The idea of the meeting was for farming identities and community members to meet the candidates running for the seat of Northern Tablelands at the state election and ask questions.

NSW Farmers also ran a video on their #standup4farmers social media campaign, urging farmers to get involved in the online world to spread their thoughts and concerns.

The candidates Adam Marshall (Nationals sitting member), David Mailler (independent), Mercurius Goldstein (Greens) and Debra O’Brien (Country Labor) started off the meeting by introducing themselves.

Debra was first off the rank to introduce herself as a local.

“I grew up here, born and raised here. My father worked on the railway then he went into agriculture and established Moree Seed and Grain. I went into education, and then I went into educating teachers on children in rural areas. Now I’m in community programs for early intervention for disadvantaged families,” she said.

Debra said as she wasn’t a farmer, her views were different and focused on infrastructure and education in conjunction with community and government support.

“Development of infrastructure is so important for you, for your costs and efficiency of getting your products to market. The importance of education, the importance of research for farming, the importance of extension offices that used to be widespread around here to give you support. A lot of those things have been cut,” she said.

Meanwhile, David said he was a third generation farmer who grew up in Gurley before moving to Boggabilla.

“I’ve been long disappointed by the declining terms of trade, population, investment and I’ve been devastated by the fact we make up 85 per cent of the state, it’s owned by farmers, and we’ve had continually our sovereign risk threatened by succession of government over the past 20 years in particular.

David said he was “standing up” because he was a founding member of the Country Party. “I honestly believe that we need to change direction. I believe my children deserve better from me, and our community. I don’t see the young people coming back to this industry like we need,” he said.

“We need to reinvest in this industry.”

Adam, the current member for Northern Tablelands, has been in parliament for 21 months.

“Gunnedah is my home town, I’m off the land there, both sides of the family... A bit like Dave, farming for generation after generation down there,” he said.

“Like a lot of young people when I finished school I had the opportunity to go to Sydney but I made a decision not to because I wanted to stay in country areas. I am very passionate about the bush, and everything that drives me is trying to make things a bit better for country people and provide opportunities for young people.”

Adam said there were a number of levers you could pull in parliament, and his fight was for more services, more infrastructure funding and a better opportunity for young people. “In my 20-odd months I am proud to have worked with some wonderful community organisations and groups to secure funding, and I’ve also pulled a few noses out of joint down in the Macquarie Street machinery, which I don’t apologise for.

“I’ve been pretty vocal on the issue of poles and wires to stay publically owned and they will, and I’m still fighting for drought support,” he said.

Mercurius told the 40-odd members in the crowd they could call him Merc.

“Just like the car! I’m the Greens candidate tonight and I’m here to listen to your concerns,” he said.

He said he’d lived in Glen Innes since 2010. “About 10-11 years ago I was having dinner with my father, an engineer, who was excited about a new project in Southern QLD, and he was telling me about this fantastic idea of these wells on farms going in, about how they pipe gas out of the ground and compressed it on site.

“He doesn’t think that so much anymore.”

Merc is a teacher and said his students were easy to read when things weren’t going so well on their farms. 

“I can see it in their faces. When I first landed from the city I knew I’d been accepted by them six weeks in, when I was invited to go out pigging with them,” he said.

Merc said the Green’s had legal ideas for farmers against CSG, as well as plans for young farmers under 40 wanting to get started in the industry.

After the introductions the floor was open to questions, the first about native vegetation. MC Stuart Gall said there had been a lot of native vegetation questions submitted for the panel.

Will you commit to the abolishment of the current native vegetation act?

Debra began by expressing her sympathy for farmers feeling they had no control over their farm use.

“It is obviously a very vexed question and it interferes with many things like pasture rotation and drought relief support.

“I think there will always be some form of land clearance regulations because bio-diversity is an important part of general land use but the fact you are doing this in the interest of all community is something that should be acknowledged and I’m open to hearing suggestions. Labor is not going to completely scrap it, but we are willing to support farmers,” she said.

David said he was committed to repealing the act.

