Interest rate rises not on the radar at Young Beef Producers Forum

A number of them said it was something having more of an impact on their parents as they weren't at the point of taking out stock or property loans yet.

Those who were dealing with the continual escalation of loan repayments and rising mortgages were resigned to the news, saying it was largely out of their control.

For example, Will and Sasha Treloar, who are leasing Will's parents' property at Cooladdi, said they were like weather conditions, which had to be negotiated around.

"They're something out of our control, they are what they are," Mr Treloar said. "We do pay interest - I hope they don't go back to what they were when my parents were starting out at the start of the '90s."

Ms Treloar said the main thing they were trying to do was to build profitable resilient businesses and make good business management decisions.

"Then interest rates aren't so much an issue, I guess," she said.

Condamine's Lucy Moore was another with stock and land loans, which she described as a cloud lingering on the horizon for herself and husband Bryce.

"With cattle prices dropping, a bit of a negative feel in the climate, it builds up," she said.

"At the end of the day, you've got to pay those bills.

"Our strategy is to find gaps in the market, get some cash flow in the business.

"It's a lot of time spent at the computer doing sums to make it all work."

At the other end of the scale, 20-year-old Chinchilla feedlot worker Jazmine Aicken isn't being impacted by interest rates, saying she and her friends don't really talk about money.

"Down the track I plan to get a home loan but interest rates aren't a thing for me at the moment," she said.

"My friends and I talk about what we're getting paid but not really what we do with it.

"We're still in that stage of spending it on things we probably shouldn't."

Rod Price described his parents as "working for the bank", saying they were watching what they spent money on, whereas he had enough money to pay for what he needed at present.

Asked about his situation, Liam Baker from North Star, NSW, said his family was just starting to go through succession so all the discussions about money and affordability were ahead of them.

He said rate rises made for challenging times, which was what he attended events like the Young Beef Producers Forum for, to think outside the box.

"It enables us to think about how we get around those challenges and keep moving forward," he said.

Oscar Cass from Wandoan said increasing rates weren't the greatest thing for people like his family making repayments, especially as it looked like there might be another rise.

"We'll keep managing as usual but keep a tight eye on it, and see how it goes in the future," were his thoughts.

One young person at the pointy end of interest rates is Kate Blennerhassett, who works for BM Ag Biz at Emerald, and who said people had gone from cashflow positive to just having enough cash to keep operating effectively.

"It's affecting landowners, the older ones of the generation here today, and it has a flow-on effect to people's children if they're involved in the family business," she said. "Everyone's strategies are different - it all depends on their business and the type of risk they're willing to take."

One forum attendee who knows what it's like to endure the pain of skyhigh interest rates was Richmond's Ardie Lord, who said the 'new norms' might fluctuate between 1 and 8 per cent, rather than the 18pc peak of the 1990s, thanks to the liquidity in world economies.

"Anyone who thought they were going to stay where they were probably had their head in the sand," he said. "I think everyone's aware that we were going to go back to this area, but no-one expected it to be as quick and sharp."

He was confident that high interest rates wouldn't inhibit young people from entering the industry, saying probably only 20pc were successful in borrowing money and making a business cashflow positive quickly.

"They'll have to be fairly ingenious and have something special to bring to the table to do it," he said.

"You won't do it just out of straight producing a cow.

"Normal production on its own has never been the ticket buying land."