The Queensland Farmers Federation (QFF) is still assessing the true damage to the state's agriculture industries from what is now the third major flood in two years for many farmers. 

However for some farmers not directly in the path of floodwaters or extreme rainfall, the storms have broken an intense period of unseasonal drought. But even they are impacted by damage to road and telecommunications infrastructure.

The federation and its member industries have confirmed that rainfall from ex-Tropical Cyclone Oswald has produced flooding comparable to both late 2010 and early 2011.

A QFF spokesman said this placed "serious and significant financial and emotional strain on many farmers, and government support will be required to assist in many instances". In the horticultural sector, QFF is already estimating losses of more than $100 million.

QFF members have reported varying impacts between regions and industries, but generally farms in the path of the flood have faced serious damage to crops and livestock as well as agribusiness and personal infrastructure.

The impact was worsened by the fact that the intense rain and wind squalls followed an unseasonal dry spell from which farmers were desperate for relief. In fact, parts of Queensland are still badly in need of rain.

On a positive note, some farmers not directly under the very high rainfall bands of more than 150mm are now reportedly in a more reasonable production position than they were earlier in the month.

In regions of high rainfall and swollen creeks and rivers, there have been major impacts on crops and livestock - in fact just about all major coastal rivers and catchments along the coast from Central Queensland (Rockhampton and Gladstone), south to the border fall into this category.

Farming regions adjacent inland have also been badly affected, including major horticultural and cotton producing regions.

DIRECT IMPACTS

Some intensive animal industries including piggeries and dairies have been cut off and remain isolated by floodwaters. Industry is working to resolve these high risk cases as quickly as possible.

It has been estimated the impact on the horticulture industry could be as high as $100 million.

Major transport disruptions along the Bruce Highway and telecommunications shortages have also caused significant problems for the industry, even for those who experienced lesser direct on farm impacts.

Severe losses have been incurred around the major horticultural region of Bundaberg, and upstream on the Burnett River at the citrus production region at Gayndah and Mundubbera.

The cotton industry has suffered serious damage in some regions, with further flooding yet to come as the flood peak makes its way down the Condamine River.

This peak has already caused major damage on the Darling Downs and is currently comparable to the flood heights of 2010/2011 in places.

The extent of damage to these crops will only become apparent a day or two after the water makes its way down the river and then recedes.

In Central Queensland, the Biloela region has suffered major crop and infrastructure damage on the back of a significant loss in the 2010/2011 floods.

Growers near Murgon have suffered major losses also along with previous flood losses and yield and quality issues last season with rainfall.

There are also reports of some significant damage in the Border Rivers area, particularly from flooding from the Weir River.

With a wide geographic distribution, the cane industry has suffered varying amounts of damage along the coast. It has been hit with flooding in major growing regions, with particularly acute flooding around Bundaberg and Maryborough and the surrounding mill areas.

The full extent of the losses are being assessed and will be known more accurately as the floodwaters recede. Torrential flood waters have caused major damage to infrastructure and crops, and recently planted crops are particularly vulnerable to losses from flooding.

A number of dairies have lost electricity and road access, creating difficulties milking cows. Properties that have been without road access or faced other issues have been forced to discard milk.

Some farms could still face isolation and electricity issues into next week. Infrastructure has been damaged and farms will be facing significant losses. It is estimated that about 50 percent of the Queensland industry is impacted, at a cost of about $40 million.

John Coward of Pork Queensland and also Australia Pork Limited and QFF have been assisting the pork industry with the response.

Mr Coward said about 50 percent of the Queensland pork industry has been impacted. Two piggeries have been severely impacted, with many others facing infrastructure, transport, power and water issues.

One major piggery at Mundubbera lost about 200 sows and approximately 2500 weaner pigs and a second property lost about 95 percent of their herd, with only 12 sows out of 200 remaining and 180 grower pigs out of 2500.

Production nurseries have been impacted on by this extraordinary weather from Gladstone to the Tweed River including areas in the Burnett, Lockyer Valley, Toowoomba and Granite Belt regions with complete inundation of businesses occurring in Bundaberg and along the Logan/Albert River systems. 

The cost of this event is being felt by industry in crop, infrastructure and equipment damage and losses, inaccessible markets and/or lost markets, staff retention costs and in the general clean-up, all contributing to significant pressures on cash flow and business viability. 

