World Milk Day

World Milk Day

18 June 2025

Mr McBRIDE (MacKillop) (12:46): I would like to thank the member for Finniss for his private member's motion in acknowledgement of World Milk Day. I know that we are running out of time; I will be very quick. One of the things that I want to touch base on and I was thinking about is we have a dairy industry and milk production system in South Australia/Australia that is not meeting our needs today. In other words, we are importing more product than ever. It is even suggested that sometimes during the year we are getting our milk imported from New Zealand because we are not meeting demand.

Why is this happening? I did not just say this yesterday, either; I have said it over the last five to 10 years. Why is it diminishing? Why are dairy farmers falling off the perch? Why are they not continuing? How is it not expanding on these couple of cases? One reason is we know that we saw a massive problem with world trust in baby formula in China, where they started playing with this formula and perhaps even killing their own children because they got it wrong. They then made our product in Australia more valuable by filling their suitcases with it and importing it on aeroplanes, taking it back to China because they did not trust their own product. Why did that happen? Because we do have such world-class production of food, including this dairy sector and industry.

One of the things I want the South Australian and federal governments to understand is not only are dairy farmers the owners of these dairies—the cows and the infrastructure, with all the associated costs that I have heard all the speakers talk about like dry periods, $1,000 per tonne for hay, the cost of water and the technology—but they cannot actually find employees out there to milk these cows.

We do not have a workforce in Australia that wants to wake up at 3 or 4 or 5 o'clock in the morning and milk cows in the morning and at night. In fact, we have an employment situation where it is really hard to employ someone for those three or four hours each end of the day and say, 'You can have a sleep in the middle of the day and do nothing, then come back and start again.' It does not even allow them to do this.

One of the things I want the South Australian and Australian governments to recognise is this is not the only sector that is really struggling in battles to get employees out there and doing the work. We see it in aged care: if you go to the aged-care facilities it is almost like you have to try to spot the Australian. We know that all these imported workers and people are coming in and doing that work because Australians do not want to. The dairy sector is facing the same sorts of struggles.

We know that Australians do not want to work in the meat sector and the processing sector where we have abattoirs. We have a billion-dollar processing works around dairy—e.g., the cows, calves and the like, as they are surplus to the requirements of milk when they reach their end-of-use-by date—but we do not have a workforce that actually wants to process this type of food or collect the milk like I am suggesting.

What do we do? We could watch what supermarkets Woolworths and Coles did and go and make milk at $1 and think that the farmer should be paid only paid 30¢ or 40¢ a litre. That was not many years ago. It made it really hard for those dairy farmers to survive that sort of downturn. In fact, it even created an exit strategy of saying, 'Well, if you're going to sell milk in the supermarkets for a dollar, I am out of here, because I can't make that work for me.'

Another option that I have not mentioned yet, but I know it exists in the Middle East, is where the local workforce does not want to work. They are very, very wealthy countries over there. The locals get the jobs, but they have to import other workers to do the work for them. The locals themselves, I think from when I heard about this process, are on nearly $20 an hour—probably $30 or $40 now because it is 10 years ago—and the local workers were only on $5 an hour. The imported workforce came from Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan. People from other places around the world where they cannot find work were coming to these Middle Eastern countries. There was a quota system. This quota system says, 'Right, if you employ one local at $20 to $50 an hour, you are allowed to employ some overseas workers to come in and do the work that these locals do not want to do.'

Maybe Australia and South Australia need to look at this type of example, because we are going to watch our own milk industry, which is really valuable and important, just diminish because we will not consider the fact that Australians do not want to get out of bed and work and work a job at two ends of the day, and say it is all too hard and we should just go and import our milk from somewhere overseas like New Zealand.

I will finish by thanking the member for Finniss and everyone else who has spoken to support this valuable industry. It does exist in MacKillop. It is a valuable sector. It has continued to decline. It probably will decline further if we do not address this workforce issue and all the costs associated with producing milk, but it is not the only sector that is going to face these troubles.

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