23 October 2008

Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry Tony Burke
and Peter Kenny, chair of expert panel looking at the social impact of drought
Launch of the social panel report, Parliament House, Canberra

E&OE

Tony Burke: Thanks very much Jane [Milburn]. I want to thank the Australian Council of Agricultural journalists for facilitating this morning. I want to acknowledge the many journalists who have come along this morning. My Parliamentary colleagues including the Shadow Minister John Cobb and also a special acknowledgement to the many people who are here who work in, effectively, the sector, in every sense that this report defines.

The panel members who are here today have been through a pretty emotional experience. As they’ve gone round, they’ve had people open up to the panel in ways that many of them have not opened up to their own families.

They’ve had opportunities to deal with inquiries where what I offered very much – as you’ll see in the terms of reference – was a blank canvas. It was clear that our policies with respect to drought were not as effective as they need to be. It was clear that when you have mental health issues that we have in many rural communities, when you have the challenges that face individuals, families and communities, we have to believe that there must be a better way of doing this.

That in no way is a criticism of those who designed the current drought policy. It has gone through each side as government has changed. There has always been a bipartisan approach and it’s always been a case of trying to find the best way in public policy terms of helping people through a crisis.

What the panel has started to look over in the report today is just the second of a three-part review. The first part is through the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO. This is the second part. And the third part is the work of the Productivity commission which will have a draft report out at the end of this month and a final report in February.

The challenge for the people on this panel and what they’ve started to look at is: does it need to be a crisis-driven approach? Are there ways that we can actually do more in terms of preparation so that instead of government’s role being to wait for the crisis and then help out, are there steps we can take that avert the crisis itself?

It was also important that we looked beyond drought as being something that affects the one individual who manages the farm and affects productivity and that’s it. The panel have looked at every member of the family and every member of the community. That’s given us, in policy terms, a real insight.

The panel itself – you wouldn’t change a single member of this panel. We’ve got people who are experts in mental health, people who have played a significant representative role in respect to Country Women’s Associations, people who have focused their professional life in farming, all their professional life in understanding what makes communities work and both a former Labor Senator and a formal Liberal Member of Parliament.

I do want to particularly acknowledge the work that’s been done by Peter Kenny. The reason I asked Peter Kenny to chair this report was after we met at Emerald, when most of Emerald was underwater. And Peter made the transition so quickly in explaining what had happened to people’s farm businesses through the damage of the Emerald floods at the beginning of this year and then went straight to how it was affecting the families, how that was affecting each member of the community, where the volunteers were now interacting.

It was not simply an understanding of the economic crisis. It went straight to the heart of how this is impacting on the lives of people and that really made Peter the stand-out choice to chair this panel.

None of the policy in here is easy. None of it is – nor should it be – because producers themselves in times of drought, and the communities, are going through some of the toughest periods that they do go through.

I am convinced, having had a look at the report – and I’m now working through it for the second time – that there are pathways here for us to be able to provide our support in the years to come in a far more effective way than we have in the past.

We continue to provide the guarantee for anyone who is currently on levels of assistance that the rules will not change from under them. But we do want to make sure that we can prepare for the next drought or – as the committee likes to say – periods of dryness. We want to make sure that we can prepare for the next drought more effectively than we have for any of the ones from the past.

So as my role as Minister, on behalf of the Government, and I think I can say on behalf of every rural community that stands to benefit from the hard work that’s done by the panel, we are well on the way I believe now to having a clear direction to be able to have a much stronger drought policy for the future.

Jane Milburn: So now we get to the nub of it – Peter Kenny, past president of Agforce and the chair of the expert panel. Peter, could you please come up and address the breakfast?

Peter Kenny: Thank you Jane and thank you for those kind remarks Minister. I have to say when you asked me to chair this panel I asked you why would you pick me. There were a lot of people in Australia better to do the job than I. I remember you saying I’m not going to answer that question. I’ll ask you again. I just found out.

Parliamentarians and official guests and ladies and gentlemen. I thank you for the opportunity to be here today to present the findings from this report on behalf of my fellow panel members and I will talk about them a little later.

On the 2nd of June this year , the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries & Forestry Tony Burke appointed our panel to assess the social impact of drought on farm families and on rural communities.

