Wednesday, 19 March 2025

 Martin CAMERON (Morwell) (10:26): I rise today to speak on the Environment and Planning Committee Securing the Victorian Food Supply report, like the member for Lara as she led off. This was a great committee report to be a part of. When we first got it, we thought the scope of it would be on the urban sprawl, which was part of it, and how it is eating into our food bowl and us needing to protect that, but it was so much more as we travelled around regional Victoria and were able to talk to a multitude of people in a lot of industries inside the food production of Victoria.

We only have to listen to the concerns of people now to know food is a really big issue – being able to put food on the table. As our population grows and we talk about a lot of other stuff here in Victoria, our food supply is probably going to be the most pertinent one that we do need to protect. We are trying to protect the land which is best to actually grow our food, and that seems to be moving further and further away from all the processing plants. So it was great to be able to talk to some of these producers about the concerns that they do have about being able to transport their livestock and also their produce from country and regional areas into the city to be processed. I was at a family function the other night which was out the back of Clyde and Clyde North. As you drive around there you see the impact of the growth of houses – we need more houses for our growing community – and just how much that has eaten into our food bowl. That is probably one of the greatest areas for providing food for Victoria and especially metropolitan Melbourne, so we need to make sure that we take a deep dive and make sure we can protect these areas so we can continue to secure our food bowl.

One of the other things that was brought up was the initiative of having renewables around Victoria as well. We are all in the same situation where we know that we need the renewable assets, whether it be solar or batteries or wind turbines, as we keep growing and need that use of power. But we need to make sure as it is going on land that we are not sacrificing out the other end and having the unintended consequences of blocking out prime land for our farmers that we can actually grow our produce on and have our cattle and our sheep on, which are paramount to how we live day to day and what we put on the table for our family at night. We need to make sure as all this goes through and as we bring transmission lines on that we are not robbing Peter to pay Paul in the area of being able to have this food, which is so critical to us.

It was great to be able to travel around and talk to farmers about how farming has actually changed. One of the big issues that farmers face is that normally farming is a generational thing. You will have a farmer that is on farming land for a hundred years. They are finding now that the next generation are not wanting to be on the land, which is fine, but it is putting extra pressure on the current farmers. To see a farm being able to run off an iPad is incredible. We went to a place where cattle are indoors and they spend 30 days indoors doing what milking cattle do, and the production of milk has just skyrocketed, because they are looking after their assets, their critical assets, even better.

Our chair the member for Wendouree, the members for Bass, Croydon, Monbulk, Warrandyte and Ripon and our secretariat team loved the fact that we were able to be given this committee report and to travel around, so a big shout-out to them. They have done an incredible, incredible job. We did have some recommendations which I was going to touch on, but I am going to run out of time in 6 seconds. That was our committee report, and I am very happy to have been able to talk on it.