Australian Agricultural Policy Research Articles

Constructions of gender in contemporary Australian family farming: A rural financial counsellor perspective

Family farming remains the most common form of agricultural enterprise across the world and in Australia, 90% of farms are owned and operated by farm families However, restructuring in the agricultural sector and climate change have resulted in considerable diversity amongst family operated farming businesses that now extends from smaller, marginal enterprises to larger, intergenerational, more entrepreneurial and commercially viable businesses. Australian family farms remain embedded within a pervasive agrarian mythology characterised by tight constructions of gender and family relations that often hide more complex realities. Attention to Australian agricultural policy suggests a commitment to gender mainstreaming is required to address the perpetuation of gender inequalities through institutional means. However, the ways those advising farmers construct gender remains under-researched. This article utilised the feminisation in agriculture thesis and a small story narrative approach to examine how 32 Rural Financial Counsellors from across Australia construct their gender and the gender of service users who experience considerable financial hardship. Most small stories were of integration, competition and progressive feminisation. Findings suggest that rural financial counsellor training could focus more attention on gender relations in contemporary farming families. Future studies could examine how those advising more successful farmers construct gender.

Trends in current Australian agricultural policy and land resource management

Food security and the human right to food, as recognised under Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Article 11 of the International Covenant of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, are intrinsically linked. Both Articles recognize that access to agricultural land and security of tenure is essential to achieving food security. The right to food requires that each individual, alone or in concert with others, has physical and economic access at all times to adequate food or means for its procurement. Primarily, however, the right to food requires that: States refrain from taking measures that may deprive individuals of access to productive resources on which they depend when they produce food for themselves (the obligation to respect); that they protect such access from encroachment by other private parties (the obligation to protect); and that they seek to strengthen people’s access to and utilization of resources and means to ensure their livelihoods, including food security (the obligation to fulfil). This paper explores and assesses three contemporary policy instruments in the area of agricultural production and unconventional gas operations in Australia against the right to food and security of tenure. It examines the new natural resource governance proposals in The Agricultural Competitiveness Green Paper, The Regional Planning Interests Act 2014 (Qld) protecting prime agricultural land and The Multiple Land Use Framework developed in recognition of the conflict arising over land access and land use.

Re-mapping regulatory space: The new governance of Australian dairying

Despite questions currently raised about the future of neoliberalism, it remains embedded within Australian agricultural policy and practice. This paper explores the strengths and limitations of mechanisms contributing to neoliberalism’s survival through a close examination of the restructuring of Australian agricultural production and governance processes under the influence of both globalising impulses and adherence to neoliberal strategies. We trace the changes in governance flowing from the dismantling of regulatory structures in the Australian dairy industry, and the creation of new forms of governance that have both facilitated this transition and dealt with its adverse, often unintended, consequences. The changing governance of Australian dairying is analysed through the lens of three arenas of governance: state, industry and place. Drought has played an important part in re-spacialising dairying and re-shaping the balance between farmers and industry, demonstrating the contingency at play in emerging governance structures. This study of processes of change within the highly export-oriented dairy sector of Australia focuses attention on resistance and on some of the messy actualities of the interplay between state, place and industry – and nature – in neoliberal agri-food governance.

The Attribution of Self Amongst Australian Family Farm Operators: Personal Responsibility and Control

Australian agriculture is dominated both numerically and in terms of production by family owned and operated farm enterprises. Many family farmers struggle to maintain farm viability amidst the ongoing commitment to a trade liberal paradigm in Australian agricultural policy. Significantly, governmental neoliberal discourses insist on Australian farmers taking personal responsibility and control for any socio-economic hardship or farm viability problems they face and down play structural explanations. In this article we argue that the intent of this discourse, if internalised by individual family farm operators, creates the potential for self-blame where fanners “fail”. To investigate this argument, open-ended responses from a survey of farmers in a NSW rural local government area were examined using an extension of attribution theory from social psychology. The analysis identifies how individual family farm operators have actually engaged with these discourses and the extent to which the attributions these discourses encapsulate are replicated, transformed, or contested. Areas for future research, including impacts of attributions on family farm operators’ psychological health, are discussed.

Implementing and maintaining neoliberal agriculture in Australia. Part II. Strategies for securing neoliberalism.

Australia is the world’s leading advocate for neoliberal agriculture, and dominant opinion in the Australian Government interprets the adoption of neoliberalism as a triumph of rational ‘national interest’ considerations in policy. This is the second of a two-part critical review of how these policy frameworks have been implemented and maintained (the first part of the review is published in the previous issue of IJSAF - Vol. 13(1), July 2005). In this article, attention is focused on the legitimising discourses used to justify and defend these policies. It concludes that a culture of political correctness has emerged in Australian agricultural policy discourse, in which the benefits from neoliberal outcomes are systemically exaggerated, but other implications are silenced. The insights presented here have international significance, given the leadership role being played by the Australian Government in advancing a new, market-oriented model for the political relationship between food, agriculture and society.

Attributions of Responsibility: Rural Neoliberalism and Farmers’ Explanations of The Australian Rural Crisis.

