[21:50] It’s interesting because the image portrayed is often that the local bank manager would know the area, know the people, know agriculture, know farming.

They varied a lot. Many farmers depended on their bank manager for guidance and the way forward and wouldn’t take any decision without consulting their bank manager. There were some bank managers in the drought that would come up with very creative and helpful solutions for people who had considerable difficulties. There were other managers who probably helped some farmers get into [difficulties], out of their depth, because there was a time in the early ’80s where bank managers were given promotion based on how much money they loaned out, so that gave them an opportunity to lend a lot of money. It was often based on the capital value of the farm if you wanted to repossess it, rather than on the farm’s ability to generate the revenue to support the loan. During the drought, of course, there was very little revenue and often the properties themselves might lose value. Then the bank was faced with what to do with the property which was worth less than the extent of the collateral that they’d loaned [to the farmers]. In many cases they just left the farmers there, on the grounds that they couldn’t look after an empty farm. Then when things improved, they tried to sell up the properties. Forced sales of farms were socially very difficult and there were occasions where local communities would rise and physically stop banks trying to take possession of properties. I can think of examples on Kangaroo Island where that occurred. Within the Rural Assistance Branch of the Department, we loaned money out. A lot of the money actually came from the Commonwealth and then we added a small increment of handling cost and either loaned money directly or provided interest rate subsidy, which might be half of the interest rate. This then helped the growers pay off, or at least maintain, their interest payments. It didn’t necessarily reduce their capital debt. If they didn’t make payments then their unpaid debts were capitalised, prior to the original debt. This was at a time when bank interest rates were up to 17% and you had growers buying diesel for their tractors on their Bankcards at 23%, which is a far cry, of course, from the way interest rates have receded in more recent years. With those interest rates, farmers could get out of their depth very rapidly if they had two or three years of drought.

[25:00] This is the work on the Rural Bank Committee is it? Your work – was it the Rural Bank Committee, the name? I meant whether that was still work for the meetings you were having with the banks, the Minister’s meetings and so on?

There are really two sets of issues here. There were the meetings which we held with the bank managers or the Minister held with the bank managers (but we’d go along). Then quite separately, of course, we ran the Rural Adjustment Branch, which really had its origins much earlier in the Department of Lands and had been responsible for soldier settlement loans and ‘Loans to Primary Producers Act’ and things like that. All of that was transferred into the Department of Agriculture in Jim McColl’s time. There had been quite a bit of criticism of the way some of that had operated in the Department of Lands. It was argued that people who had loans under that scheme were tightly constrained by managers in the Department of Lands, who often had never been to the properties and really sat in Adelaide passing judgement on the growers. As a result of some of the concerns, the whole enterprise was transferred over from a department which was primarily concerned with land titles and things of that issue into the Department of Agriculture which had a more direct association with the rural community. That was really a quite separate exercise in which the Department itself was in a sense was running a bank.

The meetings with the Ministers and the banks – were they short-term? Were they ongoing over a couple of years?

They went on for perhaps 18 months. They were held at quarterly intervals with the various representatives of the banks during the drought. Once the drought finished then there wasn’t so much of a need for that. It allowed the Minister to provide advice to the managers on the sorts of correspondence he was receiving from people out in the rural community who were finding it very difficult, and who were inclined to pass personal judgements on what they thought the banks were doing or should be doing or were not doing. There were a lot of ‘war stories’ that the Minister would have. The Minister would then be seeking advice in the generality as to how the banks were approaching these issues. It wasn’t the Minister’s job to lobby for particular growers but he certainly had an interest in what the banks were doing. On occasions we would visit farming areas. I can well recall going over to the far west of Eyre Peninsula. A group of journalists had known we were going and so they set up a road block to try to interview the Minister in the car, with a tastefully wind blown sand hill in the background. But we had a journalist from the Department who recognised that the Minister, to some degree, was being set up by this group. In fact, we declined the opportunity of a press conference with the Minister in front of a vastly eroded sand hill and moved it to a different environment in the hall at Coorabie where he met a number of farmers. It was interesting that in one of the meetings, there were four farmers presenting the local case and one was left with the distinct impression that two of the farmers were waiting for the other two to fail so that they could buy their property! (Both laugh)

[29:35] This series of meetings … I mean droughts come and go. What was particular about having this series of meetings at this time? Had Ministers met with banks in other droughts?

I wasn’t involved with Ministers and banks in other droughts. It really represented the fact that a Minister is under considerable pressure for relief of some form or another. Also, he would hold the view that borrowing money is a risk, farming is a risky business and the Minister was wanting to know what was happening and was really not necessarily wanting to get prematurely involved in some of the financial difficulties. The ultimate reality is that the Minister is responsible for the taxpayers’ funds and has to handle them with some degree of care and appropriateness.

Was there only the one Minister involved?

No, there was more than one. I can’t recall the precise details now.

Fill them in later, down the track. John, we’ll just end it there for today because we’re nearly out of time but we’ve got quite a few other things to pursue in another couple of sessions I’d say, so I’ll make a time with you for later.

OK.

[31:10] End of Side B, Tape 3

Tape 4, Side A – Session of 6 April 2004

[0:30] John, perhaps just to start off with today, we could pick up with a couple of discrete topics. The vet. science, the overseas role of the Department and the Premier’s Wine Forum might be good starting points. Perhaps if we can begin with the Veterinary Sciences Division of Agriculture.

The Department of Agriculture had its own Chief Veterinary Officer and an Animal Health Branch. They looked after particularly the regulatory issues of animal disease but for any diagnostic work we really depended on the Institute of Medical and Veterinary Sciences, which had its own veterinary sciences group. An arrangement was made in Jim McColl’s time to discreetly transfer the veterinary sciences people from the Institute of Medical and Veterinary Sciences to the Department of Agriculture. Indeed, this was done so discreetly that it was announced in the Parliament as more or less a fait accompli without the staff really knowing it was going to happen, which is very unusual in the Public Service as the grapevine was usually pretty well informed on what people were incubating. There was the feeling that the Department needed to, so to speak, get command of this group. I was asked whether I would go down and manage it, being totally unencumbered by any knowledge really of the veterinary diagnostics, being an agricultural scientist not a veterinary scientist. To help me do that, I was also being assisted by Barry Windle who, as a horticulturalist, probably had even less to do with animals then I did. Anyway, we were sent down there as a team and we spent six months there, which was an interesting experience. We had to do some restructuring of the group and we had to gain their confidence and get them accepting their being in the Department of Agriculture. That involved some delicacies but it was a time when many of the staff were looking for some management change. From my point of view it was a pretty interesting exercise.