“The legislation has failed the state and rural Australia. I am very disappointed and this is part of the reason I am standing,” he said.

Adam said in short, “yes”.

“It can’t happen quick enough and it should have happened long ago. I think people on the land have every right to be disappointed. It’s not just the native veg act, it’s the threatened species act and there’s about four other pieces of legislation that are intricately entwined with the native veg act,” he said. “It makes it complicated but that’s the easy bit, it’s the politics.”

Merc said the Greens were serious in protecting farm land.

“As for the act, we notice there are problems with the act... You have to review something that is so unpopular and unliked. There is also a problem with a department that has not been able to do its job properly because of funding cuts,” he said.

Another question asked was about the drug problem in Moree. What will you as a candidate do, if elected on March 28, to work with our community to overcome this problem that is ruining our community?

Debra said the problem was increasing crime and tearing families apart across the region.

“The sad thing is there is no rehabilitation services, no beds in Moree, no ability to deal with the problem. This is what I mean about infrastructure problems. We need to invest in community services,” she said.

David said the question was outside his area of expertise but believed the socioeconomic problem needed solutions to come out of the community.

“We need to empower our community and work with them to come up with a solution. Too often we see Macquarie Street trying to dictate us in our communities but we need to come up with our solutions,” David said. 

Merc said mental health services had to be sorted.

“Government governs best when it governs local. Listen to the people affected and you will have better solutions, especially with the youth. Our policies in mental health will help that, along with our plans with domestic violence,” he said.

Adam believed it was a growing concern, including with police. 

“I had a series of meetings with superintendents from both New England and Barwon commands and police are worried.

“They’ve comparing this to when heroin first took off, but as far as police information tells, there is no-one manufacturing it locally but the use and addiction is growing,” he said. 

Adam said he had a number of ways to approach the issue. “First you have to get stakeholders surrounding the community to work out individual issues within the community and work on a community based solution the government can support.”

Another issue raised was water buy-backs. “When the water buybacks came along we lost 89,000 megs. It was all in production so now it is out of balance. What is your view on the water that has been taken away?” a local asked the panel.

Adam began with, “the politics of water… where do we start?

“I guess the buybacks you’re talking about action mainly at a commonwealth level rather than a state, but you’ve asked for an opinion and I think what we fail to do with water is appropriately value it,” he said.

Adam said when the government talked about water flows and 15,000 megs to release for a fish flow from the Mehi, no economic value was measured.

“We know it’s $250-300 a meg to be used in production but we don’t measure the benefit that brings to the environment, verses an overall community benefit. You can’t compare apples with apples but in the last few months I’ve found there were a number of issues for irrigators. It is a concern,” he said.

“We need to start with a proper value on community wellbeing verses production benefits.”

Merc said there were things at state level the government could, and should, be doing to support farmers when it came to water.

“We need innovation, but there’s been a $20 million cut to the Department of Primary Industries, so how are we going to improve? These are the people who could be working with you on innovation projects and identifying new opportunities. The NSW Government is cutting the opportunity they have to support you.”

After listening to the shadow minister for agriculture, Debra agreed there was a great importance in putting research into improving soil quality to increase its ability to hold water.

“For me, I always take it back to education, investment and infrastructure. How do we know the best use of water? How do we know our soil is not leaching water away? I think this again goes back to investing in primary industry departments but I don’t know much about the water buybacks scheme,” she said.

David said up until recently, he also didn’t know a lot about the issue.

“I gotta say I’m impressed about what sort of value we place on water and what productivity we get out of the water we have. I think we’re producing 20,000 hectares of cotton but we’re usually producing about 70,000. It’s down from about 90,000 but we’ve lost a lot of water,” he said.

“The consequences of that to the community have been huge. It means loss of jobs, loss of services, machinery outlets, mechanics and then you lose teachers and police officers and health services,” he said.

“We need to understand what we’ve lost simply because we had this water buyback scheme and supplementary flows. To create an artificial wetland in a drought is not beneficial and it is all very complex but we have to value the stewardship and community in all of this,” he said.