QUEENSLAND MP Rob Katter is urging Federal Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce to advance a $30 million commitment on establishing a ground-breaking Multi-Peril Crop Insurance (MPCI) scheme.
The Federal Coalition’s Agricultural and Competitiveness White Paper released last July promised $30m to help with implementing a MPCI.
It comprised $2500 from the Commonwealth with potentially matching contributions from State governments to conduct audits of five-year production figures, to assess individual producers’ suitability, for a MPCI scheme.
That move was welcomed by farm industry stakeholders, as a good first step to incentivise commercial insurers to enter a new product market.
But with more than six months passing since the White Paper’s release, Mr Katter has now written to Mr Joyce pushing Queensland’s claims to receive $10m of that funding.
He said it was up to the minister’s discretion to decide how the remaining funds were spent from the $30m allocation – but he wanted to see an announcement in the next couple of months on how it would be allocated to Queensland.
The Katter's Australian Party MP and the son of party founder Bob Katter is Chair of the Queensland Rural Debt and Drought Taskforce that’s currently investigating financial difficulties confronting the State’s rural and farming communities.
He’s requested a meeting with Mr Joyce to also raise concerns ventilated during the Taskforce process and prioritise ways of delivering a commercially viable MPCI scheme, starting with grain farmers and extending it over time to other commodities.
“It can run on its own two legs once it’s up and running but the role for the government is to get involved in the early stage to establish it and get the critical mass from the industry that makes it viable for the insurers themselves.
“And once you can establish it in the grains industry which is probably the low-hanging fruit, there’s no reason why we should not be trying to apply it to other agricultural pursuits.”
Last week, National Farmers Federation President Brent Finlay said his lobby group also wanted government to adopt a whole of farm insurance program on production costs, not just a MPCI program.
“It needs some support in the early days but that may be paid back in spades by acting early, getting a product in place, instead of hitting the wall in every drought and then the government has to find substantial drought assistance,” he said.
Mr Katter believes the new insurance scheme would invoke a generational change by “smoothing out all of the snakes and ladders in agriculture; the market volatility and variable weather patterns”.
“It’s a part of an elegant solution to try and fortify agriculture and has been done all around the world,” he said.
“It solves a lot of issues, gives more security to the government and reinvigorates economies.
“It has an element of economic prosperity for the towns; it has a security feature for the government and long term viability and security for agriculture in general.”
Mr Katter said with $3 billion spent on drought support programs via the former Exceptional Circumstances policy, such government funding could now underpin a MPCI scheme, to manage risks of droughts, floods or “whatever failures in agriculture”.
He said an ideal outcome was for the federal government to underwrite the insurance scheme’s establishment – but the $30m would assist with the initial data collection which was industry’s “big hurdle”.
A spokesman for Minister Joyce said a meeting with Mr Katter had been agreed to and further details on delivery, this season, of the $29.9m farm insurance and risk advice grants announced in the White Paper, would be released soon.
“The government has been consulting with key stakeholders on the implementation of this initiative and will be happy to brief the Queensland Government’s Rural Debt and Drought Taskforce once details are announced,” the spokesperson said.
Mr Katter said the data collection process had already started in NSW and the “same love needs to be shown for Queensland” by providing the $10m he’s requesting.
He said that funding could be allocated to the State government and program delivery then facilitated through the local Agriculture Department and QRAA disaster financial assistance delivery agency.
At the release of the White Paper, Victorian Liberal MP Dan Tehan warned against the government underwriting any MPCI scheme saying Australian farmers were not over-reliant on government subsidies, like competing farmers in the US or Europe.