We also acquired the Gilles Plains Field Station which was doing some research work, particularly some work with sheep. They also provided industry services in terms of production of serum of various sorts and maintaining minimum disease, rabbit colonies and mouse colonies and things of that nature, and guinea pigs I believe as well. Particularly the minimum disease (mouse and rat colonies) were really very difficult places to operate because the staff had to go in there at 8 o’clock in the morning. They had to shower in and change their clothes and once they’re in there, they couldn’t really get out. The building itself had been lined, floor and walls and practically ceiling, with grey tiles. These were lino-type tiles. So the environment was very stultifying and it was difficult to keep field assistants working in there, laboratory assistants, for more than a few months because your mental health tended to find this environment rather wearing. So from time to time we had to change the staff members and it was not a particularly good environment for people to have to work in.

[4:43] They would work in there on a day-to-day basis?

Yes. Of course the animals in cages had to be kept and fed at weekends, so there was a need for rostering over seven days and that also made their social life difficult as well. That was one of the more interesting areas that we had to oversee and see how we could perhaps make that a more interesting environment. It also raised the issue of whether or not we really should be in the business of doing some of those sorts of things and whether or not the private sector ought to be doing it. Previously, they’d also had a large colony of beagles, but a review undertaken before the Department took over had suggested that keeping beagles, which were seen to nice friendly animals, in wire cages for experimental purposes was not all that satisfactory. Furthermore, they were very expensive partly because the person responsible for feeding the beagles tended to go down to the local supermarket and bought retail priced dog food to feed the beagles. I got the impression that [they] might have quite a reasonable relationship with the individual running the supermarket and there seemed to be some difficulties there about the form of supply and the cost of it. So anyway when this inquiry was undertaken and the beagles eventually finished up being used experimentally in the Children’s Hospital in the basement, which was described as a ‘tenebrous funkhole’ by the review, everyone ran as far away as possible from any knowledge of beagles. The people at Gilles Plains, quite quickly, were caused to unload the population of beagles. They were pretty unsatisfactory as pets because having been reared with no real social interaction in cages for quite long periods, there wasn’t a lot you could do with them in terms of teaching old dogs new tricks you might say.

When was this happening, the review and the takeover?

It was in the late ’70s, early ’80s if I recall correctly. [Looks at documents]

We can follow it through, but it’s the general time frame, late ’70s, early ’80s.

A report which we eventually did which I’ve got a copy of sets out some restructuring arrangements and how to make the place operate more effectively. It seemed to be, from my point of view, quite an interesting experience down there. I quite enjoyed it. On the other hand, also we might possibly have had some success in moving the culture along and bringing that group closer within the Department of Agriculture. Indeed, even today whilst some of the group is now out at Glenside, certainly the research components were effectively transferred into the Department and that worked out well. Sometimes some of the diagnostic components were difficult. Every morning there would be a whole lot of diagnostic material that would turn out down in the basement. It would have to be catalogued and results had to be obtained as quickly as possible and telephoned through to the veterinary surgeons and also paper copies sent as backup. Some of the analytical work was integrated with that of the human system and they often used to ask for a thing called an MBA – a multiple biochemical analysis. Depending on the range of results for the 20-odd things they analysed for in the blood samples, there was an automatic print-out, some of which wasn’t terribly appropriate to livestock because it was capable of telling the recipient that this ‘person’ might have a psychological problem and needed to be dealt with, which probably wasn’t a response that was useful when addressing an animal! Overall, we improved the quality of activity. We had some particular skills there in parasitology, which were very good, and also the group at Gilles Plains developed a lot of skills in starch gel electrophoresis and protein typing, which was useful for differentiating species and it also had a lot of occasional use for forensic work as well. Indeed, the person who was responsible for it, Peter Bavistock, later has had a substantial career as a professor at Southern Cross University at Lismore.

[10:35] Then we later got another person to take over more formal control of the Veterinary Sciences Division. That was Dr Tony Davidson. Tony had been a veterinarian in the Department of Agriculture anyway for quite a few years. He actually had been a farmer in Victoria in his early days so he had quite a reasonable knowledge of applying agriculture. He took over the vets from there and continued to operate the veterinary group.

Bringing the people into the Department, how did that work? You have established people in the Department versus people being merged or taken over?

Obviously they thought they had been taken over initially although, on the other hand, there were tensions there because of the previous managerial arrangements so, in a sense, by overcoming quite a few of those tensions we gained acceptance. They, of course, still retained their own veterinary cohesion because they were all located in the IMVS Building down in Frome Road. They didn’t necessarily see a great deal of the Department of Agriculture people anyway. They were encouraged to come to Department of Agriculture Social Club events and things like that and some of the scientists had interacted with say the soil scientists. People like Geoff Judson had had a close interaction with Doug Reuter who was in the Department of Agriculture as a soil scientist. So there was an underlying set of relationships with the Department that could be built on, both with the Animal Health Branch on the one hand and some of the agronomy people dealing with [livestock] metabolic disorders of one sort or another on the other.

[12:30] So in that sense, John, was it really simplifying an administrative arrangement to make it easier or formalising the arrangement?

Much of the veterinary work was meant to be brought closer to the work of the Department. It really divided up into two sorts of practices though. A lot of the practices were straight cat and dog urban practices. Indeed, in due course or even then, we were competing with other private sector laboratories. Competition policy had already established: people who were doing human diagnostic work found with the capital they had invested they could also, without very much additional work, do veterinary work as well. In fact, about all they needed was one competent veterinary pathologist. Many of those private sector laboratories just employed relatively unskilled technicians to run the analytical techniques. The single veterinary pathologist then just looked over the results and gave a bit of feedback. Indeed, our own people had quite a good relationship with that veterinary pathologist and those professional relationships probably still exist today.

[14:00] Was there any intention to move the staff from the Frome Road area?

No. There was no intention of moving the staff as such but an underlying problem was the animal house. There was an animal house in Frome Road and there was a preference for as much as the animal work as possible to be out at Gilles Plains, partly because of pressure on space in the Royal Adelaide Hospital precinct where the IMVS is located. It was only quite a few years later that the Veterinary Sciences Group was relocated to Glenside. That really happened after I’d left the Department. Again, that was brought on by pressure of space for the human diagnostics that the IMVS is pretty well renowned for.

Pressure of space is an ongoing theme for the Department.

So it probably is, of course, for the IMVS too, particularly down at the Royal Adelaide Hospital precinct.

And you mentioned you were involved with this process for about six months or so?

Yes, that’s right.

So really you were just coming in, setting it up and making sure it was running …

And identifying, by selection, of somebody else to keep it running and so that transfer seemed to work out satisfactorily.

So a bit of a ‘hit man’ in a sense?

I didn’t think I was a hit man.

I mean in terms of getting the job done.

I had to go down there and do the job. Barry Windle, in plain terms he is a fairly discreet person, was sent down to remind me to make sure I didn’t get too much out of hand! We [developed] quite a good relationship in that time, that was fine.

I meant the term in the sense of getting the job done. It had to be done. So that was just a very discrete episode then for your career?

