Two stories this week that both come down to the same question: who actually shows up for rural communities when it matters, and who just turns up for the photo. First, what genuinely helps farming families through fire, flood and drought (spoiler: it isn’t another balance-sheet workshop). Second, a first-hand account from a black-tie night in Canberra that was meant to celebrate the best of rural Australia.
Episode 4: Natural Crisis Response & Rural Women's Awards – Agsolutely Fabulous
Crisis response: good intentions, wrong instrument
The Future Drought Fund is real money, an initial $3.9 billion investment delivering around $100 million a year since 2019, aimed at making farm businesses and rural communities more resilient before the next drought hits rather than just mopping up after it. Nobody’s arguing with the intent. The problem, as we said on the day, is what a lot of that money has actually been spent on: another round of financial literacy workshops teaching people who’ve run profitable multi-generational businesses how to read a balance sheet. That’s not resilience, it’s condescension with a training budget. The government’s own Productivity Commission review found enough wrong with the Fund’s design that $17.7 million was redirected in late 2023 specifically to fix delivery against the Commission’s recommendations, which tells you the criticism wasn’t just two women venting into a microphone.
The part that doesn’t get funded is the unglamorous stuff: mental health support that’s there before the crisis and after the cameras leave, not just parachuted in for a fortnight when a drought makes the evening news. And the charity hay problem is a genuine market distortion, well-meaning organisations without a balance sheet to protect can outbid the farmers who actually need the fodder, because they’re not worried about staying solvent. Good intentions, bad price signal. The organisations we’d back every time on the ground are the ones already embedded in the community, the CWA chief among them, because they know the difference between what a family needs and what looks good in a donation drive.
The AgriFutures Rural Women’s Award: a night that should have been about them
Congratulations again to Tanya Egerton, named the 2024 AgriFutures Rural Women’s Award national winner for her work through Circulanation and the Remote OpShop Project supporting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander entrepreneurship in remote Australia, and to runner-up Grace Larson, a paediatric critical care nurse recognised for The Sisterhood Project’s work addressing health disadvantage for rural kids. That’s the story that should have made every headline out of that dinner.
Instead, the story that did was the Prime Minister’s. At the same black-tie gala, addressing a room full of the people he’d just been discussing live export policy with, he told the crowd that at dinner with Indonesia’s president-elect, they’d had “beautiful Australian beef, not the live export, we made sure it was dead.” It happened. It’s not an exaggeration for the show, it was widely reported at the time, Nationals leader David Littleproud called it “completely out of touch,” and the Australian Livestock Exporters’ Council CEO described it as showing an “astounding lack of judgement,” made weeks after the live sheep export ban had already passed. Whatever your view on live export policy itself, cracking that joke to the room, on the winners’ own night, was a self-inflicted wound.
Then there’s the bit I saw with my own eyes rather than read about afterwards: Agriculture Minister Julie Collins presenting the awards, at a declared black-tie event where every other woman in the room was in a floor-length gown or a proper suit, in a t-shirt and flats. I want to be careful here, because I don’t love piling on a woman for what she wears when men rarely cop the same scrutiny. This isn’t about the outfit for its own sake. It’s about what it signalled to the winners on their night of nights, that dressing for the room wasn’t worth the effort for the person handing them the trophy. Someone on her staff could have found her a jacket. Nobody did.
The bottom line
Rural communities don’t need another balance-sheet course; they need mental health support that doesn’t disappear when the drought falls off the news cycle, and they need the people setting policy about them to at least look like they respect the room. Both stories this week are really the same complaint: turn up properly, or don’t turn up at all.
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