Opinion
The Prime Minister has declared his Drought Summit will in part be ‘about long-term resilience’. It must be.
It's a welcome shift from a Government which abolished the agriculture CoAG Committee and pulled the hand brake on drought policy reform back in 2013.
Now we are playing catch-up but the collective desire for real reform is still there if the PM is prepared to lead. If he fails to, Labor will if given the chance. Our first act will be to resurrect formal Commonwealth-State cooperation.
The Summit is not likely to produce anything not already known if too much time is spent looking backwards rather looking forward to long-term strategic planning.
Show me an initiative announced at the peak of a drought crisis and I'll show you one not well designed, targeted or adequately thought through. Nor indeed, one likely to be satisfyingly effective.
The Summit must focus on our natural resource base and must include a stocktake. Our water and soil resources are finite and these resources must been seen through the prisms of security for future generations .
We need to know how we can ensure we are using those resources sustainably and efficiently, and how we can make sure they are being allocated where they produce the greatest return for our farmers and the economy.
As in any business, if these settings are correct some entities will come to the conclusion they don't have a viable business proposition.
I think that's what the PM was saying when he posted the controversial and insulting "cut out the bottom ten percent of farms" drought video on his twitter account. Let's give him the benefit of the doubt.
No farm enterprise can succeed without adequate water and healthy soil resources. The two go together because healthy soils are great absorbers and holders of water. Higher levels of carbon and other organic matter means greater water retention and higher productivity.
The summit should not spend a disproportionate amount of time talking about dams. We know where the opportunities are and we have a political settlement on the rules around balancing water consumption and environmental flows. We should not be revisiting these issues.
Thanks to our scientists in this 21st Century, we also have a much better understanding of the environmental effects of dams. Some will be able to meet those standards, some will not. Some will stack up economically, some will not.
Let the Summit not be distracted or hi-jacked by those who say dams are the answer to all of our challenges, they are not.
There is no shortage of successful land management systems designed to rejuvenate our landscapes and many farmers are embracing them. But many are not.
The Summit must answer the key question: how do we improve the uptake of these practices? Government surely has a role to play.
In the agriculture sector we call it "extension", a function of government which has sadly fallen away in recent years. We have the vehicles; our agriculture research bodies, our Landcare groups, and state-based land services authorities.
We just need some leadership and determination to mobilise them. It will take some money too, but every dollar invested should provide a greater return than that spent on short-term crisis in-drought assistance.
The Summit should spend some time reflecting on tax incentives that help farmers put money away for a dry day and to build feed storage, efficient water systems and other drought adaptation infrastructure. We need to better understand which are working best and which are best targeted.
Finally, if there aren't at least as many non-farmers - including economists and scientists - as farmers and farm industry leaders sitting in and contributing to the Summit it will descend into a political talk-fest of those seeking affection rather than solutions.
So we'll know the likelihood of the Summit's success well before it begins; when we see the invitation list!
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