You could also say it was perhaps, to use a euphemism, a career growth experience if you want to call it that. It probably set me in reasonable stead for later opportunities that I was offered.

[16:15] I might follow through some of that with Tony Davidson or someone like that. Perhaps to look at one of those other topics I mentioned, say the overseas situation.

I didn’t have as much involvement with the international projects group of the Department as my predecessors had. Jim McColl had been a consultant anyway and had a strong background in that area. Pat Harvey, who was the Deputy Director of Agriculture, also had taken a strong interest in the overseas projects activity. I had not been very closely involved in it. Although they went through some very cathartic experiences, I generally managed to keep clear of them, for which I was duly thankful. Subsequently, when I became Director-General of Agriculture I was involved more closely with Sagric International, which by that time had become quite discrete from the Department of Agriculture. For a while it was cross-subsidised by the Department in so far as the Department lodged six positions [from] the departmental payroll in Sagric International when they were established independently down in Hindmarsh Square. Ultimately they were weaned off the Department’s payroll and it became fully self-supporting. In the first few years it did very well on a strong portfolio of agricultural projects. I occupied a position of deputy chairman to Pat Harvey. Pat continued as a chairman as I recall for the organisation. He had been Deputy Director of Agriculture but when I was appointed as Director-General, a position to which he aspired, he then spent increasing amounts of time down at Sagric International and, indeed, ultimately he finished up there on a fairly full-time basis and was much more involved in the overseas projects and more of the commercial negotiations and the relationships that related to all that. In a sense, that division of labour suited us fine.

There were two phases: your description, John, of the period up to becoming Director-General and then, of course, as Director-General. Just looking at the earlier period. Do you recall much of the feeling personally or about the Department in regards to the Department going off to work overseas?

Initially, staff members were enthused about the idea of, the excitement of, a new appointment and a new environment and having their skills recognised and going overseas. There were, however, some downsides. That is, sometimes if they were away for a year or sometimes two years, back home things in the Department moved on and it was sometimes hard for them to settle back into the Department. There were also problems with wives that might go over there and if they had young children because, generally speaking, whilst the husbands were out working in the field, working on the projects, the wives generally were not able to be employed. So they tended to have a lot more time on their hands and that tended to pall after a while. So there were limits to the extent to which people would be happy in these projects; they were very long times. In several cases various political events tended to overtake what we were doing. Sometimes there were quite pedantic rules about how you could bring material into projects from overseas. For example, in Iraq we developed quite a substantial export industry from Australia of agricultural machinery. A number of Australian farmers went over and supported its introduction and maintained it and got the locals used to using that equipment. On the other hand, there were some places where if we wanted to take vehicles in, which were cheaper to buy overseas and import, we actually had to export them out of the country again and then the payments were only made by the countries of the projects after we had met all of the bureaucratic requirements. I recall one particular case where a vehicle had been damaged and written off but we were expected to actually export the remains afterwards. There was considerable difficulty about ‘What did that consist of?’. Eventually we had to be seen to export the engine and probably the rest of it disappeared in the scrap heap somewhere. There was a long haggle about all of that. Indeed, on at least one of the projects we had to call up export insurance to encompass the remainder of the project in terms of payments to the Department.

The longer term problem was to get continuity of staff because after 10 or 15 years, many of the regional agronomists and other field staff who had the skills that we particularly needed in those environments had ‘been there and done that’ as the expression is. They were not necessarily all that keen to go back a second time so it became more difficult to get participants and sometimes we had to get participants from outside of our own departmental background. One thing we did learn was that it is probably quite important for the project leader to be a person who is from the Department and understands the ethos of the Department and the staff’s framework of thinking. There was one project where the project leader was actually appointed from a North American background and that didn’t seem to work so well because, in a sense, he tended to have his eye more on what were the longer term career opportunities after this project as far as he was concerned; rather than perhaps knowing the Department was there and having a home to go back to and keeping his eye on the historical involvement and the Department’s interests. That was something we learnt but some of the projects made a difference, but it was hard to tell. As far as the project in Iraq is concerned, I was very interested to learn only a few days ago that Don Plowman, who is now the Deputy Executive Director of the South Australian Research and Development Institute, has been seconded for a little while to work on some Iraq projects as part of the reconstruction of Iraq. He had been over to Iraq and had in fact gone to the project that we ran in the 1970s and was delighted to discover that the buildings

were still in good order, they were still being used as a research facility and indeed they were to be extended and it appeared to him that the technology we’d introduced actually had made a difference.

In some cases the projects have lived on but, by and large, have projects been wrapped up, completed or fallen into …?

All of the projects have a finite life. You are contracted to do these projects for a particular time and then you get additional projects. Sagric International’s management, initially Bob Hogarth, but then for many recent years, Glen Simpson, always had to be on the look out for new work that they could do. Although Sagric International was sold to Coffey & Partners several years ago, it still operates and trades under that same name. Its portfolio of projects has changed off and on over the years. For a time they were doing a lot of technical and further education training of overseas people in Adelaide and their agricultural component became relatively small. In those days they had a lot of students staying in the nurses quarters of Modbury Hospital and they were training people in the little college they’d set up down in Currie Street in things like accountancy and tourism and various topics of this nature, sometimes in association with TAFE colleges. It is a matter of really having the ability to approach a fairly broad-based market for international projects. More recently they’ve done work in New Guinea. Other sorts of activities – some land related. The Torrens Title system and land tenure systems, which we take for granted in South Australia, was a field that Sagric International was able to market in a number of places. North Africa, for example, where land tenure had been far from clear. Many of the difficulties, socially, derive from the fact that land tenures are not clear and also there is no scope, therefore, to borrow funds if there isn’t a clear title system. That was a skill that was particularly developed up in the period when I was involved with Sagric International.

[26:40] You mentioned earlier, John, that some staff members were proud to be involved, proud of their expertise or South Australia’s expertise being recognised in these overseas projects. Was it appropriate for the Department to … Obviously if you went down that path … but was it really appropriate for the …?

It depended on how you perceived the motivation. There were two points of view. There was perhaps an underlying altruistic view, but the reality was it was perceived to be a way of trying to develop more trade opportunities with developing countries, particularly based on agricultural and engineering capabilities which we had at the time (and which are probably rather less now but we still have some of them). So people like [John Shearer & Co.] did quite well out of selling tillage equipment. It also set a broader base for trade on the grounds that if you get a sound underlying agricultural economy, you can then start to develop other aspects of the economy.

However, there was also a contrary view. That is, whilst initially we had very good sales say of pasture seeds from the South Australian Seed and Growers Co-operative among other South Australian companies, it was also a concern that they might learn how to manage their own seed industry and perhaps that would undermine the Australian seed export industry, although I don’t think the reality of that was probably all that important. Seedco put a lot of effort into marketing its products in some of those countries where we’ve been active and very much built on some of the awareness and interests that were raised by our projects. They actually, commercially, took a very creative and responsible role and probably did quite well at it for a while.

