By Chris Spindler
Despite protestations about helping the rural sector, the federal Coalition's rural package, released a fortnight ago, does little more than continue the policy begun by the previous Labor government of actively removing small producers and favouring big business. Winning export markets remains the highest priority, at the expense of rural workers and small producers.
The five-year package comes with only $200 million in new funding, and very little of that is allocated to alleviating social problems in rural areas.
The underlying theme of the package is for rural producers to become more self-reliant, weaned off their "welfare mentality". The ALP, Coalition and National Farmers Federation all support this approach of opening up the rural sector to fluctuations in the market, and blaming the victim when disaster results.
The package includes $60 million to encourage farmers to put money aside in good times for use in lean times. Yet for many, money made in good seasons has already been spent purchasing equipment to improve efficiency and paying off massive mortgages.
Furthermore, this $60 million comes from tax breaks, but approximately one-third of producers are unprofitable, don't pay tax and therefore will not benefit.
This fits with the government's aim of ridding the industry of as many small producers as quickly and cheaply as possible. Re-establishment grants of just $45,000 can be claimed for leaving the industry.
The initial target group is the 23,000 smallest, least efficient producers — almost one-quarter of Australia's farmers.
The number of rural producers has been declining at about 15% per year for the past 25 years. This trend of fewer but larger producers will continue.
Recently, Stanbroke Pastoral Company bought another four properties in the Northern Territory, making it the biggest beef producer in Australia, owning a land area twice the size of Tasmania. Because companies such as Stanbroke are focused on export markets, their increasing dominance in the sector is encouraged by the government.
The policy emphasis on self-reliance means that exceptional circumstance relief is harder to get. In Gippsland recently, an application for exceptional circumstance relief took more than six months to process, and in Queensland 29 shires were revoked from being drought-declared.
As part of this approach, the government is in the process of redefining "drought". Drought should not be seen as "exceptional", it now says, but as part of the normal climatic conditions of this dry continent. This redefinition conveniently shifts responsibility for the consequences of drought and other "natural" occurrences onto individual producers.
While it's clear that traditional farming practices in Australia have damaged the natural environment, the government's belated recognition of climate conditions is motivated by its restructuring agenda, rather than the urgent need for environmentally sustainable farming practices.
Indeed, as individual producers are increasingly expected to bear the brunt of market and weather fluctuations, environmental and social devastation in this sector can only get worse.
In announcing the package, the primary industries and energy minister, John Anderson, said that the poor conditions in the bush were leading to more marriage breakdowns and suicides. He trivialised farmers' problems and pessimism by attributing it to recent "talk" about the looming impact of the el niño effect.
This is not just "talk". Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics figures anticipate crop losses worth $600 million as a result of the drought brought about by el niño. Winter crops are expected to be down 28% on last year's record crop. Wheat, which bolstered exports last year, is already down by about 3 million tonnes.
The government's rural package does nothing to help individual producers through a normal dry year, let alone a drought. The last el niño, in 1993-94, cost $2 billion, or 10% of the value of farm production. Many individual farmers were declared "unprofitable", received no government support and were devastated.
All the indications are that the social cost of the next el niño will be even greater, but better covered up by the government.