QUEENSLAND LNP Senator Barry O’Sullivan says there’s a false belief among many observers that resolving debt and drought issues with debt mitigation or rain will simply restore producers’ fortunes and “everything will be all right”.
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But he said while drought and debt issues had compounded producers’ circumstances, the problems they were now facing had been coming for 20 years.
“It is about a lack of profitability in their enterprises,” he said.
“These enterprises are reporting, in many cases, zero return on investment and those that are operating effectively are operating on about 3 or 4 per cent return on investment.
“These are not anecdotal figures; these are figures that have been borne out by many peer-reviewed empirical studies into this issue over the last decade.
“We have producers who are reporting the same level of income per kilogram for their commodity – for their beef or for their livestock – as they were receiving 20 years ago.
“In fact, for those who have looked at the index in the last 24 months, there have been occasions where producers who have sold their entire livestock for up to one quarter of the prices per kilogram that they would have received 20 years ago.”
But Senator O’Sullivan said many producers and rural people were tired of hearing from their members of parliament telling them what their problems are.
“They are tired of us indicating to them what the circumstances were that brought them into these unfortunate circumstances of their own,” he said in a recent Senate speech after touring drought regions in his home state.
“It is time for all of us across this place to dig deep, without regard to partisanship, to start to produce some solutions to support our primary producers.
“Each of us has to personally put a value on primary production for our nation.
“We each of us have to answer the question of whether we intend to continue to support these small communities and the social infrastructure that goes with them.
“We need to accept, I say, the proposition that agriculture and primary production will be the next economy.
“Long after the mining resources of gas, coal, iron ore and the like have made their contribution, we will go back to the age of producing soft commodities, predominantly for export into the Asian market.”