[28:52] You mentioned that projects have a finite life. I was just wondering what sorts of benefits came out of these various projects and the various countries that the Department was involved in. What were the benefits for the country itself and what were the benefits for the Agriculture Department?

The benefits for the Department of Agriculture were exposure to some new environments and career experience. ‘Job enrichment’ is sometimes the expression favoured by the human resources people. Those things can be a little overstated but there was quite a commitment and a camaraderie among the people involved in those sorts of projects. I don’t think they did any real harm to the Department at all. Overall, it was seen to be a positive thing. Indeed, the work at Sagric International still attracts public interest. Even in the current Iraq environment it’s achieved some quite major commitment. People from Primary Industries and Resources SA and CSIRO and SARDI are involved with some of those projects which are still being undertaken, albeit by the private sector and Sagric International.

As you say, Sagric has grown outside the Department.

The other thing is that there was an introduction of new technologies. Not all of the technologies were probably successful. We had friendly rivalry also with a group from Western Australia who were doing somewhat similar work in several countries, albeit in geographically separate locations. South Australia and Western Australia, particularly, were strong in that dryland agricultural development. The major thrust of what we tried to market was the so-called lay farming system in which medics and clovers were introduced to the farm system between cereal crops. You might also introduce livestock to eat some of the residues, get rid of the surplus straw and produce a further revenue stream. There were social problems. For example, when we tried to fence off the field plots where we were carrying the livestock, there was a tendency for the fencing to disappear and the livestock to disappear in the night! It did prove quite difficult to manage livestock in the way that we had become used to and I guess the South Australian wheat sheep zone was the thing we were trying to emulate. It has to be said that our own South Australian system has also changed quite a bit since the 1970s with a much broader introduction of grain legumes, availability of much more specific selective herbicides [and the] move to minimum tillage. In a way, some of the original technologies we were introducing have probably evolved further here as much as they may well have done over there.

So was there any transfer of expertise or knowledge back to South Australia, to the South Australian farming sector?

There were issues of robustness of equipment, for example. Some of which wasn’t handled with great delicacy in these environments which meant the manufacturers learnt a little bit more about what was required to really build equipment that would stand up and some of it stood up very well. One of the successes we had was marketing Australian equipment, which was much more robust than the European equipment they’d had previously. A lot of our equipment, also, was designed to be used differently. The English or the Europeans had very deep, rather fertile, soils and were used to using the mouldboard ploughs that they put down to considerable depth and tipped the soil profile upside down. They needed a lot of tractor power or animal power, as the case may be, to do that whereas we moved into a much shallower cultivation, less ‘recreational’ cultivation.

[33:30] End of Tape 4, Side A

Side B, Tape 4

[0:05] … gain some benefits by going over?

It gave them an interesting experience. It meant that there was a coterie of farmers who had seen more of the world. In some cases they would not have travelled as much as perhaps their own parents might have done who were involved with say the first or second war. There was another generation after them who were younger and had not really travelled a lot and it opened up their eyes to other parts of the world and they found that an interesting experience, probably some frustrations mind you too. I guess the other point to be made which I haven’t commented on and I’m sure other people you have talked to will, is that there were meant to be local staff that paralleled the appointments that we had for the purpose of transferring the technology to local people. Certainly in Iraq one of the people who was the local parallel appointment to our officer in charge got shot one day going to work at a roundabout ... Arthur Tideman can tell you about that.

[1:25] Another aspect of the overseas experience is the political support, the level of support from the Minister, from the government and even the opposition. There doesn’t seem to be much of a political campaign about these ...

There were times when people were asking ‘Why were we in this?’. Brian Chatterton, who was Minister before I was much involved, had been very enthusiastic about it. Later Ministers, particularly from the Liberal side of government, initially really were asking, ‘Why was the government, the Public Service, involved in what appears to be a relatively commercial consultancy operation?’. In each case, they really came to see the purpose of it as far as developing an aspect of the South Australian economy was concerned. Whilst there was a bit of a conversion program that went on when they first came to office, in each case the various Ministers seemed to become quite committed to the program and they occasionally went on overseas expeditions to meet their counterparts in government in other places. It also depended whether there was a good champion (which there had been, for example, in Algeria) for the work that was being done and if an effective relationship developed say between the South Australian Minister and his opposite number in those countries (and that did happen on a number of occasions), then that added strength to the whole process too.

People these days are quite fond of referring to the ‘bottom line’. With this overseas experience, what was the bottom line for the Department in terms of the finances and so on? How did that work?

Once Sagric International became independent that really was no longer a problem for the Department. Initially, you could say, it was an investment by the Department using its consolidated revenue funds (the budget allocated by the Parliament) to get the whole thing started. At the time there were still six people on our payroll then obviously you could say that was perhaps a cost [investment] to get it going. Earlier, of course, the whole exercise had been funded just as a section of the Department of Agriculture. Quite correctly, it moved to a self-sufficient operation and Bob Hogarth and later Glen Simpson drew up the skills to look at all of the new opportunities. There are quite large international catalogues of new tender proposals that are on offer. There’s quite a lot of work involved in mounting a tender. They’re quite costly investments to mount a tender and you didn’t always win them. That involved a whole series of staff who were involved in seeing what projects were perhaps on the horizon, how we could bid on them and a whole network of people. It involved connections to the World Bank. Whilst again I wasn’t closely involved in those things, the Sagric International people did develop those skills quite well.

[5:14] That’s interesting. What other tenderers were there? Who was competing? You mentioned Western Australia.

There are firms in Germany, Holland and in some cases there are government agencies in those countries that will also provide some financial support for that work to be bid on. Sometimes they would hire people from our own Department! There was one firm, a German firm, that employed one of the ex-departmental people in Indonesia for several years. There was quite a bit of competition. Of course, many American organisations and land grant colleges had interests in overseas projects. It was probably much more common then for public instrumentalities to pursue those things than might be the case today.

Were there other examples in South Australia with other departments that you are aware of?

The Education Department, at some stage, and the TAFE colleges, they took an interest in trying to develop relationships. For example, there were relationships between the Regency Park Hotel School and colleges in Japan. Sometimes these were just sister-state relationships, but other times they were on some commercial basis and the students were brought out to train in an Australian college. The Institute of Medical and Veterinary Science itself set up a company of its own to do some of that work. I don’t know that it did a great deal but there were examples in other departments where overseas project work was being undertaken.

Thanks for that. We might follow through a few points when we see the transcript on that, if there are any things we haven’t covered.

Yes, that’s fine.

I appreciate that you were outside that overseas field.

There are others that you will be talking to who had much more personal involvement. Jim McColl, Arthur Tideman, Peter Barrow and probably Don Plowman would be worth talking to too. Don had a background in the old Monarto Commission and then transferred to the Department of Agriculture at the time it was determined that we weren’t going to have a great migration to Monarto and living in the houses out there. Don had a lot to do with the Overseas Projects Unit as it was called before it transferred into becoming Sagric International, which is why in fact he’s been re-involved quite recently in the rebuilding of Iraq.