We were asked to identify gaps in social support services available to help people cope with drought and to identify areas where improvements could be made to ease the impacts of stress and change due to drought.

The people of rural Australia make a vital contribution to the rest of this country. We’ve identified a number of areas where these people could, and should, be better supported.

The title of our report: “It’s all about people. Changing perspectives on dryness” reflects our strong belief in the need for a new approach to living with drought rather than dealing with drought or, as we prefer to call it, dryness.

It is important that the future policy be focused on people and helping them to prepare for future dryness. I will return to this theme shortly, but first the process we went through when undertaking this assessment.

This review has been a unique opportunity and the first of its kind, to our knowledge, to be undertaken for consideration as evidence for policy development in Australia – not only this policy but every other policy as well.

Our assessment process had three main parts. Over six weeks we held 25 regional consultation forums across all states and in the Northern Territory. These attracted over 1,000 participants who gave us a first-hand account of their experiences of living with dryness over recent years.

More than four out of every ten people attending were farmers, the others being a range of service providers, business and community people and officials representing local community and government bodies.

The panel visited areas that provided a representative coverage of Australia’s agricultural areas and balanced this with good geographic spread of locations across the country.

We held some forums in areas that had been long-term EC declared. While ideally we would have liked to been able to conduct forums in more areas, we are confident that we heard all the key issues of concern to farm families and rural communities.

The second part was nine sessions of meetings that we held with key stakeholders and concerned parties in the capital cities and the major regional centres. These meetings included state and commonwealth government agencies, peak bodies and peak NGOs.

We also invited written submissions and were delighted by the amount of interest. Over 230 written submissions were received and I can tell you, people didn’t have a lot of time to prepare for this. Most contributors were happy to share their submissions and they are now publicly available on the [Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry] website.

To give our assessment of all important national context and to put what we heard in the forums and submissions into perspective we also engaged the Bureau of Rural Sciences to prepare research for our consideration.

We were welcomed into the communities everywhere and we were frequently overwhelmed by the generosity and honesty of people who were prepared to share their sometimes very painful experiences and sometimes for the first time.

We felt that the strength of the response underlined the importance of the issue of rural communities and their appreciation that these issues were being examined. I have to say that when people arrived at these forums it was interesting because we didn’t know who was going to turn up, nor did we know how many.

As they entered the door we asked them to register. We then asked them to also put their names of a piece of paper if they wished to speak. Following that we then had an idea exactly as to who was in these forums and what their agenda was.

The interesting thing then was of course when we started, we asked them to explain just in a word or two or a phrase just how they felt with regards to their feelings as to how drought has affected them mentally or physically.

When we started, I would stand there and there wasn’t a sound and I would say, “Well there’s nothing wrong here, eh?” And then it all started. The words would come out. Some positive, some negative.

That only took a few minutes. Following that, we asked the people then to come forward and we had a list of speakers and there was some discipline attached to that. They knew that they had to stick to the social impact and that was difficult to divorce the economic problems from the social impact.

I asked them to stick to the social impact but also to talk to the panel. Don’t worry about anyone else in this room. It was interesting, that these are the people who are the experts. So they had their five minutes and following that then we had two-and-a-half-hours where the rest of the people, we said to them: “Look we’re the panel, we’ve come to listen, you’ve come to talk, so let’s hear it.”

And a few people would start to talk. It was amazing that it was always in the third person to start with. It was ‘they’, ‘the government’ and all the rest of it. But when we picked our mark we would say, “But just how are you travelling yourself? How are you doing?” And as soon as they said ‘I’ they would break down. And sometimes for the first time in their lives. And their wives were beside them, holding them and saying, “We didn’t know that you were in this situation.”

We had situations where the neighbours were standing beside people, standing up beside them and holding them and saying, “We didn’t know that you were in this situation.” It was extremely emotional. Not only for them, but also for us as a panel.

