A laissez-faire relationship exists between Australian farmers and their government.
“Government has the view that industry should be structured so it stands on its own two feet,” said Craig Conkey, a program director with the federal department of agriculture in Canberra.
When the agriculture industry took control of its own business affairs more than 10 years ago, the result was a more ambitious export program and improved profitability, Conkey said.
To support a world class beef and wheat export program, the government opened some doors, then stepped back.
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“Private enterprise got the ball rolling,” said Richard Rains, chief executive officer of Sanger Australia, a red meat exporting company that has sold internationally for more than 30 years.
Government’s commitment is to provide services that benefit the public such as food safety, inspection and quarantine services, export accreditation, animal welfare guidelines and environmental protection.
It also provides matching grants to research and development agencies. For example, the research arm of the red meat industry corporation, Meat and Livestock Australia, gets about $40 million annually in public money.
Government also helps agriculture by applying pressure through the World Trade Organization and the Cairns group to remove tariffs imposed by Japan, China and India, said Scott Mitchell, manager of trade policy for the National Farmers Federation.
Cairns, a free-trade federation that Australia chairs and to which about 16 countries including Canada belong, wants international markets open. About three-quarters of all Australian agriculture products are exported.
“We took the view that we export 70 percent of everything we produce; we have got a very small population of 20 million people; our capacity to consume much more of what we produce is very limited,” said Mitchell.