[8:15] I will follow that one through, thanks. Perhaps if we can just look at that other topic we mentioned at the start, the Premiers Wine Forum. Let’s hear a little bit about that.

This was an exercise that really was set up by John Bannon when he was premier, which proved ultimately to be quite a good initiative though it was perhaps heavy going for him in the first place. The background was that there were four quite discrete organisations in South Australia dealing with aspects of the wine industry. They didn’t really have any notion of exporting or industry development or any sense of being a cohesive industry. The various components were: the little boutique wineries; you had the cooperative wineries; you had several proprietary wineries; and you had Penfolds who were a law unto themselves in those days. Also, you had the Wine and Grape Section of the then United Farmers and Stockowners, which was managed by an individual who actually worked professionally in the Taxation Department. His interest in grapes was perhaps a bit more peripheral than most of the grape growers but he had a knowledge or the ability by being in the city to keep his finger on what was going on.

John Bannon decided to convene the Wine Industry Forum, which was to bring these groups together on it was a six-monthly basis and at times quarterly to try and generate a more cohesive approach. This was occurring very soon after we had had the Vine Pull Scheme in which there had been over-production of grapes and we had been funded to have growers remove grapevines. From my point of view that process involved me in more problems and complaints than anything else we did in Agriculture in the time I was Director-General. Have we talked about that?

We haven’t gone down that path yet but perhaps we can come back to that after the Forum.

We can come back to that. John Bannon’s feeling was that here was an industry that had some scope for development even though it had only just gone through the anguish of vine pulling and downsizing. What he did was to convene a meeting of these people and really encourage them to try to develop a cohesive structure. My recollection is that he funded some consultancies to see how this might be done and the outcome of the whole process was to create the Wine[makers’] Federation of Australia, so-called WFA. This brought the components of the industry together. It also had later consequences insofar as it provided something of a vehicle that underpinned the creation of a Co-operative Research Centre for Viticulture which had its headquarters on the Waite campus and has operated out there now for 12 or 13 years and again increased the research focus in that area. We had, of course, had the [Australian] Wine Research Institute here for quite a long time but that itself is funded by a levy on the [wine] industry. That was purely a research body. John Bannon, bringing these groups together, did provide in a roundabout way the underpinning to lift the horizons and got the industry to look much further afield in terms of all the export potential. In a way, the blossoming of the industry and the more than doubling of exports and it now becoming a multi-million dollar industry, does owe something to that early effort by John Bannon to create a degree of industry cohesion and to lift its sights beyond competing for the local wine market.

You’ve mentioned several times that it was a Bannon initiative. Putting a fine point on it: was it the premier’s initiative? Where did it originate from?

I can’t quite recall exactly where the initiative rose from but it certainly was taken strongly forward by John Bannon. He personally and very clearly chaired the meetings and he was clearly the driver of the process. It wasn’t just a window-dressing exercise, which these things can sometimes be.

How involved was the Department then?

There were a range of people from various departments. The Department was directly involved. The Department of Trade was involved. There were the various wine participants, probably the Wine Institute would have been present and there would have been quite detailed records kept when ...

Was the Agriculture Department taking a leading role?

In a sense it was seen to be lodged in the Premier’s Department but obviously we provided quite a strong role in terms of the underpinning of the process but it was important that it was seen to be the premier’s initiative. When the premier invited people to come to meetings, that acted as a pretty good incentive to make sure that they did. Whereas if a public servant in the Department of Agriculture invited them, it really didn’t have the gravitas and impact of the premier’s personal involvement. It was a good initiative.

[14:34] You mentioned the organisation WFA. Just interested to know why it became the Wine Federation of Australia, a national focus rather than a South Australian focus.

The majority of the wine industry is in South Australia. It was then 60, 70% in South Australia and John could see quite clearly that you had to look beyond the purely parochial focus. It’s true that there has been quite an expansion of the wine industry in other States, particularly in Victoria and in areas like Margaret River in Western Australia and the Swan coastal plain. But equally well, there has been considerable expansion in South Australia. There’s been a bit of expansion even in Tasmania and I hesitate to mention that [winery] in Alice Springs. The fact that it had a core and that many of the participants in the wine industry do have their headquarters here, the others are in the Hunter Valley by and large. It provided the thrust of driving forward the industry.

It’s interesting that it has taken a national name, a national focus right from the start there.

Australia has tended to at times become very skilled at playing interstate rivalries and arguments, which are not always productive. Often they are driven by who pays for what and how it can be minimised but there are many times when we do have to take a national perspective. Things like controlling exotic plant pests and diseases, and animal diseases, clearly we are able to operate in the national perspective pretty well. Also, there would have been a notion that headquarters of companies that were in South Australia were things that needed to be nurtured. We didn’t necessarily want to let all the headquarters of companies be in Melbourne and Sydney. There has been a bit of a tendency for some companies to migrate to the eastern States and the idea of trying to keep wine companies here would also have been a motivating factor in all of this.

[17:15] I’m not sure if it’s appropriate to ask you, John, what happened to the Forum? How did it evolve and what has it become? Have you kept in touch with them?

Eventually the Forum itself ceased to operate once the cohesion was generated within the industry. There really wasn’t a lot of necessity for it. At the time John Bannon was comfortable that it was on its way then to the best of my knowledge it no longer was meeting.

And the Federation there took over?

It was a personal initiative and, of course, then John Bannon had to leave office as a result of the State Bank affair so the job had been done which highlights the fact that not all structures need to be kept in place for time immemorial for no good reason, if they’ve served their purpose.

But the Federation has taken over that role?

Yes. It’s a very different role but it was established initially offices out [at Wayville then Payneham], later [in Magill near the Penfolds precinct] and then, more recently, it is now in the [National] Wine Centre in North Terrace, [Adelaide].

That’s just another little story in the agricultural industry of South Australia.

Yes.

[18:45] We have got a few moments, perhaps if we could just go back to that issue of the Vine Pull Scheme you mentioned and the headaches it caused you!

The Vine Pull Scheme basically was a scheme whereby people who wanted to remove their vines were given an interest-free loan which if no vines had been replanted on the property within two or three years after the vines were removed (and it was certified that the vines had been removed), the loan would be discharged without repayment. The actual management of all those aspects was done through the Rural Assistance Branch, which was also managing loans for drought relief and rural adjustment loans and that sort of notion. We had the mechanics to deal with that so that was one set of things that were reasonably satisfactory.

