February 2019

Every state agricultural Minister leaves their particular mark on the portfolio. Some grow the farm, some just keep the farm ticking over and others allow the farm to go backwards. Going back in time to the 1990s, I recall a hyperactive Minister with a lot of energy particularly around the sheep industry, the next left us with a ban on GM crops and not much else, and then his successor turned on the tap for

Having dealt with WAfarmers and the PGA in one form or another over the past 25 years working in the political world, I am very familiar with the fact that political messaging from the State’s two peak farm bodies often cancels each other out. Even when both organisations are presenting common views on bad government policy, any slightly different presentation of the facts is leapt on by government as disunity in the industry and hence

The Northern Cattle Industry is heavily reliant on the live export trade.   The live export cattle trade in WA is reliant on the 120 pastoral stations which are spread across the Kimberley and Pilbara which include forty-one indigenous owned properties.   Its an important trade that underwrites the prosperity of these businesses. But the industry is under threat from the animal activists as they seek to destroy the trade out of the largest and most comprehensively monitored

In 2017, I swapped life as Chief of Staff to the Minister for Agriculture working out of an office overlooking the Swan River, to working out of a donger in Fitzroy Crossing, overseeing a struggling Aboriginal Corporation that owned three bankrupt and abandoned stations in the Kimberley. Besides the pleasant shock of working with real people what I found most shocking was how 1.3 million acres of prime pastoral country was being left virtually abandoned

We all know that running any sort of agricultural business is complex and comes with uncontrollable risk – commodity price fluctuations, unpredictable weather, global economies influencing trade and market access, and government policy easily swayed by political persuasion. For station country across the hot dry pastoral regions of the state, there is an additional risk, the need to keep water up to cattle, no water no live cattle. To reduce this risk, and ensure water