As a Federated Farmers Provincial President, the main part of my role is trying to express the majority of our members’ viewpoints; these incorporate many different businesses, and many different stages in those businesses.
Our members include employees, farm business owners, contractors and sharemilkers, lessors and lessees, retirees, those that service our businesses or have business on rural properties or just own rural property.
We consider the effects on our wider communities, we have families and partners working in urban centres, we simply must avoid thinking in a silo at all costs.
We look for the most efficient way of getting to the end goal; is it a public good or a private good, should it be user pays or all contribute – or a mixture of the two?
We have been doing this for over 75 years and I think we are getting good at it; the modern federation has protocols around being fact-based, expectations of good practices by members, along with mandated frequent change in leadership and succession helps to refresh diversity of thought.
New Zealand has a poor record of planning future focussed infrastructure. The three waters infrastructure buyback may be an attempt – but no detail is given to know the real costs that are shifted from Councils, to who and how?
The common mistake by government is to look at our income and ignore the expenditure.
This current generation of agribusiness is facing fixing and paying for activities of the past several hundred years of lack of planning, not only in our own businesses, but the wider general public’s as well.
That comes through a broken rating system, unimplementable high-cost regulations, signalling of harsh allocation limits, and paying to prove you are not guilty. Despite good prices in many products, people are exiting farming.
Our productive farmland is being swallowed by forest carbon schemes or urban sprawl that ensures that land is never available again for anything else.
Yet another sign of abysmal planning, and no plan in the Budget to halt this; this simply shows the lack of planning continues.
Until we stop, plan and map out how we fix traffic, living, community and living flows, we will not reduce our need for more land from agriculture.
We will simply need more and more, and all the stuff we hope to fix by rules won’t happen.
We need to be cohesive – look at the big picture.
