Floods in north Queensland create a cattle industry catastrophe
The floods that swept through the state’s northern interior have created a human tragedy, an animal welfare disaster and an economic crisis set to impact on Australia’s bottom line in the years ahead, writes Michael Madigan
QLD News
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THE cattle that lived through it still look dazed and confused.
Many of them have got pneumonia and won’t live long.
They gaze at feed dropped just a few metres away in puzzlement, not even raising a shuffling walk at the sound of an approaching helicopter.
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Anthony Anderson, a 40-year-old grazier outside Julia Creek, explains in the blunt manner of his breed that his cattle were effectively put under a high-pressure hose of cold water for three days straight while 60km/h winds tore at their hides.
“I had around 4800 head – I’ll probably lose half,” he tells Insight, grimly.
Anderson and wife Rachael, like many in the district, had been hand feeding cattle for much of 2018, an expensive exercise compounding their already onerous debt commitments.
When the rains arrived on the main family property, Eddington, just 20 minutes outside of town they were ecstatic, sensing one of those rare opportunities to take advantage of good cattle prices and “put a big dent in the debt”.
Instead, their financial position looks far worse than when they were in drought, and the struggle to hold onto the four family properties started by his Cloncurry-born father, who ran a butchery, will only intensify.
“It can break your heart,” he says.
It’s highly likely more than 500,000 cattle have died in the floods which swept into the state’s northern interior earlier this month and created a human tragedy, an animal welfare disaster and an economic crisis set to impact heavily on Australia’s bottom line in the years ahead.
Around 2 per cent of the nation’s already undersized beef herd of 23 million are rotting under the now resolutely blue skies of the northwest, the stench of their decay cutting through the air-conditioned confines of the four-wheel-drives speeding by on the Flinders Highway.
Around the dead animals are strewn the less dramatic residue of the rainstorm which happened, as it always does, when a hot continent begins dragging in a zone of low pressure and rising moist air coming down from the equator.
The monsoon is part of northern life, and a welcome one. But this trough which refused to keep moving and squatted over much of the north for weeks, brought not life-giving rain but death and destruction on an epic scale.
While the mass of the human tragedy occurred in Townsville where thousands of homes are still being scrubbed clean of mud, the grazing families of the northern interior and up into the Gulf are still gazing in stunned amazement at the extraordinary destruction – the fences, troughs, water tanks, farm implements and tractors swallowed up by an inland sea which dissolved earthen dam walls that took hundreds of man hours to build, and gouged out new pathways for ancient waterways.
In Cloncurry, Mayor Greg Campbell, also a grazier, says the extent of the financial disaster at a local level is still being processed.
The emotional toll is another matter.
“We had technically been out of drought in Cloncurry for a while but there were still a lot of properties dealing with extremely dry weather,” Campbell says.
“When the rain first came (in late January, early February) there was just extraordinary optimism in the air.
“But by early last week it suddenly hit us – it wasn’t rain, it was a disaster.”
For Campbell, and neighbours like Belinda Murphy, the Mayor of McKinlay Shire, an overriding fear is that this cruel economic hit will be compounded in the coming winter months by an absence of tourists, who may have a sense (inspired by media coverage) that the inland has been destroyed.
Those wandering middle aged Australians – the grey nomads – have in the past decade shored up western economies mid-year as the caravan convoys meander into town.
This year they will be even more vital to the survival of scores of local businesses and, without in any way diminishing the tragedy of the flooding, the drawcard will be an extraordinarily lush countryside.
“If there is one message we need to get out there, it’s that the west is open for business,” Murphy says.
“The sodden soil will transform into green landscape. Mother Nature’s beauty will be on show after horrible cruelty.”
For beef market analyst Simon Quilty, managing director of MLX Pty Ltd, the macro economics of the flood look grim.
He says the loss of livestock has “exacerbated the liquidation of the Australian herd in a way that is deeply concerning”.
“The loss in northern Australia has been across all breeds; male or female; and all genetics, both good and bad,” he wrote in an analysis piece this week.
“Flood loss is non-discriminatory and as a result the ability for northern producers to rebuild is going to be very difficult.”
