New drought boss in Narrabri

Shane Stone is the newly appointed coordinator-general of the Drought and North Queensland Flood Response and Recovery Agency and he visited the district last week to meet with Narrabri Shire Councillors and community members to discuss the ongoing impact of the drought.

If you missed Mr Stone on his recent visit, he has a clear message for you: “I’ll be back.”

“I’m not based in Canberra, the road is my office,” he added.

Mr Stone is a former Northern Territory chief minister and former Liberal party president.

He’s also well-known for penning a memo in 2001, that was leaked, and said ‘MPs believed the Government was mean and tricky’ and criticised Peter Costello.

In his new role, Mr Stone and his team are currently travelling through drought-affected areas to see and hear first-hand how locals are handling these dry and difficult times.

The straight-talking, drought agency boss wants to know what support measures are working and what areas still need improvement.

Mr Stone said he’s making a shopping list of “local ideas” and he’ll be taking that list straight back to the Prime Minister.

“I report directly to the Prime Minister which is a real advantage in this bureaucracy,” said Mr Stone in an interview with the The Courier.

“In fact, I wasn’t prepared to do the job unless I could.”

Mr Stone said he doesn’t have a farming background but he grew up in country Victoria and is a big supporter of agriculture and its future.

“I bloody believe in farmers and I’m fighting on many fronts,” he said.

“I’m not a farmer but I’ve been intimately involved around the edges of the agricultural sector.

“I helped build the live cattle trade in the north into places like Brunei and the Philippines.

“I also get the fact that you don’t just help the cockies because you feel sorry for the farmers – it’s the social utility of the sector.

“It’s a major contributor to our balance of trade, to our wealth as a nation. We are an agricultural nation.”

Mr Stone said people were in “diabolical trouble” because of the drought.

“It’s a slow strangulation, it’s not as dramatic as a flood or a bushfire – people suffer in silence.

“People get to a point where they start making decisions which some are good decisions, some are bad.

“Some people are going to survive it and a lot of people are not going to survive it, and so it’s a very complex issue to confront.

“And it’s not just about the farmers, in towns like this, unless we get it right, they will continue to diminish.

“The towns are as important as the agricultural sector in maintaining a semblance of existence in this part of the world. And it’s the same
approach that we took in the floods.”

In March 2019, Mr Stone was appointed chair of the North Queensland Livestock Industry Recovery Agency in response to the devastating floods in North Queensland.

In December 2019, the Prime Minister Scott Morrison expanded the Agency’s responsibilities to include drought at a national level.

“What Shane and his team have been able to do in Queensland I want to see them do across the drought affected areas of this country,” said the Prime Minister during the announcement.

The Prime Minister said one of the “challenges” of dealing with the drought was making sure people were aware of the assistance packages.

Mr Stone acknowledged that he joins a list of people who have been given varying government positions to deal with the drought from Barnaby Joyce’s former role as special drought envoy to Jock Laurie’s former position as NSW drought coordinator.

The drought isn’t new and so the pressure is on Mr Stone to be an appointment that delivers.

“People put it a little more gently to me, they say – we’ve had lots of people come through to talk to us, lots of drought panels, lots of drought advisors and nothing changed – we’re hoping that you will be the agent of change.

“We all know it needs to rain but even if it rains that doesn’t fix it. Some of these properties will take five to 10 years to get back up again.

“So the whole idea is about giving people a hand up, not a hand out and there is a range of things you can do,” said Mr Stone.

“We can talk to our NSW
counterpart on freight subsidies, which seem to be hitting the mark, so we could encourage them to expand that or at the same time we could be doing our own federal grants.”

“Let’s put in place some planning for the future, we’re going to confront this water issue, big time.

“Let’s stop dancing around this, ‘oh they can’t say the word dam’. I mean, the water that was lost in North Queensland was the size of the whole of the UK. And it went out to sea.”

Mr Stone said his recent trip had produced some good ideas and he singled out a suggestion from a meeting in Goondiwindi.

“The old John Howard scheme, where we subsidised people, so someone might have said – ‘look I’ve got a business, I’ve got five people and the reality is they’re only occupied 40 per cent of the time’.

“It’s unrealistic to expect that they will hang around for 40 per cent of a job, but if the Commonwealth was able to step in and take up the 60 per cent and then use them on other things, even if it’s planting rocks.

“And we did it during the Howard years, we subsidised employment until people could get through a difficult period so we’re looking at
seeing whether we can reactivate that scheme.”

Mr Stone was very complimentary of the Narrabri Shire Council’s drought initiatives and the way it has distributed funding so far, he encouraged more ideas from a local level.

“I’ve got to say, the guys here, what they have done has been spectacular.

“We expect people to come up with the local ideas that can be locally implemented.

“They’ve got to own it.”