CORRECTED VERSION

EDUCATION AND TRAINING COMMITTEE

Inquiry into agricultural education and training in

Pyramid Hill — 2 November 2011

Members

Mr P. Crisp Mr D. Southwick Mr N. Elasmar Ms G. Tierney Ms E. Miller

Chair: Mr D. Southwick Deputy Chair: Ms G. Tierney

Staff

Executive Officer: Ms K. Riseley Research Officers: Ms A. Madden, Ms M. Scott Administration Officer: Ms N. Tyler

Witnesses

Ms M. Eicher, Saluté Oliva Pty Ltd;

Mr R. Moon, owner, mixed farming enterprise;

Mr P. Ford, Chief Executive Officer, Gardiner Foundation; Ms J. Nelson, Executive Officer, North Central Local Learning and Employment Network; and Mr J. Mazzarella, Principal, College.

2 November 2011 Education and Training Committee 1 The CHAIR — Thank you for appearing before the committee today. A few of you have heard what I have said, but unfortunately I need to keep saying it for the purpose of Hansard. As you know, we are taking evidence today as part of the Education and Training Committee’s review of agricultural education and training. The evidence that you provide us today will be covered by what we call parliamentary privilege, so anything you say today will be covered, just as members of Parliament are covered during their parliamentary activities within the Parliament. However, that privilege does not apply outside of this room. Feel free to say whatever you like within these four walls. Hansard is recording all of your evidence, and that is the reason these microphones are in front of you. You will get the opportunity to have a look at a draft of the transcript of these proceedings and, if there are any errors, you will have the opportunity to correct them. Thank you again for appearing before the committee. We will begin with any opening comments you would like to make, otherwise we will get straight into the questions.

Mr FORD — My opening remarks would be that dairy is a large, complex and exciting industry. It is $13 billion a year in value, and 75 per cent of that is in Victoria. There are 3500 dairy farmers. They are really agile people who are responding to things like drought, flood, changes in price and things like that. There are 140 processing sites in Victoria. They are producing over 1 million tonnes of exports and are quite an important sort of economy.

The Gardiner Foundation has funds in trust and we invest about $6 million a year. Some of that is in better grass, better cows and less energy in the factories. It is about human nutrition and things like that. Zeroing down to the investment in community and people, that is about $1 million a year of investment in the community, people and issues in the dairy industry.

There are two key drivers of the dairy industry which drive our investment in Gateways. Of the 60 000 people who work in the dairy industry in , 40 000 are living in small communities of less than 5000 people. That is like the four communities we are talking about here. Making sure that those small communities are vibrant is a defining issue for dairy, because if you do not have people staying in those small communities — living in them and contributing to them — the industry will not have labour for the farms and factories. Another key demographic for us is the fact that since 2008 the Australian workforce has been shrinking. For the last 60 years we have had a high birth rate, migration and things like that, but it has started to shrink, and so dairy is in competition with mining and tourism and things like that for the talented people in the workforce. The magic words for us have been attracting, retaining and developing talented staff.

Gardiner Foundation has a proud history of projects such as Cows Create Careers, which is putting calves in schools at year 8 or year 9 to attract kids to the industry. Projects like Gateways are a pathway to vocational training in agriculture and dairy, scholarships, mentoring and leadership programs, including rural community-based leadership programs and things like that.

We invested $250 000 or thereabouts, in the Gateways project. It is one of those projects where we have got in, funded it in the early stages and have tried to stay in there long enough to make sure that it has had time to build up, the models have been worked out and it has got a bit of a track record. We are thinking it is pretty close to that sort of stage now. Typically with those other projects that we have talked about, at some stage we have to decide to pull out and move on to something else.

We see lots of good things in Gateways — all the students you have seen today. In addition to things that have not been discussed today, Cohuna school won a government prize for the best science and maths program, which we think is significant. The community has a say in the curriculum for these sort of programs, which we think is really important. The way that the community and the individuals in the community and the industry come together in a program like Gateways is also a really important part of the program. For the dairy industry having vibrant small communities, talented people and Gateways as part of a development program for life is pretty important.

