Pivotal ag role for Stone

Since 1996, Ms Stone has represented the northern Victorian electorate of Murray which is home to iconic agricultural and horticultural industries and fruit processing company SPC Ardmona.

She replaces another Victorian rural Liberal MP Dan Tehan as chair of the backbench committee, which assesses proposed agricultural policy and legislation while consulting other members with rural and regional interests.

Ms Stone was communications director at the Victorian Farmers Federation before being elected to parliament and has held various executive government roles including Parliamentary Secretary to the Environment Minister and Finance Minister, in the former Howard government.

In February last year, Ms Stone spearheaded a strong public campaign to save SPC from potential disaster, after the Coalition rejected a $25 million co-investment proposal.

During that campaign, she accused Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Treasurer Joe Hockey of lying about the worker conditions at SPC Ardmona, negotiated by the unions.

After crisis talks, the Victorian government announced a $22 million contribution to a $100m co-investment package with SPCA's parent company, Coca Cola Amatil to help modernise the Shepparton fruit processing plant in Ms Stone's electorate.

Mr Abbott and Mr Hockey had pushed back on “corporate welfare” in knocking-back SPC’s support request after CCA posted an after tax profit of $215m for the previous six months.

Ms Stone told Fairfax Media she currently chaired five other committees and anticipated she would be asked to continue in the agricultural committee role, by new Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, after Mr Abbott made the chair’s appointment, shortly before his removal as Prime Minister.

“With my electorate of Murray, being rural and regional, it’s critical for me to be able to ensure that our Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce gets feedback from all of our Coalition rural and regional members and has a policy sounding board for legislation that’s coming through,” she said.

Ms Stone said she was also a fifth generation primary producer and also had her own property, while her only brother and son are also primary producers.

“My 10 grandchildren will become primary producers and my electorate is rural based, on the production of fine foods, but in turn it is also dependent on secure water supply,” she said.

“In this area of northern Victoria in 1886 the first sod was turned on the first public irrigation system in Australia.

“But that security of water supply is now being destroyed and dismantled; not by drought, not by flood, not by bad prices for exports or domestically but by failed state and federal government policy and that’s just absolutely devastating.

“It is extremely distressing too that a lot of people don’t care.”

But Ms Stone said the public support displayed around the SPC campaign showed “people do care and they really do want choice of clean-green, Australian-grown produce”.

She said when concerns were raised about SPC potentially being “destroyed”, the response was “extraordinary” with 22 million hits on the campaign’s Facebook site expressing support for the iconic fruit processing company.

That campaign also resulted in a nationwide sales boost of 40 to 50 per cent for SPCA products.

“That support saved SPC at the time, because literally the tractors were rolling and pulling down the orchards and that increase in sales has also been sustained which is fantastic,” she said.

“The biggest proportion of our primary producers are living on extremely low incomes.

“They’re ageing and they don’t have other members of their families who are interested in following on but there are also some real bright spots like the great prices for beef.”

Ms Stone also has strong views about country of origin food labelling (CoOL) that are currently set for changes under the Coalition government to help identify product origins.

She said she believed the current proposed labelling regime was too complicated.

In July, Mr Joyce unveiled changes to the “Made in Australia” kangaroo label with a gold bar indicating what portion of the product has been made with ingredients, at varying percentages.

But Ms Stone said, “the fact is you still can’t readily identify the actual country of origin”.

“We’ve got a system now that tells you a portion of the product might be imported,” she said.

“But people I interact with regularly in supermarkets and the general populous, say ‘we don’t just want to know the product is imported - we want to know from what country it has come from’.

“Now that’s not racist or xenophobic or anything else.

“These consumers just happen to be aware of different production standards in different countries.

“For example at the moment they don’t want to buy frozen berries form China.

“They want to be assured that the berries, if imported, are from countries with similar inspection qualities as ours without the contaminated soils and water.

“However, at the moment they can’t get that information from the new labelling system.

“I think it’s still a work in progress but I wish that it wasn’t and the job was done.”

“People want to know where their imported frozen packet of frozen vegetables has come from and they have a right to know, to make more informed choices"