Nursery and Garden Industry Queensland (NGIQ) estimates the cost of this event will run to the many millions of dollars as industry starts to recover. 

Many farms in the path of the flood have faced direct infrastructure or household damage or both.

ASSISTANCE

Category B disaster assistance under the Natural Disaster Relief and Recovery Arrangements (NDRRA) was enacted for a number of local government areas. This scheme offers concessional loans and freight subsidies for primary producers and small businesses.

Given the extent of the disaster, industries are also working with the government to enact Category C measures, as was the case with the previous flood of 2010/2011. Agriculture Minister John McVeigh said he was looking at Category C measures for the worst-affected shires.

Category B assistance is now in place for:

• Banana Shire Council
• Brisbane City Council
• Bundaberg Regional Council
• Fraser Coast Regional Council
• Gladstone Regional Council
• Gold Coast City Council
• Gympie Regional Council
• Ipswich Regional Council
• Lockyer Valley Regional Council
• Logan City Council
• Moreton Bay Regional Council
• North Burnett Regional Council
• Redland City Council
• Rockhampton Regional Council
• Scenic Rim Regional Council
• Somerset Regional Council
• South Burnett Regional Council
• Southern Downs Regional Council
• Sunshine Coast Regional Council
• Toowoomba Regional Council
• Western Downs Regional Council.

Mr McVeigh said he may seek to extend assistance to other shires as the full picture of the flood damage emerged.

http://www.qff.org.au/

Farmers seeking assistance:http://www.daff.qld.gov.au/ or call 132 523.

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Queensland's forgotten businesses, still dealing with the aftermath of the 2011 floods, may have initially been helped by their banks and insurers but now in many cases find themselves let down by insurance and ‘surcharged' by their banks.

The water may have subsided, but last year's Queenslsand floods are still hurting businesses.

Business Acumen research has found many cases of insurers providing little information for many months before delivering ‘the bad news'. One business owner felt it was a tactic by his insurer to let the issue "go out of the spotlight" so this common practice received no media coverage.

Several businesses that have been denied assessments so far, a year on, could still go to the wall. But business owners are reticent to go public while the issue is still in negotiation as they fear a backlash from their insurers and banks, with loans usually needing to be secured by business insurance.

Several business owners have found that selling assets to reduce monthly outgoings has been exploited by their banks insisting on early payout fees on leases - and in most cases this has amounted to payments of thousands of dollars.

"You do the right thing, at their advice, and sell vehicles and things to reduce outgoings -- and you get slugged by the bank over and above," said one business owner who did not want to be identified for fear of recrimination. His early payout figure on vehicle sales totalled more than $10,000.  

"It stinks," he said. "We are forgotten now."

Chamber of Commerce and Industry Queensland (CCIQ) research has shown that many Queensland businesses are still significantly impacted by the natural disasters of early 2011 - and many have been let down by their insurers after very lengthy periods of assessment.

In the CCIQ report, Six Months on from Queensland's Natural Disasters, CCIQ indicated that three out of five businesses which made an insurance claim were still waiting for the claim to be settled. CCIQ's new  ‘one-year-on' analysis revealed that as time went on more businesses discovered that they had been more greatly affected than they had initially anticipated.

The results confirm the concerns of a survey in February last year by CCIQ that warned job losses from the floods in the longer term would be significant and many businesses would struggle to recover without sufficient support from authorities and insurers.

CCIQ's initial survey in late January 2011 found one in five businesses in Queensland had to close as a result of the floods due to full or partial water inundation, loss of power or being cut off from their business. The average number of days businesses were forced to close was eight and the average number of days before a business returned to normal operations was 31 days.

The loss to property including plant and equipment, stock, buildings and motor vehicles to those businesses directly affected by the floods was on average $589,000. In the months following the natural disasters, businesses were experiencing difficulty finding out from their insurers where they stood in terms of claims and subsequent results have shown insurers have taken many months to deliver new - especially bad news.

CCIQ president David Goodwin said one of the key findings following the natural disasters was that businesses did not have to be directly impacted by the floods to have experienced a significant and serious financial impact. Furthermore, a noticeable trend was that as time progressed, more businesses came to the realisation that the indirect impact of the floods on revenue had been much greater than first anticipated.