Ms EICHER — I might just take it from there. What I find is so interesting in Gateways for these kids is that they are taken out of their own community. Even though we are so close together, the agriculture side of it is quite varied. Pyramid Hill and Cohuna are very dairy based, whereas has virtually no dairy at all — it is basically broadacre farming, sheep and horticulture. The irrigation there has been utilised for that. I think it is a great opportunity for those kids who have grown up in one area seeing their way of farming to move not that far and learn about other sides of farming that might attract them more. They might get something out of it and say,

2 November 2011 Education and Training Committee 2 ‘We could adopt that here. We could have a small side part of the farm that could become that’. I think it opens the mind to what farming is. It is not just what we see at the doorstep.

Mr MOON — Just for your interest more than anything else, I will give you a bit on my background. I am a farmer — almost third generation here — and my son is a vet, just come home to the farm. I am fairly involved in the community and have been involved in the school council for quite a number of years. My involvement in the Gateways project probably started quite a bit before it was established. It is trying to build agriculture into something to be recognised as a career opportunity. I know when I went through school agriculture was not my first choice of career by any means; I just ended up there. I have enjoyed it immensely and got a lot out of it.

My passion for this was sparked because I had a son and all he wanted to be was a farmer, but at that stage it was talked down. People said to him, ‘Why do you want to be a farmer? There is no future in that’, et cetera. That came as a fair concern to me. There were a couple of others on the school council experiencing the same thing. We tried to get agriculture into the program, as you heard Joe speak about before. Some of that started a bit before Joe’s time. He came in to really feed off some of the predecessors. When you ask why industry gets involved in this, I will say I am very selfish about it and that that is why I got involved in it. I have a real interest in it. My eldest son was one of the first ones prior to the Gateways program, and he and his cohort of students were some of the ones who designed the orchard that you had a look at before.

From there we built up, and I worked with Joe for a little while. We took four kids who were very much disengaged with school — well, I will not say they were disengaged, just that they struggled with some of their schooling outcomes — and they had a bit of a flair for agriculture, so we set up a land program. We actually took it from paddock to plate. This was back in about 2006, so it was before a lot of these in-vogue things were here.

They actually came out to my place and had a look at some different types of lamb and sheep. They had to go and assess their feeding requirements, nutrient requirements and marketing requirements before they even started, and then we actually brought some lambs into the school and fed them through. Out of that I saw that those kids had to do their maths; they had to sit down and calculate; they had to go out and engage with the community when working with the local butcher shop and work out how best to market it and what weight does he want. All of a sudden the kids who were struggling with school started to engage. It built up from that, and the chairs from the Titanic started to line up and as a few started to get into different meetings Gateways was founded. Through the generosity of Gardiner and some of the others it has built up. I have watched at times some of the kids go through — some of them have no interest in agriculture and some have, but the thing with agriculture is it is diverse. From an agricultural banker through to a marketer through to a grain trader, whether you want to live in the city or whether you want to live in a rural area, there are a lot of careers that tie back to agriculture, which, prior to being exposed to this Gateway program, some of these kids had no idea about, or ‘I didn’t think that was tied to agriculture’.

The other thing with it is we are exporting our greatest asset out of here. Our kids from the area had to go to and had to go to to get their education or career opportunities. If we can turn that around and say, ‘There are a lot of good career opportunities, and with IT now you can actually still live in these areas and basically telecommute to Melbourne’, it would give them a different outlook on life and broaden their horizons. A lot of what I see is part of schooling; it is not just that you go there to learn to read and write — your 3 Rs or 4 Rs, or how many Rs they want to come up with nowadays. It is actually preparing a child or a student for lifelong learning. We have heard that here today — education no longer finishes at year 12 or year 10 or whenever you get out school. Agriculture is probably one of the biggest ones. With the way it is developing, if you do not keep trying to learn or pick up these new ideas, you are left well behind.

The CHAIR — Just picking up on what you said, Robert — thanks for that — when did you first get involved with the school? When was your first involvement in this area?

Mr MOON — Coming through as a student, but as a school councillor I started here in about 1996, I think it was.

