April 2019

Date of publication: December 2018 The Australian farming sector is one of the least subsidised in the world and as a direct result it is one of the most efficient. Our farmers have increasingly been forced to rely on their own capital reserves to get their farm businesses through drought years. WAFarmers sympathises with our eastern states cousins who are battling through a tough dry spell and we are only too aware that we endured

Date of publication: 8 October 2018 The vast majority of food found in your local supermarket has been produced with the aid of agricultural chemicals; without them, domestic and global food production would be massively reduced, there would be less variety on our supermarket shelves and a heftier price tag on most foods and beverages. Australian agriculture is highly diverse and includes industries such as livestock production, grain production, horticulture, dairy and aquaculture, just to

Date of publication: 28 September 2018 Modern communication across the Western Australian Wheatbelt is totally reliant on two key forms of infrastructure; road transport and mobile phones. To compete in today’s highly competitive globalised world of agriculture, our world class farmers and agri service businesses need world class infrastructure.  Unfortunately, what we have is far from it.  Both state and commonwealth governments have failed to keep pace with the speed of change in broadacre agriculture

Date of publication:  1 November 2018 I read with interest in the Friday October 26 West Australian, Christie Kingston’s article Farmers on the Front Line of a Changing Climate.  It is written from the perspective of a farming family from Goomalling who are obviously concerned about the implications of climate change on their farm business. They are not alone; Western Australia’s 4000 Wheatbelt farmers have been cleverly managing the short and long term climatic impacts

Date of publication: 18 September 2018 European agriculture is drowning in a sea of red and green tape driven by activist anti-farming Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) which are slowly but surely shutting down their farmer’s right to farm. Green groups such as PETA and Greenpeace have been quietly working away since the 1960s pressuring European bureaucrats with claims that modern agricultural practices were endangering the environment, the rights of animals; and the world’s food security and

Date of publication: 7 March 2019 In a past life working for ministers across the various primary industry portfolios as well as a State Premier, I met regularly with all of the representative peak bodies – from the Association of Mining and Exploration Companies (AMEC) to the Potato Growers Association through to the Western Australian Fishing Industry Council (WAFIC).  In total there are over one hundred organisations in WA representing every fisher, farmer and miner,

Date of publication:  11 Jan 2019 For Western Australian farmers it might just be that State Government policy on the waters off our coast could have implications for those on the land. In recent months Fisheries Minister Dave Kelly made policy announcements on three of the State’s fisheries – lobster, coral and pearl – which effectively grab part of one for the Government and redistribute quotas or double rents in the others. As the fightback

Date of publication:  25 Jan 2019 What does a Chinese reality TV dating show in Rockingham have to do with WA farmers? I’m glad you asked. Right now, our farmers are relying on WA’s tourism industry to fill the gaps in our unskilled labour force. Young folks from all over the globe on working holidays are getting unskilled jobs done in the short term, but their visas come with age and time restrictions. There has

AT the recent WAFarmers annual conference, Agriculture and Food Minister Alannah MacTiernan noted the regular calls to action I was giving her in these pages and questioned why I had not been more proactive making things happen when I was chief of staff to a previous agriculture minister. A fair question but as a staffer my job then was to give advice, not to make decisions – that responsibility is with ministers. In politics, good