At times it took up to five minutes for these people to actually express their feelings of how they actually felt. So it was a difficult process. At the end of the night, at the end of the two hours we had to put some humour back into it and keep the thing afloat. Fortunately we always had professional people with us who were able to pick these people up from the dust when we’d finished, because they were empty.
I can remember a number of times myself, standing outside the hall when we were busy, talking to a few people who really wanted to talk to us. And I’m not sure that the Government understands what’s actually happened here but they have put in place a process for the first time that some of these people have been able to open themselves up in public and tell us exactly how they felt emotionally.
It’s important, we believe, that that continues. We can’t just stop this process now.
It is clear that drought is having an impact on the well-being of farming families and rural communities. We also found that drought can exacerbate pressures from rural restructuring and the demographic decline of some rural communities.

The panel was told many times that for all the assistance that had been provided, that was greatly appreciated, but farm families and rural communities currently dealing with dryness do not feel that they are measurably better off.

Many farmers feel misunderstood and abandoned and believe that governments, the media, and the city people have negative attitudes towards them, particularly the irrigators and do not understand their difficulties.

They feel that this directly affects their ability to cope with drought. Drought has meant that farmers have had to cut costs, usually through laying off workers and spending less time in town, and their debt has grown.

Consequently, this has had a flow-on impact on local community businesses and services and we found that labourers were moving to pursue employment opportunities outside of agriculture and many of these people were young people.

When farm families are struggling, the communities they live in die. While many farmers say that they are coping, their coping mechanisms often place great pressure on their families. We heard of situations where money that would normally be spent on the family is keeping the business afloat. While tolerable for short periods, long-term this has the potential to erode the composition of families.

We noted that some regions appeared to lack either drought-specific or human support services, while other regions appeared to have a large number of services on offer, to the extent where some farmers have suggested that a drought industry has grown up around them.

The panel heard that children and young adults are being denied education and extra curricular activities because of household financial limitations resulting from the drought or because they were required to work on the farm.

The panel found, at a fundamental level, it appears that government funding for service providers to deliver drought-specific or focus human support services for defined periods has caused the creation of an extra layer of bureaucracy that is often poorly-coordinated and not linked into existing professional networks or referral hierarchies.

In many cases we observed that both government and non-government service providers appeared to have a very low awareness of the support that others were offering in local communities.  Conceivably, a number of people could be driving up to farms or waiting behind a desk to offer similar services or support.

We also noted that, because of stress, too many decisions involving family and business were being made and implemented without adequate consideration for each other. At the most extreme, poor decisions were contributing to personal crisis. Sometimes, sadly, to suicide.  And at the farm business level – to skipping on good farm management practices and compromising long-term productivity or productive capacity and environmental outcomes.

We also heard from farmers who said that they had adequately planned and prepared for drought and resented those who had not – that they were the ones receiving assistance from government, while they received nothing.

At the moment, government’s responses to drought are not effective enough because many are crisis-driven and not focusing on early intervention, prevention and preparedness for dry periods. There is funding to run barbeques or twelve weeks of yoga classes that aim to rebuild declining social capital or to tell farmers and rural businesses which assistance to apply for and help them fill in forms, or even to drive from farm-to-farm handing out food parcels and pamper packs with a leaflet inside that advertises, say, mental health or church services.

All these are valuable and useful, but they are short-term fixes to bigger longer-term problems. Sometimes extra health professionals are brought in for, say, six to twelve months and then funding for the service ends. The rapport that the people have to build in that particular time is just absolutely wasted.

Many non-government organisations are operating in this short-term environment. They are under pressure from skills shortages and lack of coordination. They are doing their very best, but under difficult circumstances, and sometimes without adequate training and professional support.

We found it difficult to ascertain the breadth and detail of many programs on offer and I suspect that some farmers might find it just as difficult.

Before I give a brief overview of the key recommendations from our report I would like to make three high-level observations that underpin our findings.

First, extreme climate variations is normal in Australia and so are the production and income fluctuations associated with it.

Second, rainfall is not a measure of dryness. It is a measure of variation.

We went to areas where three millimetres of rain was exceptionally dry. We also went to areas where 200 millimetres of rain was exceptionally dry.

Third, following from these two, drought is still often equated with an inability to control the weather, rather than an inability to control a rural business under conditions of climate variation.

The Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO predicted there was an increase risk of hotter and dryer seasons over the next 20 to 30 years, compared to the last hundred years, across many parts of Australia.

