The Nationals Member for Murray Plains, Peter Walsh, says the Allan Labor government has achieved its “ideological dream” and removed the word agriculture from public view.
Mr Walsh says it started with the independent Department of Environment and Primary Industries being sucked into the mega Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action.
Now, he says, the Allan Labor government has achieved its ideological wish and deleted any reference to primary production, or indeed any reference to farmers at all, in its departmental structures.
“They have this ideological dislike of country Victoria, and everyone put here knows that, and is paying the price for that, but they also have this ideological dislike of farmers,” Mr Walsh told Parliament last week.
“And they have spent a long time doing this – removing it from public view,” he says.
“In my hometown of Echuca, the rumour mill is absolutely rife the department of agriculture office here is going to close.
“I know the ABC is hunting around on that and where there is smoke there is usually fire – particularly with this government.
“So, I point blank asked Ros Spence, the Minister who controls the unseen agriculture department, to give some assurances the Department of Agriculture office in Echuca will not close.
“I look forward to her response.”
Mr Walsh says today Agriculture Victoria, or whatever it is going to be called in its next incarnation, is merely an office right down the back of a great big other department.
He says it is no longer a standalone, serving Victoria’s multibillion dollar agriculture industry, “it’s just a sign on the door down the back of a very long corridor”.
“We have just seen announcements again about cuts to AgVic staff and cuts to pest plant and animal officers – just the all too depressingly familiar annual cuts to what was once the Department of Agriculture in Victoria,” Mr Walsh explains.
“This government has been in place for 11 years now, and nearly every year there have been cuts to the department’s staffing, not only to service delivery but to key scientists as well,” he says.
“So the government is getting its wish. It is slowly getting rid of it and slowly strangling what is probably the last great Victorian based production industry – agriculture.”
Mr Walsh says Victorian agriculture is one of the state’s largest employers, in the top five contributors to the state’s financial wellbeing and responsible for providing around 25 per cent of the nation’s, not just the state’s, food and fibre.
He says along with pharmaceutical products agriculture is Victoria’s largest exporter.
“Yet with this ideological insanity, the Allan Labor government has decreed it does not deserve its own department and does not even deserve mention where possible.”