The CHAIR — From the time you have been involved — and you mentioned just then that there was a bit of a negative feeling in terms of ag ed around generally and part of doing this and getting involved was to change that feeling and to look at farming as being a real option for people — do you think that since Gateways

2 November 2011 Education and Training Committee 3 has been introduced and the involvement that you and others have had that perception has changed within the community? Is agriculture education now a real option for many young people, in your view?

Mr MOON — In the community I think it probably has. It definitely has in the school community, and that is evident when looking at the orchard and what we have got out there in livestock holding and everything else. It is a lot more than just years 9 and 10, or the Gateways cohort, as you heard the staff talk about before. Some of my kids in prep and year 1 raised chickens, they incubated chickens out. Different agricultural pursuits have been developed, and that is right across the board, from prep to year 10. Different staff will pick up different things that they are comfortable with. I fully appreciate and quite understand not all staff are comfortable with agriculture. We do not want everyone going into agriculture. There is a bit of concern there. You were saying that 70 per cent of our students are not picking it up, but if we can get 30 per cent of students going through and being involved in agriculture or pursuing a career in agriculture, it would be a heck of a turnaround from what we have at the moment. We need those other academics to pursue those other professional careers.

The CHAIR — In terms of all of you, why did you get involved in Gateways? I know you mentioned it in your introductory remarks, but why was it specifically Gateways? What was your involvement in the program itself? What are some of the direct benefits to your organisations or the industries in which you are working? Have you received support or training since you put your hand up and said you want to be involved? What sort of support have you received from Gateways itself?

Ms EICHER — As you can hear from my accent, I did not grow up in Australia. We came to Australia in 1988 for two years and somehow got stuck. We were in Melbourne to start off with. My husband and I are both engineers. We tried to find a way of moving to the country. We both grew up in a small country town in Switzerland, and we wanted that environment for our kids to grow up in. It is a choice you make as a parent — what you think is the best environment for your kids. It is not that easy if you are an engineer to find work in a small community, so for us farming was a change of career path altogether, because we could see only that as a way of living that dream of moving out to the country. We set up an olive grove.

To us the farming side is really only one part of the business, which probably does not make even half of the income. The value-adding to the product and the marketing of the product is probably the bigger of the two things. For us to get involved in that program was very much to give the kids an outlook to see that you can move back to the country. I think what people from the city do not appreciate is that once kids have moved on for their further education they are a bit stuck in the city, because no-one really talks about where they can apply the dream careers they have chosen to. A lot of those career paths tie you to the city. There is no way that you can say, ‘I am a civil engineer; I am going to work from Boort’; I think you would struggle to get enough work when you are out there.

I think a lot kids would like to come back to the country, but they would also like to see more in the city. What I can see from our involvement is that you do not have to be stuck with what you are doing now. There are plenty of opportunities that you can utilise to come back to the country. Even giving them a bit of an insight into what is involved in it lowers that barrier. It is not that you start completely as an outsider growing something or marketing something or whatever. I think lowering that barrier gives more opportunities to kids to make the move back to the country, not necessarily to stay but to make the move back.

The CHAIR — How did you find out about Gateways? How did you first get involved?

Ms EICHER — Through our local school. I have two kids at school in Boort. We got written to. I think all people in the industry that seemed interested in the program got written to, and they had an information night, and I thought it was a great initiative.

Mr FORD — I would strongly endorse the input from my two colleagues that you have to see this as a whole supply chain. It is not just encouraging kids to be in farming. It is the way that we describe it to kids. A big dairy factory that is doing 5000 tonnes of milk a day — you could describe it to the kids as the greatest computer game in town: driving a milk spray drier for 300 or 400 tonnes of milk a day. There are opportunities right across the industry. To answer your specific question as to why we should fund Gateways — I think what a number of people have done this afternoon is describe someone’s career as quite a long event, if you like. It starts off as trying to attract the young kids with chickens or saying cows create careers. You are trying to get them to think about agriculture and dairy for a start. We seem to have in dairy quite a few leadership programs

2 November 2011 Education and Training Committee 4 and scholarship programs for vocational training, tertiary education and things like that, but what was missing was in that time frame of around 15 or so, like the kids you have seen today, and trying to pick up on the early investment we were making and making sure that at that critical time of developing their thoughts about agriculture there was not a gap. This sort of filled in a whole range of tools that you were deploying across somebody’s lifetime. It was a gap. That is probably one of the attractions for the Gardiner Foundation to invest.

