DRAWING lines on maps to determine who gets drought assistance, or not, has always created inequities.
But imagine how you'd feel if the line kept moving every month.
One month you're eligible to gain drought assistance the next you're not. Sound ridiculous?
Well that's what the Federal Government has put in place to determine who will get access to $30 million in drought concessional loans.
It's using the Bureau of Meteorology's rainfall deficiency maps, which show regions that have experienced 1-in-20 year and 1-in-10 year rainfall deficiencies.
The problem is BOM uses computers to redraw these maps every month to cover a new period.
The Victorian Farmers Federation (VFF) has already received a call from a farmer, near Birchip, who checked the BOM map in mid-November to discover her property was in a 1-in-20 year rainfall deficiency area, making her automatically eligible to apply for the drought concessional loans. The map used the period 1/11/2012 to 31/10/2014.
Imagine her surprise, when she went back to the map on December 31 and discovered it had been re-drawn to exclude her farm from the 1-in-20 year region. The map was now covering the period from 1/12/2012 to 30/11/2014.
It's an absurd situation and one the VFF has raised with the National Farmers' Federation's Drought Taskforce, which is taking the issue to Federal Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce.
The reality is we need a more sophisticated model that examines the full growing season and is ground-truthed by people who understand agriculture.
I know we can never have a perfect system that's fair to all. But we can do a lot better than this. And the VFF will do all it can to make sure that happens.
Peter Tuohey is the VFF president