The other component, though, was the valuation of what was being removed and, indeed, whether it had been removed. It was a requirement that local offices in the Department in the regions where the vines were being removed, actually went and inspected the site to see that the vines had been removed. Then they signed a certificate to say the vines had been removed. The loan payment was then made to the grower. The site property was inspected again in two years time and if it was free of vines well that was fine, you had the loan discharged. However, we did have a problem particularly in one case where the owner had cut off the vines with a chainsaw. It was inspected in the late winter where the grass had grown green all the way around. The [inspecting] person who did it, did it in a rather cursory way. Probably he didn’t walk very far into the vineyard and didn’t actually notice, in fact, that the rootstocks were still along the ground. The owner then sold the property having pocketed his loan and the new owner in the following few months suddenly discovered a vast collection of vines all sprouting out in the middle of his grass. In fact, the vineyard was still there. Then there was a court case about who was liable and, ultimately, the Department had some liability for having not properly examined the field and had incorrectly certified that the vines had been removed. The new owner had thought he had bought a paddock which was free of vine rootstocks. In fact, he couldn’t do much with it.

There was one other issue that occasionally arose too and that is we had the right to refuse a Vine Pull Scheme where we thought the vines were being removed for the economic convenience of the owner. That was sometimes an issue in properties that had subdivisional potential around the outskirts of towns. If an individual had in mind that it might be nice to subdivide his property, sometimes they’d come along with a proposition to pull the vines and then they would proceed to whack in a few roads and that would be more convenient if the place wasn’t full of vine stumps. So we had the ability to refuse those. In some cases when the refusal was provided, then there might be arguments that ensued and my recollection is that we finished up with about six different cases where the Ombudsman was dealing with various issues that arose out of problems with the Vine Pull Scheme. We did reduce quite a lot of areas of vines. There were a few hectares of chardonnay and desirable varieties that were pulled out but there were a lot of the old varieties – sultanas and Pedro and things like that – were also pulled out. If the truth be known, some of them in later years, quite a few years later, were replanted but replanted with more desirable modern-day varieties. This meant that the industry now is much more oriented towards varietal management rather then just producing general-purpose grapes to send off to the winery to do what they like with.

[23:30] Had the industry expanded by planting so many vines? Had it expanded in an uncontrollable way?

You mean before the Vine Pull Scheme?

Before the scheme sorry.

Not really, I wouldn’t have thought so. The industry had probably been on a relatively stagnant plane. I mean there had been some new vines – Semillon and Chardonnay – planted and things like that. The much bigger plantations have occurred since the Vine Pull Scheme. The much bigger areas of plantings now are again starting to raise issues of over-production. There are a number of competing issues there. For example, the market forces generated by supermarket companies in England being able drive harder bargains with competing wine suppliers both from Australia and Chile and South Africa have meant that margins have become tighter, prices for growers are reducing and, in some cases, in the current season areas of reds weren’t harvested because there was no market. So we are perhaps facing another area of adjustment but time will tell.

[25:00] Is that left to natural forces? Does supply and demand determine how much is planted? I’m just wondering how much involvement the Department would have had in …?

The Department would have less involvement now then it would have done then. One of the other things that we were involved with was establishing an information system whereby growers could list the grapes they had available for market on a database which was ultimately run for a while by the South Australian Farmers Federation and its predecessor. Buyers who were looking for grapes could go to this [database], which was called the Wine [Grape] Exchange, and see what was on the database and see where they might find the grapes they were looking for. There had also been processes of minimal pricing historically and to some degree that had propped up parts of the industry and had served in a way to probably inhibit rural adjustment. Particularly in the Riverina of New South Wales, [minimum] prices were set and they of course flowed over into the other States although prices set in New South Wales had no legal significance in South Australia, but then they influenced prices that prevailed here. Whilst there had been some price setting in South Australia, later there were established what were called indicative prices, which had no particular market-based legal significance but gave growers some guidance. This is all part of a process in which growers increasingly had to take responsibility for decisions on where they sold their produce. It didn’t matter whether it was wheat or wool or what. Historically, wheat had all gone to wheat pools if they were average quality and the prices just reflected the best money could obtain and there wasn’t much response back to the growers about the quality of wheat. All that’s changed immeasurably with a whole range of different grades of wheat in different markets and the ability to forward sell. The growers have to have much more knowledge of markets. In the [1980s] with the wool industry, the wool was propped up by the floor price scheme. After they had 5 000 000 bales in a stockpile, really it was clearly out of hand and it negated any development of the wool industry probably for 10 years afterwards. In the same way, the grape growers had to increasingly take responsibility for their own marketing decisions. One of the problems there also was growers would sometimes say, ‘We’ve got to get rid of these grapes. Let’s form a co-op’. So they would form a co-operative and all of these grapes would go to a co-operative. They would then find a winery that would actually process the grapes and make the wine and then [the cooperative would] try to sell it. Often they didn’t have any sales price and they had to pay for the cost of producing the wine so in a sense the growers got no payment by which time the next year was around so they would go and form another co-operative. There were cases of one winery in the Riverland that had separately created co-operatives on two or three separate years and each time they went broke and the growers didn’t get payments and hope seemed to spring eternal.

There were also a lot of mixed views in the Department about co-operatives. Certainly some Ministers and particularly one of the departmental staff, Anne Bunning, was quite enthusiastic about greater use of co-operatives and she was given some encouragement in that by John Kerin who was the Federal Minister of Agriculture at the time. Some State Ministers were not particularly enthused about this or didn’t have the same commitment but they were prepared to allow this to be explored. There were disadvantages in the co-operatives in the sense that any surpluses had to be returned to the co-operative holders and it was quite difficult for them to retain capital. In many cases what had been co-operatives, say Berri, moved over to a proprietary model and then ultimately there was integration between the various companies so that co-operatives now are probably rather less significant then they were then. People

understand the benefits on the one hand and the constraints in operation on the other of co-operatives.

[30:10] The co-operative movement goes back a long way but times have changed.

There is … Overall in agriculture, as we have seen the number of players, farmers, reduced, properties get bigger, much more responsibility for marketing decisions rather then just sending it all off to somebody that gets rid of it. This used to be the case of the woolgrowers and dairy co-ops and all that. We probably had 10 dairy co-operative companies of various sorts and they all finished up in two major companies. Now the Australian dairy industry is increasingly integrated with the New Zealand dairy industry. It’s not just a matter of co-operatives in adjacent towns trying to be independent.

Did the Department get involved in providing advice or comment on the benefits or negatives of co-ops? Informally or formally to people?

I wouldn’t say there was a lot of involvement about providing advice about the benefits of it, but what it did do was to provide leadership for the review of the role of co-operatives across the States as a project supported by the Standing Committee on Agriculture and the Australian Agricultural Council. Those States with an interest in that area participated with more vigour. It depended on the legislation of the different States. New South Wales, for example, had a Registrar of Co-operatives and they were quite active players in seeing the extent to which a co-operative movement might be facilitated. However, I’m not sure there was a great deal of change. There were proposals to make some improvements to legislation and perhaps lead to greater harmonisation, as you might put it, of legislation. That’s a euphemism of trying to get similar legislation in all States. You can never actually achieve that because when you go to the House, then the politicians will invariably want to make various improvements. What you really need to be aiming for there is that the outcomes between the different States are all pretty similar even though the actual wording of the legislation will have its variations and that’s fine, it doesn’t matter. The democratic processes have done its job.

