Should change to rural policy be revolutionary or evolutionary? More than 100 participants in the Rangelands Policy Dialogue are wrestling with the question.
The dialogue has been running for more than 15 months, co-organised by AgForce, NRM Regions Queensland and The Royal Society of Queensland.
The aim is to compile a significant "policy package" that outlines reforms for transitioning broadacre pastoral enterprises to greater levels of financial and environmental sustainability.
This log of claims could take one of two paths.
Transformative: Big changes, a ground-up restructure of how the pastoral industry is conducted on the rangelands (75 per cent of Queensland).
Should governments use sovereign debt to finance revitalisation of outback communities? Should powers be redistributed between Commonwealth, State and local governments? Should Parliament pass a new Stewardship Act? Should there be an overhaul of property rights and tenure? Should Australia withdraw from free trade agreements and abandon its faith in exporting as the source of profitability of agriculture? Should Queensland restore price support and collective marketing?
Incremental: Modest improvements, broadly within business-as-usual. Perhaps there could be a new program of land resource mapping. The agricultural colleges could be re-opened. More grants could be offered for fencing waterways. Drought aid conditions could be more flexible.
In August, a survey of participants in the dialogue yielded a preference for transformative change by a ratio of 9 to 1.
They had little choice. Transformative reforms are looming anyway because, on top of the ups and downs that pastoralists have traditionally weathered, they must now confront Covid-19, entrenched rural debt, fuel vulnerability, international financial turmoil, emerging breakdown of ecological systems such as collapses in insect populations, and above all, climate change.
When change is inevitable for such external reasons, reforms more ambitious than could have been contemplated in a more serene era become feasible.
However, major purposeful reforms require a change agent operating outside the quarrelling of the agri-political bubble.
We can't look confidently to the present public service to facilitate change: it has been gutted by repeated budget cuts, restructures and staff caps, including loss of rural extension officers.
Scientists and environmental spokespeople have both been demonised by the mainstream press (QCL excluded) and repeated scientific warnings ridiculed.
The Rangelands Policy Dialogue aims to step into the breach with independent policy capability, but it is largely unfunded and run by volunteers.
Big adjustments are on their way and rural industry is not adequately prepared.
- Dr Geoff Edwards, vice president, Royal Society of Queensland. These are his personal views.