It was with great pride that we drove to Canberra for our meeting with Agriculture Minister Tony Burke.

To be asked to represent so many friends and fellow farmers from our community, many of whom were wondering how they are going to continue, was a responsibility we did not take lightly.

The other two delegates (David Clarke and Mitchell Clapham) and I arrived at Parliament House on Wednesday afternoon, and we worked through to 8.30pm with Mark Coulton and his staff to compile a 40 page submission.

This contained about a dozen pages of text being the body of the report, then some appendices: graphs from the Livestock Health and Pest Authorities, five “case studies” from local farmers giving financial and personal accounts of the drought, a Salvation Army report and also six letters from local businesses. We delivered the report to the minister’s office at 8.30am on Thursday morning, two hours prior to our meeting with him.

We met with the Minister as planned from 10.30am to 11.00am (on Thursday). We thought the meeting was positive, and Tony showed a real interest in our issues, including those of a long-term nature. It was valuable to speak with the Minister directly, as it put a face to our situation.  During the meeting, he identified his position as follows:

  1. “…needing to follow procedure.” This means he will wait for the formal submission to arrive from the NSW Minister for Primary Industries Steve Whan’s office before deploying National Rural Advisory Council (if deemed to be warranted). I understand the formal submission is about to leave (or has already left) the Department of Industry and Investment office in Orange for Minister Whan’s office, which should mean it will be on Minister Burke’s desk late next week.
  2. “…will do everything possible at his end to speed up the process.”  He said he understood the urgency, and identified a “same day turn-around” priority whenever he or his office was required to be involved in the submission process.
  3. “…has full confidence in NRAC, and will comply to their recommendation.”  Just to qualify this a bit, he does give NRAC some parameters before they go to areas to assess them, and so has some control as to how “compassionate” they are able to be. Possibly NRAC is a bit of a scapegoat for the government, to wear the brunt of tough decisions as the government tightens it’s drought policy.
  4. “…NRAC will predominantly be assessing a ‘landscape recovery’.” This was the one I struggled with a bit, as it indicated to me that a financial recovery was not a big consideration for the government at this time. With the recent rains in the area over the weekend, if NRAC is deployed with instructions only to asses a ‘landscape recovery’, we will be in a poor position for being declared EC status. Preempting the outcome will achieve little I guess, but it was hard not to feel a bit let down.

It is worth thinking back briefly to spring last year. Had we (the farmers) not remained hopeful that spring rains would eventuate and decided to hit the panic button in September, perhaps NRAC would have arrived in November, which would have been an easy decision for them to reinstate us.

The fact we needed to approach the government at all, shows me their monitoring and assistance systems are failing them (and us).  There is no review process for NRAC for monitoring the decisions they have made, and this allowed the situation to get as bad as it was by the time we got to December, which was nothing short of negligent.

I left the minister six colour photos on the day — five of the drought, and the sixth and final photo showing green grassy paddocks, which was taken in February last year. The point I am making here is one of “deja vu” — we are at exactly the same point as we were 12 months ago, when we were told by NRAC that the recovery had been sufficient.

Look what happened — we don’t want to see the same mistake being made again under virtually identical circumstances. We are in a cash drought, with a great opportunity to work our way into our own recovery, if given some financial assistance to kick-start the system.