Thank you to John and Kym for making myself, Sussan, Barnaby and our team so welcome, and thanks everyone for coming along to talk to us about the impact of drought on you and your communities.
Now, I accept that this is a very serious problem for country Australia and it doesn’t just affect the farmers; it affects everyone living in the areas which clearly depend upon farming for their whole life and there are so many places in this part of Australia that are absolutely utterly dependant on farming.
So, this is a matter which Barnaby has been thinking about for several months now. We are going to come up with a decent package to help, probably in the first half of next week.
We’re going to address two things: first of all, the immediate income problems of people who aren’t making any money because their crops have died and their cattle aren’t saleable, or their sheep aren’t saleable at the moment and if you’re in a drought-stricken property, you can’t leave, you can’t sell, you can’t borrow and you’ve got a real problem so we’re going to deal with that; the other thing we’re going to deal with is the issue of people who have been through very serious drought, more akin to a natural disaster than to an ordinary cyclical event, and their needs to reconstruct. So, they’re the two issues that we are going to deal with and in the first half of next week you can expect some significant announcements from the Government.
The main point I want to make, though, is that as far as I’m concerned and as far as this Government is concerned, agriculture is at the heart of our country. Agriculture is at the heart of a strong and dynamic Australia.
We all know that Broken Hill has been going for about 130 years. I ran up to the top of the mound this morning and I looked at the Miners’ Memorial and I thought there’s 800 people who have died in that mine and what an extraordinary sacrifice they’ve made and how important, over the years, Broken Hill has been to the story of our country. But, for all the wealth that’s come out of the Broken Hill Mine, sooner or later that mine will be gone, but the land will be here forever.
So, the long-term future of our country is every bit as dependent upon agriculture as it is on anything else.
As long as people live on this planet, there’ll be a need to feed them and the richer we are, the better we will want to eat and live and the more important it will be that we’ve got a dynamic agricultural sector here in Australia.
When the mines are gone, the coal, the gas and the iron ore, not nearly as important as it is now, our land and our farms will be absolutely vital to our prosperity and the prosperity of the wider world.
So agriculture, one way or another, has a massive future as far as I’m concerned and when I look at you, I don’t see people who are holding on to the past, I see people who are the mainstays of our future.
So, thanks for everything you do.
Whenever I come to country Australia, I am uplifted and exhilarated by the spirit that I see and when I talk to country Australians, I don’t see victims, I see fighters; people who are fighting for their families, for their businesses, for their communities, for their future.
So, thanks so much, John and Kym. I really appreciate the chance to be here.
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