Joyce: three main problems confront the beef industry.

Updated May 07, 2013 08:53:00

The leader of the Nationals in the Senate, and the Coalition's spokesman for regional developement, Barnaby Joyce, is on his way to Richmond for the the beef forum. He says a Coalition Government would mend Australia's relationship with Indonesia and support Australia's farmers and graziers.

Source: AM | Duration: 2min 38sec

Topics: beef-cattle, drought, agribusiness, agricultural-prices, agricultural-subsidies, qld, australia


TONY EASTLEY: The leader of the Nationals in the Senate and the Coalition's spokesman for regional development Barnaby Joyce will also be at today's beef forum.

AM's Martin Cuddihy spoke to him as his plane was making a brief stopover at Roma on the western Darling Downs.

MARTIN CUDDIHY: There are reports graziers are not far away from shooting cattle. What would be different under a Coalition government.

BARNABY JOYCE: Well the first thing is that we would make sure that we got the live trade up and running again. We would have a serious cell of people who would be trying to work towards rebuilding the relationships that were destroyed by the Green/Labor party independent alliance.

We have a history of clearly showing that our empathy is with the people on the land and we will back that up with the financial packages that we would work with the state to deliver.

MARTIN CUDDIHY: There are quite a few problems with the beef industry at the moment. How much of that can be attributed to the problems with live export?

BARNABY JOYCE: Well there's three main problems at the moment: obviously the horrible break down in the relationship with the Indonesians which has brought about destitution, the reason for a depression in prices; the high dollar; and the drought. And these three things in combination have been a disaster.

MARTIN CUDDIHY: The Coalition can't make it rain and you can't bring down the high Australian dollar, so how much realistically would change?

BARNABY JOYCE: Well I think that first of all you can definitely affect the relationship with Indonesia by having a competent government, competent trade minister, competent relations.

You can not exacerbate where our dollar is by making sure that we keep down the amount of borrowing, because the higher our borrowing goes the more we have to attract funds in, the more our domestic interest rates stay high, the more our Australian dollar stays up. So you can actually affect the Australian dollar.

But obviously you can't make it rain - you can pray, but you can't make it rain.

MARTIN CUDDIHY: There is a report in the West Australian this morning saying that Indonesian officials, including those from government-owned corporations, are looking to northern Australian cattle properties to get a secure beef supply. What's your response to that?

BARNABY JOYCE: It's probably a smart thing for them to do but I hope we can look forward to the time where we're actually selling them the product, not just selling them the land. I want to make sure that Australians, our nation has the best opportunity of being the benefactors of trade with Asia.

And of course smart business people, as Indonesians are, are looking at ways to obviously secure their foothold and you know, good luck to them. You know, that's what clever business people do.

But we want to make sure that we have Australian families and Australian farms as the benefactors of the wealth that would be from the beef industry if we had proper management.

TONY EASTLEY: The Opposition spokesman for regional development Barnaby Joyce speaking to Martin Cuddihy.