Ms MILLER — The committee understands the Gardiner Foundation is the major funding provider for the Gateways program. Why did the foundation choose to invest in the program?

Mr FORD — I have perhaps described a bit of that. I should also add, though, it is a competitive bidding process, so we do not just decide to invest. People have to put up an application to us based on a unique proposition — the impact for the dairy industry, the type of project plan and the team track record — and that its put up to a team of multiskilled assessors, not the Gardiner Foundation. So it is a competitive bidding process, and it was really the quality of the application which was a lot of the reason why we might have invested and the fact that the business case was a unique proposition to us.

The CHAIR — Just extending from that for a minute, in terms of return on investment compared to a whole lot of other programs that the Gardiner Foundation funds, how do you see this stacking up as a project? I know we are all sitting in here talking about it, but objectively how do you see it in terms of what it has done and potentially what it could do?

Mr FORD — I do not think I can sit here and say in an economic way it is a 1-in-3 or a 1-in-10 or a 1-in-50 return on investment.

The CHAIR — I am not talking necessarily dollar-wise; I am talking about community engagement.

Mr FORD — Yes, but the community engagement is really important. The fact that you have not gone into one community, you have gone into a cluster of four, and they have shared ideas and sort of built on that. The enthusiasm of those young kids that came back from America and New Zealand is infectious, and two of them spoke to our annual general meeting and demanded to be talking to our directors a week ago. The confidence of them is just outstanding, and the lessons learnt to be applied in other small towns or other small communities around the state for dairy, we think, is quite important, so we see big gains.

Mr ELASMAR — A number of submissions state that the agricultural industry is experiencing skills and labour shortages. Is this a problem for the local industries around Pyramid Hill and Boort, and if so, do you think the Gateways program will help to address this?

Mr FORD — In the dairy industry, did you say?

Mr ELASMAR — In the agricultural industry.

Mr FORD — It is an interaction. The communities need agriculture and agriculture needs the communities. It is sort of two-way, and you have to have both of them together to make for successful communities and successful industry, so when you have a look at the numbers — —

You have described horticulture near Boort. In the Cohuna area or Pyramid Hill area there is a bit more focus on dairy, and there are other areas of Robert’s I am talking about that might be in wool growing and things like that, but I would be saying that it is an interaction between the communities and industry, and you need to have something like this program to have success in both areas.

Mr MOON — As far as the area is concerned, there is a definite skills shortage in employable labour. The big problem is a lot of it is seasonal, and that in itself creates a problem because you might be able to give someone employment for 3 months or 6 months, but it is difficult to give it for the 12 months. In saying that, you have to understand that this area has gone through probably 10 years of the worst drought that it has had, followed by the second biggest flood it has ever had, and the resilience out there — —

There are businesses out there that are employing people, and there are businesses out there — and I am talking farming businesses here — that are starting to re-employ people. Some of the small businesses in town are probably still struggling a little bit, although there are a few employment opportunities there. Goulburn-Murray Water creates a few employment opportunities. Pyramid Hill probably had a big setback in the middle of the 2 November 2011 Education and Training Committee 5 drought. We did have a pet food processing factory here as well, which, when it closed, had a major impact on the town and the school, right across the community. But if we can get back to having some reasonable farming years again, with the way farms have had to expand, because we have lost a lot of little farms — a lot of them were bought out by the next door neighbour or someone from Melbourne has bought it as an investment — they are looking to either put on a manager or employ an extra farm labourer.

One of the big problems with students when they come out of school now is that they are very good academically, but work placement skills are really lacking. It is a program like this that really helps a lot of that because they do get out there and, as some of the kids stated here before, they are off farms and they are getting recognised for what they normally do of a weekend or after school, or whatever else. But there is the opportunity there for some of these others — Pyramid Hill has a couple that are not off farms — who had to go out and actively seek to try and get that. I am not sure how some of them went, but there are properties out there looking for some of these sorts of skills or these types of workers.