There are also a number of outstanding issues that continue to impact on many businesses, particularly unsettled insurance claims.

For many businesses, the indefinite delay in claim payouts has effectively resulted in being non-insured in terms of ensuring business viability.

Overwhelmingly businesses have also indicated a need for a standard definition of flood, insurance policies that are clearly and plainly written for ease of understanding and the need for earlier payouts with the introduction of a fixed period for assessing claims.

Queensland businesses generally gave positive feedback to CCIQ on the assistance provided by the State Government. The primary assistance measures accessed by businesses were the $25,000 Special Disaster Assistance Grant and deferral of both State and Federal Government tax liabilities.

However there were a large number of both directly and indirectly impacted businesses who are critical of their ineligibility to access any government assistance.

CCIQ stressed the importance of the State Government learning from their experiences to ensure a quicker recovery for businesses and the economy in the event of future natural disasters.

BDO partner Marita Corbett said that all Queensland businesses needed to proactively review their insurance, financing and operational systems.

"For many businesses waiting more than six months for an insurance claim to be settled could be the last straw," Ms Corbett said. "The aftermath of the floods and Cyclone Yasi demonstrated that many Queensland businesses were unclear as to what aspects of their business were covered by insurance.

"Business owners need a clear understanding of their insurance cover, both for physical assets and any loss of profits or business interruption. If you are not 100 percent sure, now is the time to contact your insurance broker or insurer.  Don't wait until you have to make a claim."

According to Ms Corbett, business recovery plans should be reviewed on a continual basis to reflect ongoing changes in internal and external environments.

"Many businesses reviewed their business recovery plans directly after the floods but probably haven't looked at them since," she said. "Simple elements can bring down a plan if not continually updated and tested. 

"Businesses need to update their database of contact numbers of key personnel, particularly in a mobile workforce. 

"Do they know the location of all their critical contracts for services that may be relied upon during the disaster and recovery phases?

"Testing strategies in simulated environments can provide a valuable insight into how they may perform in a real-life situation.

"There is a cost involved in testing your business recovery plan. But what might be the cost to a business if its recovery plan remains untested and then fails during a time of disaster?"

* More on this issue in the February edition of Business Acumen magazine. Subscriptions: www.businessacumen.biz

http://www.cciq.com.au/

http://www.bdo.com.au/

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AGRIBUSINESS, gas, tourism, international education and wealth management are five future growth sectors in which Australia has a competitive advantage -- and it is vital Australian business fosters them properly according to new research from Deloitte.

Chris Richardson

According to the report, Positioning for Prosperity? Catching the next wave, these five ‘super-growth' industry sectors could be worth an extra $250 billion to the national economy over the next 20 years and are likely to hold the key to Australia's future prosperity.

The report is the third edition of Deloittes' Building the Lucky Country series, which focuses on business imperatives for a prosperous Australia, according to its co-author from Deloitte Access Economics, Chris Richardson.

"As the mining wave continues to deliver prosperity for Australia, albeit at a declining rate, our analysis shows there is vast potential to be tapped in five additional super-growth waves of agribusiness, gas, tourism, international education and wealth management," Mr Richardson said.

"Exceptional growth in these five sectors could add an additional $25 billion to Australia's GDP in 2033 or a boost of about 1 percent to an economy turning over $2.6 trillion in today's dollars."

Positioning for prosperity? Catching the next wave  includes detailed analyses of the challenges and opportunities for maintaining Australia's current wave of prosperity beyond the mining boom as well as how to make the most of the next five ‘super-waves', which Deloitte predicted would collectively match mining in terms of their contribution to the Australian economy.

"It's all about catching the next wave," Mr Richardson said.

"Mining will continue as a major driver of our prosperity over the next two decades and beyond. We need to look at how we can extend our ability to ride the mining wave. Yet success as a nation cannot be built on natural resources alone. That boom is slowing and our competitive advantage is being challenged.

"The reality is that we need new growth drivers. We need another wave - or several - to create more diversified growth. And the first place to look is markets that can be expected to grow significantly faster than the global economy as a whole over the next 10 or 20 years, or by more than about 3.4 percent per year. For example, global markets for gas, tourism and agribusiness are each expected to grow at rates at least 10 percent faster than global GDP as a whole.

