Wednesday, 29 October 2025

 Peter WALSH (Murray Plains) (10:23): I rise to make some comments on the Legislative Assembly Environment and Planning Committee report into securing Victoria’s food supply and on some of the recommendations that were made and, I suppose, the lack of a government response to that particular report. I refer particularly to recommendations 1 and 2. Recommendation 1 is:

That the Victorian Government develop a whole-of-government Victorian Food System Strategy.

That strategy should look at supporting farmers and food manufacturers to build profitable businesses and expand healthy food production. It should map the food-producing regions and protect all agricultural land from inappropriate development. The strategy must also set measurable targets, clearly attribute responsibility for achieving these targets and include a transparent monitoring framework. I think they are aspirations that would be good to make sure Victoria secures its food supply in the future. Disappointingly, the government response to that recommendation was that it is under review – and we know what ‘under review’ means. It means park it down the back and probably never do anything about it in the future. So I think there is a missed opportunity from the government to actually do something about that recommendation.

Recommendation 2 follows on from that:

That the Victorian Government consider establishing a Minister for Food with responsibility for the Victorian food system in its entirety (including agriculture, food processing, manufacturing, supply and consumption).

Again, we have different parts of government managing different parts of the production, manufacturing, supply and distribution of food. That needs to be coordinated into the future. The minister should coordinate the development and implementation of the Victorian food system strategy, which is what was in recommendation 1. Disappointingly, that is also under review. I would have thought the government would have grabbed both those recommendations and used them as a blueprint for the future, particularly to give directions to the department.

If you think about the whole of the food supply system here in Victoria, for the benefit of the Minister for Environment at the table, more than 50 per cent of the food that we produce in Victoria relies on bees for the pollination service. We recently had the department actually exclude beekeepers from public land here in Victoria. Access to public land for beekeepers is an important part of their annual cycle as to where they can actually put bees to rest and to rejuvenate before they go and do the hard work of pollinating crops, like the almond crops, like the fruit tree crops, like canola and like lucerne crops. If we had had a minister for food that was actually looking at the whole supply chain, we may have had some coordination across government and we would not have had the department exclude beekeepers from public land, where they have been going for literally decades doing no harm at all. But that has a major impact on the supply of the pollination services for food.

A series of recommendations talk about population growth and urban sprawl, and that very much deals with the Melbourne growth area and the food production there. But I would remind the house that the overwhelming majority of food in Victoria is produced outside the urban growth area, and we need to make sure there is a focus on all of that.

Recommendation 21 talks about the fact that Agriculture Victoria should, with all programs, initiatives and grants, acknowledge the importance of small to medium-sized farms to the food supply and resilience of the agriculture sector and make sure they have access to services and funding. The government has supported that in full. The concern I would raise is that large-scale farmers are equally important to the production of food here in Victoria. I would not like to see the fact that because the government has supported this in full they will exclude large-scale farmers from their programs.

The last one to touch on is recommendation 22:

That the Victorian Government revise the Ministerial guidelines for differential rating … to encourage local governments to apply differential rates to farmland. The revised guidelines should …

and so on. This is supported in principle. Again, we have not seen any action. One of the things that we find in our electorates every year is that there are complaints that farmers carry an over-representative burden of the rate cost in local government. There is the ability to have differential rating. Most local governments do not use that differential rating for farmers. I would encourage the government to do more than just support it in principle – actually make this recommendation happen. The last bit would be that apart from not having the differential rate, they have actually penalised farmers with the emergency services tax. That now is effectively a wealth tax or a land tax on farmers.