The CHAIR — Extending on my point — and I know we have covered a lot of it today — how successful do you think the Gateways program has been in exposing students to career paths in agriculture?

Mr MOON — I think it has been extremely successful, probably because I have been involved in it before and some of my real successes have been prior to that. In my opening statement I said I had a son and that while he was reasonably good academically at school, he hated school. He was coming home at the end of year 10, no matter what. Gateways was not around in those days. We had a bit of an ag program. He went across to Boort and got involved in their VCAL program. After six months there he was totally bored with that, as the VCAL program can be, but Boort rescheduled his program a little bit and made it a bit more challenging. He actually went on. He got involved in the Gateways program over there and I think had a hand in helping them set up that orchard they have out the back. I know he had a part to do with that, but he actually went on to Longerenong and came out of Longerenong as the dux over there two years running. That is a kid that was not going to go on to years 11 and 12. He hated school.

So when I look at that, while it was not Gateways specific, it was very successful. What Gateways has done is probably built on that, and I can see that Matthew who was here before probably would have gone on and done very similar to what Ashley has done. This has really enabled him to pick up and get some recognition for what he is doing and really enforce his pathway.

The other big thing that I really got out of Gateways is that I was fortunate enough to attend the New Zealand trip this year as an industry partner. The wanted to take a couple of industry partners across. Some might call it a junket, I do not know, but one of the big things that I really got out of that was that I was involved in the selection process at Pyramid Hill College. I think we had 12 students go through, and the hardest decision I have ever made was to take the two out that were not up to it because their applications were fairly good. But most of them were all very nervous in that first interview. They had reasonable presentations. They probably had not spoken with many people in front of crowds. I watched them go to New Zealand. I watched them interact with New Zealand, and out of that 10 from Pyramid Hill College there were probably six that were really into agriculture and four were maybe. I think out of that there is only one who probably did not actually learn a bit more about agriculture, and those other three came away with a differing view of what agriculture offers, so it was a success.

The really big one now is to watch them come back here now and to see those three students from Pyramid Hill today and the two from Boort who I did not know quite as well beforehand, but I did meet them fairly early on in the trip over there, and there is no way known you would have got those five students to sit in front of a committee like this six months ago. It is that personal growth. Now we can do that through some other programs maybe. This is one that has fallen into the loop, but it is not something that really comes into your academic run-of-the-mill school stuff, and that is what this program has really given and really driven.

Ms MILLER — Do you think the Gateways program is a model that could be successfully replicated across regional and rural Victoria?

Mr FORD — The answer is overwhelmingly yes.

Ms MILLER — What are the key factors that you think need to be present in a school and community to ensure a program such as Gateways is successful?

2 November 2011 Education and Training Committee 6 Ms EICHER — Personally I think there are two. One will always be there if the need is there. There is no other way around it. But I think it also needs a change of attitude towards it. As long as kids are encouraged to move on and do higher studies — everything is based on academic learning — and we do not appreciate talents that are not academic and it is considered that it is the losers that take that path, I do not think it will be successful. It is very much the work of the community and the work of the school in line with that to bring it up to the same level. There is more than just academic intelligence, and it is not just academic learning that gets you further in life.

Mr FORD — It is having the community involved in the curriculum, raising the profile of agriculture and making agriculture feel good about itself, even in really tough conditions that this project has been going on in, with three of the eight droughts and two of the floods. All of those are transferable skills that you could start off in some other region at a much higher level. You are not starting from scratch any more.

Ms MILLER — Following on from that, what then in your view is the best way to promote the program?

Mr FORD — I think it is raising the awareness of Gateways and the lessons learnt from it and making sure it is promoted to other regional areas or cluster communities in agricultural areas.

Ms MILLER — What about in particular to a specific industry?

Mr FORD — It could be industry as well, yes.

Ms MILLER — How would you go about promoting it, though? Do you do it through a tiered system, like you have a sales and marketing business plan — so you have a website, marketing material and whatever it may be — and then you have your education curriculum, like here where there is a thread of agriculture through the different year levels? Is it a combination?