Many farmers struggle to maintain farm viability amidst the ongoing commitment to a trade liberal paradigm in Australian agricultural policy. Significantly, governmental neoliberal discourses insist on Australian farmers taking personal responsibility and control for any socio-economic hardship or farm viability problems they face and down play structural explanations. In this article we argue that the neoliberal discursive environment creates the potential for self-blame where farmers ‘fail’. To investigate this argument, open-ended responses from a survey of farmers in a NSW rural local government area were examined using coding categories of attribution theory from social psychology. The analysis identifies how individual farmers have borrowed from these discourses and the extent to which the attributions these discourses encapsulate are replicated, transformed or contested. Areas for future research, including impacts of attributions on psychological health and political mobilisation, are discussed.

Assembling restructuring: governmentality, economic regulation and the historical emergence of the 'enterprising farmer' in Australian agricultural policy

In the last 15 years the term 'restructuring' has been used by scholars from a wide range of disciplines to explain the economic and social changes experienced within Australia and other Western nations. While these analyses have been productive in accounting for restructuring in terms of the historical structural relations between fractions of capital and the state, this paper argues for an understanding of the more subtle ways through which programmes of economic reform are assembled at the state level. Using the Foucauldian-inspired literature on governmentality, the paper draws attention - through a historical analysis of the emergence in Australian political discourse of formal managerial skills - to the specific rationalities and technologies of governing that enable particular forms of 'restructuring' to be constituted and assembled into a programmatic form. The emergence of farm business management, as a means of improving agricultural productivity, is conceptualized as embedded within a series of problematizations of governing. These problematizations sought to constitute the national economy as in a state of crisis, and previous forms of governing as failing to enhance the capacities of farmers to compete internationally. On this basis, the managerial capacities of farmers emerged as the proper sites through which to pursue 'reform'.

PUBLIC CHOICE THEORY AND AUSTRALIAN AGRICULTURAL POLICY REFORM*

Recent discussion of the process of policy reform has tended to focus on public and private interest theories of public choice as alternative models. The analysis of Australian agricultural policy presented in this paper draws on several extensions of the private interest model including the contractarian framework, extra‐rational considerations such as moral attitudes and the desire to participate. Recent agricultural policy reforms in Australia are examined in the light of those theories. This examination highlights the importance of ideas and changes in the rules for policy formulation in influencing policy outcomes. In some cases the private interest theory appears to offer an adequate explanation while, in others, it provides only a partial explanation of policy change, and requires extension if policy choice is to be influenced, or even understood. An important independent role for economists and policy makers is seen both in the formulation of policies and in the design of rules for policy choice.

Agricultural Policy Debate: A Survey*

A survey is provided of writings between 1978 and 1985 on or directly relevant to Australian agricultural policy. The areas covered are: background and overview; industry policy, including tariff compensation, home consumption price schemes. quotas, input subsidies and futures trading by marketing boards; stabilization; adjustment and the capital market; and macroeconomics and agriculture. An increasingly critical approach has been taken in identifying sources of inefficiency in agriculture and in considering ways of reducing them. Private interest explanations of policy descisions have received serious study and macroeconomic issues have received increasing attention.

AGRICULTURAL POLICY: COMMONWEALTH‐STATE ISSUES

The Report commenced, appropriately, by addressing the federal contract within which Australian agricultural policy is set. The Australian Constitution limits what can be done by the Commonwealth and State Governments and establishes procedures for settling arguments about where jurisdictions lie. There is a wider constitutional framework than the Constitution itself. It includes, for example, the Australian Agricultural Council which is the major means of co-ordinating powers and resolving conflicts between the Commonwealth and states in the field of agricultural policy. The federal contract also includes the wide range of co-operative approaches to policy, such as statutory marketing intitutions and the complementary legislation which supports them. The issue of federalism runs through the whole of the Report, but only in Chapter 2 was it addressed as a central issue. The Group viewed the Constitution itself as virtually immutable. The Australian Agricultural Council was criticised for acting only slowly and by consensus. Where there is a fundamental conflict of interest, the Commonwealth's financial strength may need to be used to encourage state co-operation. The emergence of the National Farmers' Federation was seen as hopeful, and there was a hint that a formal link between the Council and the Federation could facilitate consensus. But, on the whole, the tone of the Report regarding the federal contract was not enthusiastic. It was seen to constrain opportunities for change rather than to create them. Issues for the 1980s with respect to inter-governmental relations were expected to be similar to those of the past. In Chapter 2, the Group provided a brief synopsis of the respective roles of the Commonwealth and State Governments in areas covered in the rest of the Report, namely, assistance, marketing, international trade, transport, innovation and resource management. But having set the scene with an overview of the constitutional framework, the Group did not return to a federal overview of policy options. It is with that important task in view that I will address briefly three of the issues raised in Chapter 2, namely, assistance, marketing and international trade, and comment on Commonwealth grants to the states which are relevant to the remaining issues. My purpose is to highlight some policy dilemmas which need to be resolved within a federal context.

The changing norms of Australian agricultural policy in the seventies∗

(1981). The changing norms of Australian agricultural policy in the seventies. Journal of Australian Studies: Vol. 5, No. 9, pp. 32-48.

AN ADAPTIVE CONTROL APPROACH TO AGRICULTURAL POLICY*

It is postulated that some issues of economic policy in general, and of Australian agricultural policy in particular, may be analysed in the framework of an adaptive control model. Policy making is characterized as a rational, sequential decision‐making process under conditions of imperfect knowledge in which forthcoming information may be used to learn about the uncertain terms as decision periods pass. Emphasis is given to the linear‐quadratic control problem. The paper provides a review of the formulation of a policy problem in the framework of an adaptive control model and of derived policy strategies. An illustrative example is reported.