Now, if they are correct, then many farm families, rural businesses and rural communities will need to change how they respond. We make a series of recommendations in our report that are consistent with an improved policy and planning process and together they focus on the capacity of farm families and rural communities to prepare for dryness.

The challenge is to design programs which address the social well-being of farming families and rural communities in ways which do not inhibit the efficiency of agricultural industries.

The panel recommends that future policy should move people towards an acceptance that future dryness will occur, that it is not a crisis and that planning for dryness should be about both farm development and personal and family well-being.

The focus should be moved away from crisis-driven policy initiatives and should be reinforced through mutual responsibility and should recognise the connections between family and business. Rather than providing crisis-framed assistance in times of difficulty, governments should provide incentives in better times to encourage commercially- and environmentally-responsible management under prevailing seasonal conditions.

We propose the future policy be focused on investment in, and planning for, the well-being of farm families and rural communities and that this occur prior to the period of dryness.

We consider the priority for all levels of government should be to develop and to deliver the information and tools necessary to help farm families and rural communities help themselves respond to the challenges of future dryness.

Perhaps it goes back to the old saying: failing to plan is planning to fail. Also taking this into account, the panel suggests for future periods of dryness that the governments consider a mutual responsibility policy that only provides assistance to farm families which have developed an appropriate plan before dryness gets to a point or a trigger point that could be described as beyond their control.

The strong connection between farm families and the land requires planning in which social, economic and environmental considerations have equal importance. We consider that governments should provide the means and incentives for families to develop and implement their own well-being plans, which would include family plans which document the needs and value of healthy families to the farm from rural businesses number one are business plans.

[Families] should have personal development plans including health and learning considerations.  [There should be] property management plans. Environmental plans, human resource and workforce management plans – which would also underpin farm safety – and also farm succession plans. And most people I know today consider all of those issues but some people don’t.

Through these plans, the need for self-reliance will be reinforced. Structural adjustment will be promoted. Agricultural and environmental resources will be protected. Longer, dryer periods will be withstood and the longer-term sustainability of farms and farmers can be assured.

Drought is inevitable and natural and we must factor it into our planning process in a positive way, without the fear factor.

The panel believes that governments have a crucial role in providing certain basic human support services for rural Australia before, during and after drought, as they do for all Australians in all locations and in all circumstances.

While we all understand, even if we cant always welcome, the pressures that drive services to be centralised, we need to ensure that those who continue living and working in rural areas are not disadvantaged through, say, their costs of accessing services being driven up whether in terms of time, financial outlay or even both.

The outreach mobility of human support services to respond to rural people in times of stress such as future periods of dryness needs to be improved. The panel heard that the current response by government to fund a variety of providers and individuals together with a considerable presence from non-government charity and church organisations has created a number of uncoordinated stop-start initiatives.

When education and training are considered, drought affects people’s participation and ability to access education and training so the panel recommends that the viability of classes, schools and bus services should include consideration of community stress and if services are withdrawn, viable alternatives should be offered to the families remaining in those locations.

The panel also recommends further research into how reoccurring stresses, such as dryness, affect the access of young people to education and that that Australian government’s review of higher education should consider issues of access and support, particularly to rural and remote communities.

It is also important to note that education doesn’t just finish at school and vocational education and training should be aimed at assisting farm families with up-skilling or re-skilling, including recognition of prior learning to broaden opportunities to earn off-farm income.

Further funding for vocational education institutions is needed to help farm families and people in rural communities access further education opportunities. There should also be careful consideration to timing and appropriateness on delivering education and training programs during times of stress such as dryness. In order to ensure sustainable levels of human capital, governments, along with the education and industry sectors, must develop policies and initiatives to address trade and other professional skills shortages in farm families and rural communities. These policies and initiatives must be underpinned by regional-specific research on the location, extent, and impact of skills shortages.

Current employment programs, such as Drought Force must be evaluated in order to better address the functioning of the labour market and the agriculture sector during periods of dryness and to encourage people to remain in their local communities. The rewards and risks associated with careers in agriculture and related rural industries also need to be further promoted to improve the image of farming and attract more young people to the agribusiness industry.

