Day: July 31, 2020

SENATE RURAL AND REGIONAL AFFAIRS AND TRANSPORT REFERENCES COMMITTEE ENQUIRY

Representatives from BDCG were given the opportunity to address the senate committee for enquiry into “Identification of leading practices in ensuring evidence based regulation of farm practices that impact water quality outcomes in the Great Barrier Reef” in Brisbane on Monday of this week in support of submission that was lodged in November 2019.

BDCG highlighted a number of issues:

• that members take their environmental stewardship responsibilities very seriously including the health of the GBR
• growers consider themselves to be the caretakers of the land
• due to high input costs, reducing margins, lower prices etc. farmers can ill afford to unnecessarily apply fertiliser and chemicals beyond crop requirements
• financial cost to agriculture to meet state government introduced regulations
• integrity and reliability of the reef science on which legislation and funding decisions are made on
• damming findings from recent CCC review of 3 Qld universities looking at “reducing the risk of research fraud”
• group of international scientists unable to obtain consistent results from repeated experiments of 8 JCU studies confirming that a “replication crisis” exists
• organisation members being fully supportive of an independent authority as suggested by Dr Ridd to “check the science” on which government policy and funding decisions are made and
• calling upon the Federal Government to set aside a nominal amount of funding for this purpose.

Les Elphinstone
Manager KCGO