I usually run 10,000 breeding ewes--that's sheep--500 or 600 cows, and a crop of a couple of thousand acres. We actually haven't had a season. We've had three complete failures in a row, which is pretty catastrophic for farmers. I'm not too sure whether I'd like to get into comparisons about who's doing better or worse, Canada or us. We all have expectations of the institution in Australia of what we call family farming, where you get up in the morning and defy common sense and go to work. I'm sure that in the future, given the global food task, what's in the fridge is going to be more important than what's in the garage, because the world seems to be obsessed with modelling the future energy task but not the food task.
I'm also sure that we would love to have your thoughts, formally or informally, into the inquiry we're doing, because the more on-the-ground information we have as to how are we going to task the food task in the future.... The urban mob—and you can't blame them—go to the supermarket and the milk's there, the meat's there, and the veggies are there, but they have no idea how it gets there as long as it's there. I have to say that in our country in some cases--and I'll say generally not always, because they might be litigious--if you have to take a contract with some of the monopoly suppliers, the resellers, you end up wanting to jump off a cliff because they eventually cut all their costs back to you and all the profits forward to the consumer. This is a continuing serious problem.
Can I also say that one of the things we're conscious of in the future for the development of northern Australia—and I chaired under the previous government the Northern Development Taskforce—our Australian Federal Police Commission has said that Australia's greatest challenge to its sovereignty would be the displacement of people on the planet in the future. I won't go into that today, but there you go.