Last week Shadow Minister for Agriculture Joel Fitzgibbon; Senator for Queensland, Chris Ketter and Senator for Victoria, Kim Carr invited the various state and national dairy farming organisations as well as representatives from Coles and Woolworths to meet with them in Brisbane to discuss the crisis within the dairy industry.
The consensus from all organisations, except for the retailers naturally, was that the mandatory code of conduct recommended by the ACCC report into the dairy industry, needed to be extended across the value chain and not be confined to the relationship between processors and farmers. The imbalance of power that has been so often quoted from the report, exists at all levels and needs to be addressed.
Representatives from the major processors were frank. As much as they want to support our farmers with a price increase, unless the real issue of current retail pricing is fixed they also see no future for their businesses.
When you have representatives from multinational corporations acknowledging their own frailty due to retail pricing, you see just how dire the situation has become.
While there is speculation as to when the next federal election is called, fixing the Australian dairy crisis needs to become a key election promise for all parties.
No government wants the collapse of an industry on their conscience. As we’ve seen from the petitioning that QDO has undertaken over the past five weeks, this issue is something that the Australia public believe in and are passionate about.
It was good to see Labor taking the initiative with calling the summit, but if we wait much longer and have to wait for the election to bring about change, we won’t have a dairy industry to defend.
To date, no federal government has taken real action to fix the retail pricing issues of the dairy industry. We continue to hear words of support, but words are not enough.
