Thursday, March 28, 2024

BLNZ: is PM taking agriculture seriously?

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Five-point manifesto ‘should be required reading for Hipkins’, industry good body says.
Beef + Lamb NZ chief executive Sam McIvor says that if it is proposed that farmers should pay a bill, everybody wants to be confident that, actually, it’s calculating the right figure and a fair figure.
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Beef + Lamb New Zealand chief executive Sam McIvor wants to know how seriously Prime Minister Chris Hipkins is taking agriculture.

McIvor said in an interview that he would be interested to hear Hipkins’ view on agriculture and whether he is going to “continue to restrict agriculture growing and contributing through poorly formed regulations and legislation”.

The agriculture sector has faced a raft of regulatory changes over the past few years, largely around environmental compliance and emissions trading.  

Beef + Lamb NZ (BLNZ) and the Meat Industry Association (MIA) recently published a manifesto on five key areas: climate and environment policy, workforce and industrial relations, trade, biosecurity, and innovation, research and development.

McIvor said it should be compulsory reading for the prime minister as he embarks on leading the government and added that there is “broad alignment” in the sector around the government’s goals and ambitions. 

In terms of policy, however, there is a sense that some of it has been “poorly formed and rushed”.

For example, McIvor said that everyone agrees the Resource Management Act needs to be reformed. 

However, his staff have had to “traipse” through more than 800 pages of documents in recent months. 

“On the face of it, it looks the same as many other bits of regulatory change or proposed changes over the last few years,” he said.

The ambition is good, but it lacks clarity about what it all means, how it all fits together, where the decision-making will lie and where the responsibilities will lie, he said. 

“There is just a whole lot of that, that is unclear. That doesn’t give you confidence that when it comes to implementation it will actually deliver what we all want.” 

He cited the freshwater legislation as another example, noting for the last several years his staff have had to work on an issue related to that legislation every two weeks. 

“The understanding of what really happens on the ground and how people really act on the ground was missing. So, we’ve had these back-and-forth conversations for three years to get it right.

“A whole lot of resource is burned on the government and the industry side.”

Meanwhile, the manifesto calls on the government to change the thresholds for requiring a freshwater farm plan and ensure the plans are risk- and outcomes-based. 

According to McIvor, more than 50% of his time and resources have been tied up with regulatory change over the past two or three years and that’s unprecedented. 

The latest BLNZ survey of its members shows farmer confidence is at its lowest in 10 years and much of that is due to the sheer volume of changes. 

“There are four or five big environmental issues going on and we just don’t know how they are going to end up, so how do we make decisions about how to invest in our businesses?” he said. 

The latest Federated Farmers survey also showed confidence at a record low, with climate change policy and the Emissions Trading Scheme topping the list of frustrations.

McIvor said some of the legislation may need to go back to the drawing board under Hipkins, or a new government, later this year. 

“We do need to have that conversation around some of them.”

He pointed to the National Policy Statement for Indigenous Biodiversity as an example and said it would be far more positive to take a co-design approach with the people who are affected. 

McIvor said it was important to remember that it is not industry groups, the central government or regional and/or district councils that make the change, it is the landowner. 

“It’s the people on the land, where the resources are, where the water is flowing, or where the soil is held or where the biodiversity is held – they are the people who make the change.”

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