not about instructing them as to what the decisions have to be but about enabling those farmers to understand what information is accessible, how to access it and perhaps how to process it a little bit to make those judgements. It also sets the scene for a change in service delivery that, again, Ron will talk about that in a moment, which really goes to the question of the way we interact as a department or as a government with landholders and deliver some of the messages and takes account of some of the methods they use to gather information themselves.

The package, as you may recall from last year’s announcements, is $205million across a number of areas. It is about improving services to farmers and also building up that research capacity with a particular focus on adjustment and adaptation, particularly in relation to climate change but not solely in relation to that. It has seven broad action areas, and I will show those slides in a moment because obviously there are a lot of programs. I will not step through them all because that would take a long time, but there are seven broad areas that are focused on this. It is looking at questions of drought, climate change, competition for natural resources, population change and the changing global economic conditions, so markets changing and demands changing. These are all things that farms need to be able to deal with and will have different capacities to deal with. The difference in that capacity is probably more driven by the particulars of the individual farmer and farm business rather than necessarily their location but in certain locations you will experience different pressures, so obviously periurbanrelated farmers will face a lot more of those land usetype pressures.

The seven areas are listed in this slide. The next couple of slides, which I will not dwell on, give a few more words around each of those headings but if you look through, even just using the headings as a guide you will see propositions about productivity, which is the rate of production given inputs— looking at different forms of production and different systems to achieve that; looking at the human element— attracting people into agriculture, allowing them to deal with agriculture and seeing a prospect; dealing with change, particularly climate change; strengthening the land and water management— that is picking up on the need for that better integration of agriculture with sustainable development; and helping farm families to secure their future.

I will just jump over to this slide where there are some programs looking at farm families and assisting them to better understand the health implications, to understand their own personal health and the implications of that for farm businesses and the way that they operate. It is really arming people with a fairly holistic suite of information that allows these businesses, which are quite often family businesses, to better understand and release their capacity.

There is a little bit of work in action6 on developing and securing new markets. There is a lot of market access work, in particular access to international markets, and that can be quite important for particular specialty producers. There will be some comment on that in a moment but it is interactions between commonwealth activity and state activity, and representation internationally is quite important.

The last slide is the reference to transporting products. There are a number of items but in particular the rail road upgrades were relevant, probably more relevant to the grain industry, maybe a little less relevant to some of your areas of interest.

We have got a few slides just stepping through some of the highlighted actions and talking about how they are involved in the sectors that the committee is looking at.

MrHARRIS— In terms of one of the queries about the control of weeds on private land, in the Future Farming strategy there is a program that is about $20million over four years in addition to some other funding. DPI’s role is dealing with private land managers; we are not a public land manager. Some of the activities underneath that are increasing community involvement in fox control. There is a program called FoxStop 2009 where we are working with the Sporting Shooters Association and Field and Game Australia. They are getting coinvestments and putting up prizes for people who are shooting foxes, and that is an issue at an urban level as well, about how to control foxes because shooting may not be a suitable option there.

Looking at increasing voluntary compliance for regionally controlled weeds. When I go through the weeds categories there are stateprohibited weeds, as soon as any stateprohibited weed is found, the state will actually remove that weed. The next category is regionally prohibited and then regionally controlled weeds. Through DSE and other public land managers there is some funding going for more effective control on public land for weeds. We are also doing some work where we have a grants program with local government about weeds on roadsides. We have had the first rollout of that grants program, and we are looking at rolling that out again this year.

The critical one is, as I said, stateprohibited weeds. The state will control those, and one classic incidence was Mexican feather grass last year. The state spent a lot of money on controlling Mexican feather grass which was sold through some retail outlets as a Mother’s Day gift. There is a whole heap of reasons it even got into the retail outlets, but I am happy to discuss that later.

The last one is early responses for exotic pest animals, such as turtles or cane toads coming into Victoria. It is about being there very early on and eradicating those exotic pests where possible.

In terms of the query around programs for small landholders and hobby farmers, there are two particular programs. One is AgFutures where we get the best people around to provide information suitable for a particular location, be it Bass Coast shire or wherever it is, often working very closely in local government. As Luke said earlier on, it is about providing the best information to that community so that community can then make choices about where it wants to be in the future. Some of the regular topics discussed are some of the demographics of that particular area. It might be about the impact of climate change on that area, and it may also look at a range of other opportunities relating to agriculture in that community. At the bottom of that slide, certainly Bass Coast, Cardinia, Casey, Whittlesea, Yarra Ranges and Nillumbik are some of the areas that would have been involved in working with their communities to deliver that information.

Another important program is the services and information for new landholders. That is where we target specifically the probably about 80000amenity landholders who make a significant contribution to their local communities but in small lots. We target some of the basic dutyofcare issues and also some of the biosecurity issues about how we can get those smaller landholders to control their pests, control their weeds and have a rewarding lifestyle from the property they are residing on, or they may not be residing on. Certainly that is a targeted program specifically in Gippsland, northeast Victoria and some of those periurban areas.

The next one is critical in terms of understanding the whole approach to weeds particularly. This is what we call our invasion curve, and you will see that the key to this is actually getting the weeds early. We have a weed risk assessment where we can categorise weeds in terms of their invasiveness and spread and their economic and environmental impact. What we are saying there on the lefthand side of the diagram of slide16 is that the cost benefit is about 100 to 1 in that very early intervention, and if we go up to the red phase for things like Paterson’s curse in northern Victoria it is about 1 to 1 and it is an established weed. So very much in terms of the public expenditure we are trying to work down the lefthand side of that invasion curve for the best expenditure of public money.