Mr FORD — It is a combination. The Gardiner Foundation have showcased it at our annual general meeting, for example. A lot of dairy industry key leaders were at that event. We put out newsletters, websites and things like that and showcase it there. But you are really showcasing it to encourage investment.

Ms MILLER — Do they do it at the Royal Melbourne Show?

Mr FORD — Not that I am aware of, no.

Mr MOON — In my view the Gateways model is not farming specific. The strength of the Gateways model is that it is a community and a school coming together. The only way you can get this up and running is if the school is passionate about it and the staff want to get up and run with it. If that is not there, it is not going to happen. Secondly, the community has to be passionate enough to get behind it as well. We could run this same program for engineering, building or for whatever industry is specific to a community or a community’s needs. It just so happens that here it is agriculture, or agriculture was the easiest one to come at.

One of the big problems with Gateways when it first came on board was that it was going to be bigger than everything. We were building big sheds. What else was in there, Jerri? We lost the focus of where we were going. All we were doing is getting the community up and running, and we were running. All of a sudden everyone dropped off because where were we running to? We focused it back on agriculture, and that is why the schools that have stuck with it — Pyramid Hill and Boort, and Cohuna to a certain extent — focused on agriculture. It is where they wanted to go; that is what they put their energy into and it worked.

If you had another school which wanted to do it with mechanics, building or something else and it had the passion of the staff and the community, the same thing would work. The selling point for promoting the program to the schools is saying, ‘Here is a model if you have someone who is passionate and your community wants to get it up’. Then it is back to your VFF, your UDV, if they want to go agricultural, or whatever other industry bodies are out there in the community to say, ‘Okay, let’s work with this school, and let’s get a program up and going’.

That is what it is all about. It is industry working with schools, rather than the old, ‘Here is education. We send our kids into a school and they get educated. Here is industry out here. We send them to uni for a while or we send them off to an apprenticeship to get them across to it’. This program is actually bringing that together at a level down here, instead of up there. 2 November 2011 Education and Training Committee 7 The CHAIR — On that point, you might need to refer this question to the gallery for some assistance in giving me the answer. You said the school wrote to you and you were invited to take up the program. Do you know how many industries or groups were written to, and how many then responded by saying, ‘Yes, we want to be involved’?

Ms NELSON — I can probably take over there. In relation to that, it was a broad invitation. Specific industries received the same invitation that the broader public and the parent body received, which said, ‘Please come along to a forum and talk about opportunities, pathways and future needs of the young people in this community’. It was that broad. The forum invitation went out to the whole of the community — to the parent body, to everyone. The forum was very well attended; 40 to 45 people turned up to that community forum. By the very nature of a small community, three-quarters of those will be business and industry. They are the local farmers, the parents and the businesses and shop owners.

The CHAIR — Out of the 45 in that instance, how many would then have taken up the offer of being involved?

Ms NELSON — Probably 10 in an ongoing capacity as a working group member, as a long-term industry partner, like Marlies, or as a steering group member. I would say it has been very similar in Pyramid Hill and Cohuna.

Ms EICHER — One thing I think you have to understand is that the program was not set before the group presented. It grew over time. It was an idea that the program then grew from. As Robert was saying at the start, we delved much further. One side was very much into sustainability, sustainable energy and all sorts of things which were going to be part of that model. At the end of the day there was no way we could follow up on everything. Again, it was maybe the funding that stopped us going absolutely everywhere, but the concept behind it is still there.

Even with the whole thing about sustainability, alternative energies and things like that, my husband was very interested in that side — he is an electrical engineer by trade — and they have now just got the approval to put a community solar system on to the BRIC, which is the community information and resource centre in Boort. The centre will have educational pods in it, so people can come to information sessions on the system about how much energy is produced, how that relates to the take-up and that sort of thing. Even though those ideas were not taken up in Gateways, because we simply could not follow up on them, in the community those ideas have still moved on and developed further, which I think is a great thing to see.

