THE Federal Opposition says the Government's focus on sustainable population at this election is disproportionate to the level of funding allocated to the portfolio compared to agriculture.
Minister for Agriculture, Tony Burke, is also the Minister for Sustainable Population and has been a key player in Labor's election campaign with major appearances with the Prime Minister last week to spruik the Government's message on controlled population growth and immigration.
Mr Burke's media commitments to discuss sustainable population can be up to four or five interviews, press conferences or press releases every day of the campaign, and according to Media Monitors election coverage data sustainable population was one of the top five issues in the media nationally last week.
Mr Burke's office confirmed this week that his only agriculture-specific announcements in the campaign so far have been related to Caring For Our Country reef-rescue funding for farmers in the marginal seat of Leichhardt in North Queensland and Caring For Our Country grants to dairy farmers in the marginal seat of Eden-Monaro, in southern NSW.
An announcement regarding an exceptional circumstances decision in South Australia was also made last week.
This year's Federal budget papers reveal the resources available within the agriculture, fisheries and forestry portfolio total $1.7 billion, while population funding within the treasury portfolio is valued at just $1.5 million for the next financial year.
The Opposition's spokesman for agriculture, John Cobb, said Mr Burke was ignoring the industry which was responsible for keeping Australia out of a technical recession and is directly responsible for major export earnings and hundreds of thousands of jobs.
"The Minister for Sustainable Population has no department and a budget of less than $2 million and has been relegated to a support prop for Prime Ministerial media conferences," Mr Cobb said.
"I cannot understand why the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry and Sustainable Population is ignoring the importance of food security in the population debate."
Mr Burke last week defended the Government's attention on population when asked whether the focus on population was "just a respectable dog whistle", that is to stir up fear and prejudice in a non-offensive way by combining the issues of immigration, asylum seekers and a growing population.
"I don’t think anybody who gets caught in gridlock in traffic because we didn’t plan the distribution of our population well enough, or any employer in a place like Western Australia who is desperate for skilled workers and can’t find them because of the way our population’s distributed at the moment, I don’t think anyone in those situations would question whether or not we need to deal with this sort of policy," Mr Burke said.
"These are issues that have been ignored by Australian governments of both sides for generations.
"For the first time we’re saying let’s start to co-ordinate this, let’s start to bring together all the different departments, the different levels of government to work through how our population is spread throughout the nation. It’s a significant change but it is being driven because there are real pressures that people are facing."
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