We are probably just about out of time today because the tape’s nearly out. We might have to pick up on some of those points in a subsequent session about the co-ops and so on. We’ve covered some good ground there today, John, on those three or four issues. Thanks very much.

[33:00] End of Side B, Tape 4

Tape 5, Side A – Session of 10 March 2005

[0.35] John we going to cover a few more disparate topics again as we did last time. There’s been a bit of a gap between our sessions. But I felt perhaps today if we start off with a more recent development and that’s the formation of the South Australian Research and Development Institute, commonly known as SARDI, and your views about SARDI and its formation and your involvement in that.

I must say I was somewhat surprised by the government’s decision to create SARDI. It came to my attention while I was in a hotel in Honolulu, returning from the United States. I had a telephone call from Peter Crawford who was then head of the Premier’s Department to announce that the government had restructured the Public Service and that the Department of Agriculture had ceased to exist and they had determined to create something among other things called the South Australian Research and Development Institute. Peter Crawford made it clear it wasn’t his decision but that was the message he was conveying to me, so I had to come home and accommodate to that decision and I was to be the first Chief Executive of the new SARDI. However, you might then contemplate what were the origins of this. In fact I went back and asked Lynn Arnold who was really responsible for the decision, what brought it on, when we had the 10^th anniversary of SARDI. Lynn indicated that he had been impressed by the level of science that was being carried out. Of course, we’d had a strong thrust of developing the co-location on the Waite campus with the university and CSIRO. I’d also, on several occasions when I was Director-General of Agriculture, expressed some concern that the State government wasn’t really picking up on the issue of research and development and innovation. To some extent I was driven by the then fairly recently prognostications of an economist then in Chicago, now in California, called Romer, who argued that economic development wasn’t just a matter of land, labour and capital, but also it was a matter of innovation and that societies that had significant amounts of innovation generally did better than those that didn’t. A couple of times I put to Lynn Arnold that this was a fairly important new concept in thinking and I believe that it did have an impact on Lynn in an underlying sense and probably was part of the thinking to create SARDI. Anyway, the decision was made to establish SARDI as a separate entity and two people were transferred to it, they were myself and then Rob Lewis, who was previously the Director of Fisheries. So the two of us together with our PAs represented the core of SARDI and we negotiated a space then on the 1st floor of the Grenfell Centre to which we ultimately migrated and we were able to encourage a number of people to come with us including several administrative people, Oksana Dniprowyi was one of them, I think Don Plowman became another. Some of these people had to decide in terms of their careers, do they want to stick with what was then called PISA (the Primary Industries South Australia), it didn’t yet have the Mines and Energy part added to it, or did they want to go with the R&D group? Several people … Ian Tonkin was another one who had a background working on research centres [who] decided to go with SARDI. Quite a few of these people are still there. Indeed, Rob Lewis who’s still the Chief Executive of SARDI. At the time that SARDI was created, it was created as independent government department separate from PISA.

Was it being hived off from Primary Industries Department at that time?

It consisted of the research components of the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Fisheries, and the Woods and Forests Department though it transpired when I went around to Woods and Forests that they really didn’t have any significant research facilities anyway. In reality, it was the research components of Agriculture, which was a series of activities on research centres and also the co-location being developed on the Waite campus from Northfield with the transfer of research facilities from Northfield, and also the research facilities of the Department of Fisheries, which were then being created – the West Beach laboratories which were really world standard as were the ones that we were developing on the Waite campus, particularly the Plant Research Centre. They were the core of it. It was decided to establish ultimately … When the building was available for occupancy, the headquarters of SARDI were then the Plant Research Centre at Hartley Grove, Urrbrae and the headquarters are still there.

You mentioned you heard about this when you were overseas. How much knowledge building up to it, to the decision … Had you been involved in …?

There was no interaction in terms of reaching that decision. The decision was very much made probably by the Cabinet itself, in wanting to make those changes. Certainly from Peter Crawford’s comments, as head of the Premier’s Department he would’ve been involved in some of the decision making no doubt, but it wasn’t an issue that came out of the Premier’s Department. I don’t think that’s an issue. It was pretty innovative in its way. Indeed, it led to other States then starting to look at what they were doing with their research. Fairly soon afterwards Tasmania came up here to see what we were doing and they looked at the Plant Research Centre, which was then nearing completion, and walked away with trying to get a feel for what the approach was. They subsequently took a slightly different path but an interesting one in which they created the thing called the Tasmanian Institute for Agricultural Research which was a joint venture between the University of Tasmania, which is quite a small university, and the research component of the Tasmanian Department of Agriculture and Fisheries or whatever its then title was. They were influenced in that decision by a report that Jim McColl had done about 1990 into agricultural education in Australia, in which he had basically said that probably there were too many agricultural faculties in the country and the one in Tasmania was the smallest and it probably wasn’t viable. In that sense I imagine the Tasmanians felt somewhat threatened so they actually took some action and created the Tasmanian Institute for Agricultural Research, which actually was a good outcome I think, partly influenced by what we were doing at SARDI and also influenced by Jim McColl’s report, and it has to be said that most of the rest of Jim’s recommendations were unfortunately, in my view, largely ignored so we still have a large number of agricultural faculties all trying to teach all sorts of things with no terribly clear specialisation on anybody’s part and often dressing them up with other more trendy names in order to attract more students often without too much regard as to what the marketplace actually wants, but all that’s another story.

We might come back to it. The drive for SARDI seems to be coming from perhaps outside the Department of Agriculture.

Initially there was a lot of concern in the rural community: what was the government doing? Indeed, the Opposition at one stage was attempting to mount a case that this was very unwise and make some political points out of it, to the extent that I was being discreetly asked about these sort of things. I was trying to slow them down and not to perhaps politicise the exercise. But it did mean that we had to then work out, basically Rob Lewis and I, what it would actually mean to create a thing called SARDI. Initially I went round to quite a lot of different sorts of agencies who were involved with aspects of research, including even places like the Centre for Manufacturing, to find out what were their expectations of a research and development organisation in the South Australian government and where would the boundaries be?; should the boundaries be wider?; should we be looking at moving into other sorts of technical fields we weren’t in? Ultimately the decision was taken that if we kept pretty much into agriculture and fisheries, which were the origins, but there had been consideration of the potential to get into wider areas but then other fields were filled by the university or CSIRO, so there wasn’t a lot of point perhaps in SARDI moving away from its original origins.

On the other hand, John, was there some potential for SARDI taking on or negotiating to take on some of the roles of the university or CSIRO?

