Rural vote scramble

Politics and trade were the two major themes of the conferences and as keynote speakers the pair offered quite different perspectives on these subjects. Luxon chose to mostly attack Labour's track record in dealing with the rural sector, while Hipkins, just back from the successful trade mission to China, waxed lyrical about this and spent time congratulating the efforts of the primary sector over the last couple of years.

For the politicians in an election year, a captive audience of farming leaders from around the country and other rural professionals provided an irresistable opportunity to get on their soap boxes, and for Feds members it had an element of entertainment.

Hipkins' opening line was that he wanted NZ to be seen as the greatest little trading nation in the world. He praised the sector for its performance in the past years, having to deal with a string of adverse weather events, not to mention Covid, and noted that many people were still hurting and that he felt their frustrations.

But the focus of his speech was on his recent trade mission to China where he noted the relationship between the two countries is in a good position, but importantly the business-to-business relationship is thriving and has the potential to grow even more. He says one of the Chinese government objectives is to double the number of middle-income earners over the next decade or so.

That means more consumers looking for the quality produce and product that NZ has to offer.

"There is nothing quite like going into a supermarket in a far-flung place in the world such as China and seeing so many NZ products on display, whether it be kiwifruit, beef, lamb, or some of the manufactured products. It was a bit of buzz for me as the PM," he said.

Obviously encouraged by the success of the China mission and FTAs with the UK and the EU, Hipkins pointed out that one of his key foreign policy priorities is trade with a goal of securing more FTAs. He made a promise to lead mroe such missions if elected.

By contrast, Luxon wasted little time in rolling out slogans he's used many times in the past months, such as red tape, scrapping the ute tax, allowing genetic modification, and stating that National won't allow farming to be run out of Wellington. The latter, an open attack on the plethora of regulations that Luxon says have been thrust on frmers.

"I made a list of every new regulation or major change that's occurred since 2017. This shows that twenty-three programmes have been directed at farming and that's a lot of tennis balls coming over the net at the same time. Even Roger Federer would struggle to hit any one of them, yet that's what you have had to endure over the last six years. In my view, regulation has been weaponised against the sector to make farming life as difficult as possible."

On the issue of red tape, Luxon claimed that some farmers are spending up to 30% of their time in their office doing paperwork. As per National's recently announced agriculture policy, the National leader promised an end to farmers having to supply the same information separately to different central and local government entities.

"Certainty is crucial for the rural sector. We want stable, predictable consistent rules, and regulators should not be telling farmers how to run their farm," he said.