A long post I've already left elsewhere:
Many regional areas are heavily reliant on agriculture for employment, and that trickles into many different industries as it goes along. If farms aren't able to spend in the local towns then they start to dry up as well... What needs to happen therefore is to ensure that we have diverse communities of industries out in the regions (not just manufacturing, but services economies etc) that are able to generate income from outside the immediate area.
I'd suspect that even Armidale, which has a bigger education sector will start to suffer at the end of the year as students stay home to work on the farm into 2019 as plantings have failed (at a high cost) and there are low stock numbers.
However, a couple of simple things and some bigger ones:
1) Stop pissing water over the coal mines to keep dust down - if there's a drought, then let's use the water to sustain life... and stop the mining for a bit... yes, that'll cost jobs, but it's better than blatantly wasting it...
2) Improve infrastructure in regional areas that is working on water security - I know of at least 2 pipelines that are being proposed to improve water security running from existing dams to smaller towns in the surrounds. We're at the point that whole towns are now running out of water, never mind the farms. Water trucks are typically running at about 2 weeks lead time now....
3) Offer meaningful subsidies for installing on-farm solar systems for pumping and bores. Remember that rural power costs are higher than in cities - even down to moving house, it costs $100 to get the exit and entry meter read done... $200 to move house... in Newcastle, that would be less than $50....
4) Ensure that there is a sufficiently large insurance market for multi-peril crop insurance: this would help smooth some of the costs that farmers incur when crops fail after planting.
5) Keep promoting the export market opportunities for Australian products - this helps to create a price floor for viable products
6) Improve road transport links - just because a bit of road doesn't have 50,000 cars a day travelling on it, doesn't mean that it's worthless. If it has 4 B-Doubles of stock a day on it, then that's probably over $2m of cattle moved on it... That's got to be worth something, hasn't it?
7) Get on with improving the rail network so we can shift more bulk goods easily.
Make sure that consumers know what's going on outside the cities... this has been ticking for a long time - I know when I flew down to Sydney in March it was looking very brown all the way to the Barringtons from the NENW of NSW.
9) Understand that no matter how tough and rough a farmer looks, they love their stock as much as they love their families (I'm sure in some cases more than they love their families) and that they take any failure personally. We're seeing it with a number of colleagues and friends at the moment - all big farmers in their 50s and they're battling it, reluctant to accept help as they feel that means they've failed.
10) Get out of the town you're in, and go and spend some money in the drought affected areas so that there is an injection of cash into the towns. Quite often one person is working the farm in the household, whilst the other is working in town. If that means that the person in town still has a job next week, then that means they might be able to put some feed on the ground, some food on the table or some water in the tanks.
11) It's going to get worse. Most of the farmers here have August Calving, so they've not been able to move the cows off in July as that risks losing the cow and the calf through miscarriage. Certainly one neighbour (who is a farmer) already has one 2 week old poddy calf in the garden... it won't be the last. The cow gave birth and then wasn't able to get up.
