What does Labor have lined up for the regions after the referendum?

With the Voice referendum soon to be in the rearview mirror, farm leaders are keen to hear the government’s plan for regional Australia.

Water rights, worker shortages, housing holdups, broken roads, spiralling inputs, towering transmissions, carbon footprints and industries lost – the list of possible flashpoints keeping Australia’s agriculture industry up at night grows, while the government burns the midnight oil campaigning for the Voice referendum.

And the long road to October 14 has left a mountain of legislative work in the government’s in-tray.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has said he is ready, after this weekend’s referendum, to plant the foot on the low-emissions accelerator.

But, like its road map to net-zero 2050, many government policies remain untested, unfinished, under review or unknown.

Which has left many frustrated farmers, who plan in years and decades, in holding patterns and needing answers.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Agriculture Minister Murray Watt in Rockhampton. Picture: Annette Dew

The first of those for the worker-strapped industry will likely be the government’s long-awaited migration reforms that will cut and change visa systems.

Word is the package, that the National Farmers’ Federation fears will further curb access to international workers after the twin hammer blows of losing the ‘ag visa’ and UK backpackers, has been ready to roll out for several weeks.

There is the “slimmest” chance it might be released later this week, but “much more likely” soon after the referendum to give it and the Voice clear air.

But, even if workers do arrive, the government’s industrial relations policies, currently being scrutinised by the senate, have so spooked some businesses that job adverts have fallen off a cliff.

Then the lingering issue of where to house workers looms large, with only vague promises that the government’s centrepiece housing fund currently being divided up will increase regional accommodation.

And then there are the roads and bridges linking food bowls with bellies and Treasury bottom lines. A review of the nation’s 10-year infrastructure pipeline will be delivered by Christmas and dozens of regional projects will be axed.

The implications of ceasing, deferring or sidelining projects will be significant, but the snatched hopes and returning to square one will gut some regional councils.

Farm leaders also fear the National Freight and Supply Chain Strategy review will “not come to anything”. Those findings will be delivered in December.

Earlier in the year the Coalition warned that a government throwing its energy behind a referendum would be distracted from core business, while itself having discussed little else itself in months.

Minister for the Environment and Water, Tanya Plibersek. Picture: Martin Ollman

The regions have recently suffered through the worst drought in living memory, then the long Black Summer of bushfires and the smoke had barely cleared when Covid hit. Then the floods came. Now more dry.

But any reprieve from disrupted supply chains and spiralling inputs, particularly diesel and fertiliser, has also failed to arrive; if anything, they’ve been compounded by a recent 20 per cent surge in power prices.

Agriculture Minister Murray Watt said the government had “tried very hard” to be collaborative with states, stakeholders and groups that had not traditionally worked together.

This approach has encouraged also ministers to collaborate and tailor policies in areas like aged care and doing things like tying migration together with worker shortages and TAFE training.

But some stakeholders believe it has also left agriculture wedged between the government’s bigger picture plans.

Such as Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek’s recently struck deal to buyback 450GL of water from Murray Darling Basin communities without releasing detail on how it will be taken, or from who.

Or the national cultural heritage protection reforms now pushed into 2024, while it is unknown when the Nature Repair Market Bill – introduced then shelved over concerns its carbon offsets system will negatively impact agricultural production – will again be seen.

Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese during Question Time at Parliament House, Canberra, September 12, 2003. Picture: Martin Ollman

The industry is also waiting on reports into secularisation of industry emissions by December, and an independent review into transmission towers tearing up farmland at about the same time.

Firstly, though, Mr Watt will make public reports from the live sheep export panel and an independent evaluation of the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority later this month. Both were due before the Voice referendum but extended in recent weeks.

Agriculture has never had so many balls in the air and so much on the line if any were to drop. Regardless of the outcome this weekend, farm leaders believe the government must now shift focus to the many other important issues affecting regional Australia.