In the short term, fodder prices are going to spiral as emergency rations continue to be distributed before the sodden land has a chance to produce feed.
But one of the few upsides to the deluge, the possibility of vast tracts of grazing land covered with knee high feed, may not even materialise.
Anderson points to a clay pan paddock and explains the flood effectively cleaved off the thin top layers of earth and redistributed it as silt over much of his country – silt that will choke the life out of germinating grass unless good follow up rains occur in the weeks ahead.
For Queensland, the economic stakes are far higher than anywhere else in the nation.
When Cyclone Larry wiped out much of the Australian banana crop when it hit Ingham in 2006 the financial impacts were horrendous, but far more confined – to the Tully and Ingham districts.
The banana industry contributes roughly $1.3 billion to the state economy if you allow for knock on effects. The beef industry easily quadruples that, and extends right across the state.
The State Government’s Queensland Ag Trends 2017-2018 report points out this state is the nation’s largest producer of beef with more than three-quarters of Queensland’s $5.2 billion beef exports going to Asian markets.
“Beef is the most significant agricultural commodity for Queensland, with cattle and calf sales worth an estimated $9.5 billion in 2015-16,” the report says.
Queensland also has the largest amount of certified organic agricultural land in Australia, with around 2.3 million acres in total.
The report says, “This includes large tracts of organic grazing land in Queensland’s Channel Country resulting in almost 70 per cent of Australia’s growing organic beef industry coming from Queensland.”
It just so happens this organic sector, increasingly important in global trade, happens to be in the centre of where the floods hit hardest.
R obbie Katter, state member for the Mount Isa-based seat of Traeger, still manages to crack a smile outside the Recovery Centre at the Cloncurry Council building on Thursday morning as he talks with a bloke about a local horse that fell over in a Melbourne Cup, somewhere in the long forgotten past of the 50s and 60s.
“The thing is, it might have won if it had stayed upright,” they agree.
But despite the smiles the still youthful Katter appears to have the weight of the world on his shoulders. He’s piloting a leased plane around the north, reaching as many people as he can to try to figure out a way out of this nightmare for the industry and its doughty folk.
Many of those impacted are old school-mates, relatives or long-term friends of the Katter family, which has deep roots from Cloncurry to Charters Towers.
Katter’s old man, the federal member for Kennedy, Bob Katter, has been on ABC this same morning, spruiking a plan that the wiley old politician knows has a real chance of gaining traction while the nation’s eyes are focused on the disaster.
Katter senior had already cut a deal with the Morrison Government to essentially play nice if the numbers got too tight in the federal Parliament, in return pocketing nearly one quarter of a billion dollars for water projects in the north, including his beloved Hells Gate Project on the Burdekin.
But, as he mingles with Julia Creek locals at Gannons Pub on Friday morning, it’s clear that Katter is planning to use this flood to return to the negotiating table.
He has already demanded a $4 billion taxpayer-funded rural loan facility offering an interest rate of 2.5 per cent for stricken graziers, along with an agreement to write off a substantial amount of the bank loans of impacted graziers in the region.
And that demand is no ambit claim that Katter might agree to wind back on.
It’s more a beachhead for a far more extravagant plan Katter has been pushing for years, using the recent Banking Royal Commission to garner widespread support among Queensland farmers.
Katter wants the return of those old rural development banks – government-owned financial institutions – which provide low interest loans of around 2 per cent to primary producers.
With those loans would come a tacit understanding that faltering borrowers won’t have the receivers set upon them, but will be expected to pay the money back when the seasons come good, often under a return to higher interest rates closer to those commercially available.
It’s a return to the old world of agrarian socialism which the Hawke/Keating governments of the 1980s effectively banished, but it’s an idea with extraordinary support among primary producers across the state.
Katter Junior says “first things first”, as he attempts to deal with the immediate practical problems of constituents, many of whom will struggle with mental health issues in the months and years ahead.
But he says there is no doubt big picture ideas will be needed in the months to come, rather than just a hand-out philosophy which seldom has long-lasting impacts.
Primary producers, he says, have long been the backbone of the state and the nation, and their contribution in the years ahead will become even more important.
“We do need new ways of thinking if we are going to continue to have an agriculture sector,” he says.
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