Advice on legislation or legal policy issues contained in this paper is provided for use in parliamentary debate and for related parliamentary purposes. This paper is not professional legal opinion.
Briefing Paper No. 08/2005 by John Wilkinson
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- in the early years after people from the British Isles arrived in
Australia, government policy towards primary production tended to be based on
an assumption of producers’ self-reliance (pp.1-2)
- after observing government directly intervening in the buying and selling
of rural commodities, producers began to appeal for these (wartime
instrumentalities) to be made a permanent feature of commercial transactions in
primary production (pp.4-8, 12, 14-15, 23-24).
- producers also became successful in persuading government to refrain from
maintaining a position that producers should rely on their own efforts in dry
conditions (pp.3,6,9-10,15-18,24-30)
- by the decade of the 1970s, government had also been persuaded to employ
tariff duties to reinforce the prices sought by primary producers (pp.13-14)
- the 1973 loss of the market in Britain (hitherto the main destination for
Australia’s primary products) led to a major reconsideration of
government intervention in the production and selling of rural commodities
(pp.10-13, 16, 23-24)
- government aid to primary producers, in dry conditions, has also been
reconsidered (p.16)
- by the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, considerable amounts
of government assistance still exist in relation both to price supports and to
assistance in dry weather (pp.16-18, 24-30)
- government also provides a significant number of individual programs of
assistance (pp.18-23)
