Dairy Plan for Queensland Moves Closer

The advisory group which is guiding development of Queensland’s dairy plan has last week begun the task of looking at all of the feedback received so far and identifying priorities and common themes – issues which must be addressed in the plan, and ideas for change.

This dairy plan is all about growing Queensland’s milk pool, building the economic viability of the industry, facilitating productivity and efficiency improvements, and building confidence in the future of the industry in Queensland.

With eastAUSmilk leading development of the plan, feedback has been received from six district meetings (about 120 people attended all together), discussions amongst advisory group members themselves, and individual discussions with SubTropical Dairy, larger processors, and others. In addition, eastAUSmilk has received emails from several individuals about the problems they see as priorities, and suggesting solutions, and received responses to our invitation for online submissions. Notes of district meetings and other discussions, together with online and email input, have amounted to many thousands of words and over a hundred pages of notes.

The advisory group is made up of representatives from each of eastAUSmilk, SubTropical Dairy, Department of Agriculture and Fisheries, Lactalis, Bega, Norco and DFMC.

Once that group has digested all the feedback and proposals received so far, the next steps will include seeking advisory group consensus on the issues which must be addressed and proposals for change, then trying to reduce them to a smaller number of concrete proposals which will have a real and lasting impact.

The group will then have to weave them into a draft plan.

Once draft documents are ready to put in front of farmers, processors and other stakeholders, we’ll schedule another round of face-to-face consultations including district meetings.

Once that further feedback has been received, the advisory group is expected to modify their draft, and propose a final plan.

There’s more information about the plan on the eastAUSmilk website.

Mike Smith, eastAUSmilk Government Relations Manager