president's report

I have spent my lifetime in agriculture in Tasmania, as did generations of my family before me. We have seen good years and we have seen bad years, too many bad years but the outlook is the best I have ever seen.

I have to say that never has there been a better opportunity for people to enter farming and to be confident that they can make a really successful life for themselves. That has not happened by accident.

To continue this air of what I believe is true optimism, we have to maintain our vigilance to the investment environment. That means we have to continue to promote:

• skills and innovation;
• research and development;
• forward-looking government policy and leadership.

New and existing farmers need constant incentive. We don’t create opportunity by taking opportunity away. Governments don’t encouragement and innovation by saying to farmers, “you touch this and we will regulate it”. That attitude will stifle any growth.

Those of my generation were given wonderful opportunities; we owe it to the next generation to make sure we do the same.

So how do we do it? The current irrigation rollout around the state is a wonderful example of co-operation between the three levels of government and the farmers and irrigators who transform the guaranteed water supply to increase productivity and the quality of the food and fibre they grow.

Getting water to the soil is just the start of the investment cycle. Increased agricultural production itself becomes an accelerant for other economic activity and for employment opportunities. As allied jobs and professions hook into the agricultural upturn, our rural and regional communities become reinvigorated. The country lifestyle that we thought had become unviable is resurrected. Farming families mean country schools have a future; health professionals can look to a country practice; the travelling roadshow of agronomists, accountants and lawyers can hit the road again.

My counterparts in other states often shake their heads as they muse about how Tasmania functions. They see this huge development in irrigation infrastructure on one hand, but on the other they see the exclusion of unrealistically large forest and land reserves that take away any opportunity for further sustainable development.

“What do you beat yourselves up so much?” they wonder. They are envious of our irrigation development, especially when they compare what we have here with what is happening in the Murray-Darling basin. They cannot believe that already 48 per cent of the state is locked up in reserves and, if the intergovernmental forest agreement continues down the same path of further reserves, more than half of Tasmania will be sectioned off.

I say that enough is enough; the so-called balance in Tasmania has gone too far for the state to survive. The day will come when we need to start unlocking these areas to make them available for sustainable development. That will have to happen at some time in the future if Tasmania stand is to stand on its own two feet.