Ag Minister 'doesn't understand farmers

In a recent interview with Country TV, Cameron, a Ruawai dairy farmer, said that while O’Connor has done well for the country in his Trade Minister role, the same could not be said for his role as Agriculture Minister.

“Damien’s done a pretty good job with trade… arguably, he could have done better for the protein side of the sectors, that is the red meat sector and the dairy, with some of the FTAs [Free Trade Agreements] he’s sort of got in the pipeline and worked towards,” Cameron says.

However, Cameron is quick to note that the speed and rate of regulatory change on farm is something O’Connor and the political left wing have “got wrong”.

“When it comes to domestic regulatory settings, he [O’Connor] doesn’t understand us. He really doesn’t.”

Cameron claims that despite O’Connor’s background in farming it was clear that he was “at the behest of [Environment Minister] David Parker” on certain environmental issues including winter grazing.

In his interview with Country TV last month, O’Connor claimed that much of the rhetoric surrounding the practice of Intensive Winter Grazing (IWG) was inaccurate and inaccurate commentary, which he claimed came from former Federated Farmers president turned ACT Party candidate Andrew Hoggard.

“It’s a lot of rhetoric and it’s been run up by organisations like Fed Farmers under Andrew Hoggard; now Andrew’s stepped up and he’s going to stand for ACT which is fine, but some of the messages that they were sending to farmers were quite inaccurate,” O’Connor claims.

However, Cameron complains that the conversation around IWG “wasn’t nuanced enough”.

“People weren’t being consulted on causality, cause and effect,” he says. “If it’s not implementable on farm, the fact that those on the left, our mates in Labour, were talking about prosecuting farmers for pugging depths of animals… it was never going to work.”

Cameron claims that what he calls the more practical language coming from the political right shows a disconnect between O’Connor and Parker and what farmers could achieve.

He says that he has spent much of the past three years he’s been in Parliament explaining the impact of certain policies on farmers.

“But when you’re explaining it, you’re not debating the issues,” he says.

Cameron says that, with the upcoming election, there will be more farmers around Parliament to debate the issues.

“I think the fact that going forward the language on the right is really going to get into the weeds of what causality looks like.”