The CHAIR — So the main point is that community engagement from the very beginning in getting the industries, the parents and everyone together was the thing that really kicked this off?

Mr MOON — In most rural communities there is a real untapped resource — and not just rural communities, a lot of urban communities are the same — of either your retirees or your well-established businessman who have a bit of spare time and can see an opportunity to put something back into what has been given out. We have a local men’s shed down here. There are a lot of skills there which we do not have among staff members, but maybe there is an opportunity to look at bringing them in to bring those skills to the students.

Mr ELASMAR — Do you have any suggestions for how the Gateways program could be improved for the future?

Mr MOON — We are probably getting back to what has come up all along, which is the funding of it. There are probably opportunities in some of the schools’ curricula to fund that. I am not really sure. I sit on some of the committees there and see what money comes through. It is usually pretty tight. As we said all along, without the input of the Gardiner Foundation, this would never have got to where it has. It has built the process, and it should not take a huge amount of funding to keep it rolling, because there is a lot of community input out there which may cost a little bit, but in the big scheme of things as to what outputs we are getting it is not a huge investment.

Mr FORD — I think Robert has covered it. There are a lot of the tools and things like that. There it is: an essential tool in somebody’s career in agriculture. It is about deployment in a much wider geographic area.

2 November 2011 Education and Training Committee 8 Ms EICHER — I think what Robert and Paul were saying is that it comes down to funding. At the moment the program raises only a handful of enthusiastic people who drive it very much out of their accord. They do not get — it is not ‘recognition’ I am looking for — support. It has to be built into their normal day-to-day work, and they sort of pinch a bit here to put over there. To me that is definitely not a sustainable way of running it. It is a way to bring it together and prove that it works, but people will run out of steam if they keep doing it that way.

Mr MAZZARELLA — Is it possible to say something?

The CHAIR — Yes.

Mr MAZZARELLA — This is a point I had intended to make during our presentation. It is right on the question you are asking now, which is, ‘How can we improve it?’. We talked previously about the strength of the networks. We need to think smarter, and we need to look at other options as to how we can improve the program. I think there is capacity for us to be affiliated with a professional college — we mentioned Longerenong before, and I do not know whether Dookie still operates — and for the Gateways project to be an arm of a professional institution, so students who are studying out there can actually come on location to Pyramid Hill and do some horticulture or do some work with sheep or go to Cohuna or further towards Macorna and have a look at the dairy industry and actually immerse themselves in that agriculture. I think we have a unique opportunity here to share the fruits of this program with other communities by extending our networks, and that is just one example.

We have capacity here to be able to share with our urban friends the types of farming and what is involved in farming. That does not exist. We could develop a program whereby students could come and billet with families in these communities who are involved in the program and learn more about the olive industry or learn more about the dairy industry. There is so much this program can offer, and I believe if we take the opportunity to explore options and be prepared to take a little bit of risk, a lot of it is just finding these new partnerships. That does not require funding; that requires making the connections and building on them and then to be able to make the offer.

The idea of the green shed, Robert, was not such a bad idea. As grandiose as it may be, it would be terrific to have a big green shed out there where people from other parts of the community could come in and utilise it to do a little bit of welding or maybe utilise a corner for shearing and a corner to do a little bit of milking and so forth so that we could demonstrate in a small way just what farming is all about. Also, it would not be such a bad thing to maybe develop some sort of a hostel-type thing in the community as somewhere the kids could come and stay and do some residential learning.

The CHAIR — Fantastic. That is a great way to finish off. We want to thank you, Joe, for having us here, and we certainly thank our industry partners, who have provided some valuable input to today’s hearings. Thank you also for the contributions you have made in making Gateways such a great program, as we have heard today. Thank you very much.

Mr MAZZARELLA — Chair, in closing can I thank you and your team today. This has been something that is new to us. I found this stimulating. It has been fantastic to participate and also to sit back and listen to what people have had to say about the program. I think it emphasises one thing, and that is that we are doing a terrific job here.

The CHAIR — It absolutely has. Thank you.

Mr ELASMAR — And we thank you for your hospitality.

Committee adjourned.

2 November 2011 Education and Training Committee 9