"As history has shown, global growth alone isn't enough to deliver success to Australia. We also need an edge, a source of comparative advantage that's hard for other nations to match, so that the world wants what we have."

The report said five big-picture advantages gave Australia a head-start: world-class resources in land, minerals and energy; proximity to the world's fastest growing markets in Asia; Australia's use of English, the world's business language; a temperate climate; and well understood tax and regulatory regimes.

Building the Lucky Country co-author and global thinker on growth strategy, Mehrdad Baghai, managing director of Alchemy Growth Partners, said, "The Australian economy grows when Australian advantage meets global opportunity.

"The multi-billion-dollar question is: where will global growth and Australian advantage next intersect? That's where we will catch the waves that will drive our prosperity, today and tomorrow."

BREAKING WAVES

Central to the Deloitte report is a Positioning for Prosperity map, which assesses where the next waves of prosperity are most likely to come from by plotting expected average global GDP growth rates over the next 20 years against the level of Australian competitive advantage for each sector. 

The five sectors which offer both high growth rates and Australian advantage are:

•        Agribusiness: Global population growth of 60 million per year will increase food demand, with Asia's growing middle classes set to boost their protein intake.

•        Gas: Rapid growth in emerging economies has polluted the air in the major cities to Australia's north. That will underwrite demand for gas, a cleaner and greener alternative.

•        Tourism: This sector is set to double in size in the next 20 years, with Asia's expanding middle classes fuelling the growth.

•        International education: Foreign students are already Australia's fourth biggest export earner, with India and China likely to drive great growth in demand in the sector.

•        Wealth management: Three billion people in Asia will join the middle class by 2030 and by 2050 the region will account for more than half the world's financial assets.

These next export waves are the most important growth priorities for Australia, and Mr Richardson said the growth of these sectors would be helped by the retreat of the Australian dollar from its record highs.

"We see the Australian dollar settling at US80 cents in the longer term," Mr Richardson said. "This downswing has already begun, and it signals the starter's gun on new opportunities for ‘dollar dependent' sectors including manufacturing, farming, tourism, and international education. It will also be a tailwind for interest rate-sensitive sectors, such as retail and housing construction."

As well as mining and the five super-growth sectors identified, the Deloitte Positioning for Prosperity map features 14 other major sectors whose contribution to the nation's prosperity will continue to be vital. These include big, domestically-focused industries such as banking, health, construction, business and property services, transport and logistics, public administration and manufacturing, among others.

According to Mr Richardson, "These sectors all have the potential to generate substantial pockets of export business. Indeed, some of these mainstay industries have served as stable incubators for their high-growth sector offspring."

Agribusiness had emerged from farming, wealth management from financial services and banking; and international education from education as a whole, Mr Richardson said.

"In early 2014, Deloitte will release the final version of this report with further research that explores the story of where future growth exists and how business can unlock its potential," he said.

BUSINESS MUST TAKE LEAD

Deloitte chief strategy officer and Building the Lucky Countryseries co-author, Gerhard Vorster, said business has to take the lead in positioning Australia as a competitive global force in these growth sectors. 

Gerhard Vorster

"Governments will play a supportive role in managing the challenges of labour markets, providing more efficient regulation and tax regimes and a stable and clear set of policy rules for business, in order to enable growth," Mr Vorster said.

"But ultimately, it is up to business leaders to put in the hard work, to think hard about their own proximity to prosperity and about how best to position themselves closer to these prosperity opportunities.

 "Our report helps equip decision-makers to hit ‘forward' and ‘fast forward' when and where it counts to shape the future for their companies and Australia's economy," Mr Vorster said. 

"The report includes a range of actions, what we call ‘prosperity levers', which can help organisations to identify and review their current competencies and structural advantages.

"How organisations allocate their resources and arrange their mix of portfolios now will determine whether they optimise their growth in the years ahead.

  "Australian businesses and families can be confident that our opportunities are just as great now as they were at the start of the mining boom," Mr Vorster said.

"Our future growth will be more diversified than the past decade and we will have to work harder to maintain the quality of life we have come to expect.  But the opportunities are there to generate exceptional and lasting sources of future wealth for all Australians.

"The potential payoff is huge."

http://www.deloitte.com.au/

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