ONLINE feedback and written submissions have closed and panel hearings will be completed in the coming week, as the Farm Household Allowance (FHA) review continues.
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A final hearing – in Bairnsdale, Victoria – will be held on Thursday before the independent panel considers its information and prepares its report to the federal government in the first half of 2019.
The review is “look[ing] into what is working well for FHA and what improvements could be made”.
Dozens of farmers and other stakeholders turned out at Tamworth Community Centre on Wednesday to have their say or to listen.
One of them was accountant Wyn Trost, who has been voluntarily helping “a dozen on average” farmers per week with their applications or questions.
She said “the forms are bullshit” – repetitive, confusing and hard for people with poor internet service to complete.
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“Centrelink is not the department to handle this; it should be a separate department, set up for farmers alone and run by people that know farming and understand farmers – not bloody city people that have no friggin’ idea about the land.”
Member for New England Barnaby Joyce, who also attended, reflected that preference in an interview with Fairfax Media on Thursday.
“It’s a social security package that’s being … used as a drought package,” he said.
“We need to have it designed as a drought package.
“It asks a whole heap of social security questions, proving that you are unable to find income anywhere else.
“But the crux of drought policy is that you want people to be provident enough to survive over the longer-term, which means that there’s probably a whole range that … a social security package will knock them out.
“We don’t want every farming district to be near destitution before it can get help; we need farms to be assisted so that they all survive, because if the farm survives, the street survives.”
Almost a dozen panels hearing have been held since early October in every state and territory except the Northern Territory.