In relation to health and well-being, the ad hoc approach of bringing in extra mental health resources during times of drought largely does not succeed. The panel believes this approach should cease and that there needs to be greater investment in the capacity of existing primary and allied health care services in rural communities to enable them to be responsive to the physical and mental health impacts of future dryness.

Extra resources introduced for drought responses should remain through recovery and be used to build preparedness and resilience for handling future dry periods.

Also to improve health and well-being we suggest that drought support workers be trained in mental health literacy, referral and first aid skills.

In conclusion, governments should focus future policy on facilitating the social well-being of farm families, rural businesses and rural communities so that there is an improved capacity to live with dryness. If governments can do this better we believe there will also be positive economic and environmental outcomes for rural Australia that results from improved decision-making.

The individuals and families who want to live and work in rural Australia and contribute to the nation are important. These are people of hope and their determination and initiative must be supported. If governments agree that the social well-being of farm families, rural businesses and rural communities should be the core element of future policy for rural Australia, then we strongly recommend that there should be an urgent statement of commitment on behalf of the whole of this nation to strong, healthy, vibrant and sustainable rural Australia.

Finally I have to give some thanks to a number of people and firstly to those people who attended these forums and opened themselves up, to give us the information that we require first and foremost. Then all the people – and a lot of the people in this room – who helped to put the information forward and the people who actually wrote those submissions and gave their time, 230 of them. They are the most important.

Also, I have got to thank the secretariat. We have a [Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry] secretariat and I don’t mind saying this publicly, I have worked with a lot of people and I’ll tell you what I have never worked with a group of people like this before, led by Andrew [McDonald] and Matthew [Dadswell]. It was incredible. Not one thing went wrong on these trips. While we travelled, we were under a lot of pressure and they made sure that everything went tremendously so thanks to the secretariat.

Then of course I can go through the panel one-by-one because we travelled together for six to eight weeks under extreme pressure from time-to-time and we had some very interesting debates and then we would all go away and have a bit of a camp and come back. And it’s amazing how we grew very closely together over that short time. So for your professionalism and also for your wisdom and the support and the compassion that you showed, I just felt proud to be one of the group who was able to travel Australia and give people the opportunity to tell us how they felt.

And I guess finally, Minister to you, yourself. Thank you for what you have done. I believe that this is the first time that any government has looked at the people behind the scenes, with regards to policy, particularly that I’ve ever had anything to do with.

So, it’s encouraging to see a government, and particularly yourself, who is keen to look at the social inclusion of policy and I hope that that does happen and so there has been a paradigm shift I believe in this, to go away from pure economics to looking at the people behind the scenes.

I thank you very much for what you have done. But as I said before we really have opened up a process. And I have got to say that I have had a number of conversations with the Sydney Theatre Company in the last few weeks and they’re going to put on a play and it’s going to be called ‘Burnt’. And I don’t think they’ll mind my telling you this, but it will be in June/July next year and it will be based on the fact that we have opened the process out there and in regional and rural Australia and it’s a process that has to continue.

But the play will be focused on depression and the idea is to go to all the schools in Australia and to let people know that depression is part of life for many people but it’s something that can be overcome. So it’s their way of doing their part for rural Australia and I welcome that. They will also come back into the cities eventually and show the people in Brisbane and Sydney – I say Brisbane first because I’m a Queenslander – Sydney and Melbourne and the other capital cities exactly what’s happening out there.

As well as that there has been a poem that was written by a fellow in NSW, Murray Hartin. It’s an incredible poem.  I don’t know if you’ve heard it but it’s called ‘Rain from Nowhere’ and I have given that to the Theatre Company and I think they’re going to base their play on this particular poem. But you will hear this poem. It’s one that will go through the community. If I read it to you here you will weep I can tell you.

But having said that, we as primary producers, we’re not looking for sympathy. We’re looking for support. The only way we’re going to get that is to get into the hearts and the minds of the people in the cities because we have no political clout anymore. We have to be heard. We are the people who produce the best food and fibre in this world – certainly the safest – and we go forward with the job we do. We produce the food for our consumers and city cousins. We’ve got to get closer to one another and understand one another’s position.

So ladies and gentlemen, as we say in our report’s title: It’s all about people and changing the perspective of dryness. Thank you for your time today.

ENDS