$1m grant splash has drought-free Yorke Peninsula residents bewildered

Yorke Peninsula residents are scratching their heads after the federal government handed them $1m in drought assistance.

SA Primary Producers Association chairman Rob Kerin.

Residents of South Australia’s Yorke Peninsula are scratching their heads after the federal government handed them $1m in drought assistance, even though much of the region is not drought-affected.

The council is considering calls to forgo the cash so it can be spent on more deserving communities in other parts of the country.

If Yorke Peninsula Council does so, it will be the second council to hand back the cash after Moyne Shire in southwestern Victoria officially rejected $1m in drought assistance in October, with councillors saying they were embarrassed the offer had been made and suspected it may have been caused by a typing error after Moyne was confused with the drought-ravaged town of Moira.

The listing of Yorke Peninsula as part of the federal government’s latest $100m in drought measures is not the first questionable outlay to affect SA and points to anomalies with the formula being used to determine which communities are in need of assistance.

The Department of Regional Development uses a formula whereby communities must have 17 per cent of their population ­employed in primary production and experienced a 50 per cent fall in rain in the past two years.

Some communities that are hugely reliant on farming are having their workforce numbers skewed by the presence of a big mining project with a large group of employees, meaning they fall just short of the 17 per cent farming threshold.

Equally, some council areas are receiving average or above average rainfall in some areas, and negligible or zero rain in others, yet the assistance grants are being offered indiscriminately across the entire region.

SA has escaped the worst of the drought being experienced in eastern Australia but several ­regions are doing it tough.

However, when the first round of grants was issued last year, the three drought-ravaged areas of the state — Peterborough, Flinders Ranges and the Outback Areas Trust — all missed out on funding, with the Outback Areas Trust denied because many of its residents work at the Moomba gasfields.

Grant money was eventually found for those three areas after a lobbying effort by the Liberal member for Grey, Rowan ­Ramsey, and the SA Primary Producers Association. Mr Ramsay conceded on Wednesday that the methodology being used was “a blunt instrument”.

“The difficult thing is that you have to use some sort of measure, but with any measure you will get a few outliers that raise some eyebrows,” he said. “I am hopeful we might be able to make some changes and tweak it a bit to iron these things out.

“I accept that Yorke Peninsula is not really suffering a drought. I am not sure if the council will reject the money, but it isn’t specific money aimed at farmers, rather the tradies who are underpinned by farming communities, and they are welcoming the fact that the grants are creating work.”

SAPPA chairman Rob Kerin said communities were “a bit confused” by the methodology being used. “We were really cranky with the first round when the three worst affected areas missed out but we got that fixed.

“We have to give credit where it’s due, they are at least trying to get on top of things.”