Some of that sort of thing was discussed and we would’ve had some discussions with Harold Woolhouse. There were suggestions in earlier times when Jim Quirk was director of the Waite Institute that he had aspirations that he would be cheerfully willing to take over of the research role of the Department of Agriculture and do it better. Naturally those of us in the Department of Agriculture weren’t terribly enthused about that. It wasn’t all that much later that a review was conducted of the Waite Institute at the end of Jim Quirk’s appointment as director of it. [‘Report of the External Review of the Waite Agricultural Research Institute, University of Adelaide, March 1990’ commissioned by the Commonwealth Department of Employmeny, Education and Training.] It was conducted by a Dr Jim McWilliam. It was actually reasonably critical of how the university and the Waite had been operated. [Quirk] spent a good deal of his time in trying to secure additional funds at the expense of the North Terrace campus and the North Terrace campus on the other hand felt that the people on the Waite campus were in a somewhat sheltered environment as they didn’t have the extent of lecturing loads at North Terrace. There were pretty voluminous sorts of correspondence dealing with those sorts of issues in the files of various Vice-Chancellors who probably would’ve been happier to have done without them.

Coming back to SARDI. The first thing we then had to decide was if we are going to primarily create this thing out of the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Fisheries, who are we going to transfer? It was quite a difficult exercise of identifying who should be transferred; where was the boundary?. The boundary often was a little difficult in country areas where some individuals were involved in research and extension: they did do some fieldwork but they also had an extension role and it wasn’t always terribly discrete. There was also the issue of the research centres. There was also the issue of the outcome of the review of the Department of Agriculture which, among other things because of the State Bank affair and the general reduction in resources available across the South Australian Public Service, the area was to take something of a budget cut of some significance. So we were looking at who do we transfer?; who remains in what was then PISA?; and who might like to have a package for redundancy in order to generate a saving in the portfolio? Those sort of decisions are not easy for staff to make, particularly when they hadn’t been foreseen on the horizon. Certainly the review of the Department had generated quite a bit of discussion earlier. The creation of SARDI would also have been seen as an instrument that would help generate some of the savings that were thought to be necessary in the overall sense. So I can imagine the Treasury might well have been supportive of that sort of thing.

Just to clarify one thing there, John. Did SARDI in that sense come out of this review?

In some sense it would have, but the review did not itself particularly recommend the creation of SARDI, so you wouldn’t have seen that in reading the document.

Perhaps we can come back to that review in a moment, talk about that in a moment. So SARDI’s coming along: was there any suggestion that the government might get out of the research area full stop? I ask because you’ve got this situation of research people in the Department of Ag. already, yet you’re hiving it off to form another research body. In a sense there’s no cost savings, no …

There was a sense of perhaps the State Government might invest less of the total proportion of the cost of running SARDI. Indeed, that’s happened so that SARDI is now in 2005 about 52% externally funded, whereas in those days it would’ve been much lower in terms of external funding, it might have been about 15% or something like that. That transition has been made over quite a few years, but in many cases it has more been due to attracting additional funds that Rob Lewis and the staff at SARDI have attracted rather than due to great reductions in the number of the State public servants. Certainly there have been reductions in the number of State public servants, but SARDI under Rob’s leadership have done very well in attracting additional funds into the organisation and it’s full marks to Rob to have been able to achieve it.

In that sense is SARDI more like a statutory authority, being able to go out and solicit money and …

Initially it behaved more like a statutory authority, particularly when the SARDI Board was created which I chaired after I’d gone to CSIRO, because it was independently responsible to the Minister. It was still a government department, but I had specific delegations as chairman which allowed me, for example, to sign off on a financial delegation probably up to half-a-million dollars, and Rob Lewis could only sign off to say [$]100 000 or something like that, and then beyond that we had to go to the Minister. Later when SARDI became a unit within Primary Industries and Resources SA, it reverted to being effectively a division of a larger department and ceased to be an independent entity. The SARDI Board was replaced by the ‘so-called’ SAPIRD Board, which is the South Australian Primary Industries Research and Development Board, which provides advice, presumably to the Minister and indirectly to Jim Hallion as head of PIRSA, on its research priorities whereas the SARDI Board was more directly involved in setting its own priorities. As chairman of the SARDI Board I used to meet monthly with the Minister to discuss various R&D issues and policy issues as a separate issue from the Chief Executive, Rob Lewis, meeting with the Minister which, of course, he would have more access to than I. That went on for five years until SARDI was put back into what became PIRSA.

[18:50] So it’s an interesting twist in the story – to hive it off and to bring it back!

Then we come back to the issue of how the staff were created. This was quite difficult and quite stressful and most of that was managed for us by Jim Walkley who had been, I suppose, a Sheep Research Officer primarily at Turretfield Research Centre but had moved into the city to do some other project work. He went around and had to meet with the groups of people and see what their aspirations were in terms of career terms, were they wanting to ensure they got a place in the new R&D structure or did they find attraction in perhaps taking a package and hanging their shingle up. All of a sudden people moved into private sector research and development operations, often in association with perhaps consultancy activities. People like Alan Mayfield, who had been [phone rings] research [plant] pathologist, they would hang their shingle up at say Clare and have been very successful doing that. [phone ringing]

OK John, after a short pause for the phone. We were talking about getting staff to the new organisation and the process there.

The point I wanted to make was that this was quite stressful for some of them. It was also very stressful for Jim Walkley who really had the responsibility of coordinating what was for some the outcome and sadly Jim felt that he’d enough of all of this and he eventually moved to Queensland and later joined the Queensland Department of Primary Industries.

He was somebody who’d come up through the Department?

Yes. He’d been probably a cadet in the Department in the days when the Department had cadets and contributed towards them doing their degree and then they then had to work for the Department contractually for the same number of years as they were supported with a living allowance in the Department. There are other examples of that. A good example currently who was in that position is Roger Wickes who is now an Executive Director in the Department of Water, Land and Biodiversity Conservation. He was supported as a cadet coming through his degree and has maintained a career in the public service ever since and developed it very well.

Just very briefly that aspect, something we haven’t really thought of, in this case of the separation packages, redundancy and so on, the impact on the person in Jim Walkely. We talk in terms of the person taking the package but not the person offering it!

As far as Jim was concerned, these were all people that he knew quite well. Some came from the research centre he was on; others were people he’d worked with in other parts of the Department. One has to accept that sometimes these change processes can be quite difficult, not only for those who have to change but those who are involved in managing the change.

Would you recall if Jim had expressed any concerns about this before he decided to leave?

Yes. He was a very conscientious person and he was doing the job he’d been asked to do, but clearly he didn’t enjoy it and we knew he didn’t enjoy it, but being Jim he felt he still had to carry it through. [Ultimately] a considerable list of staff members were formally transferred to SARDI on the 2nd of February 1994 which followed the original transfer of us to SARDI when the decision was made in November 1993. When I get the transcript I’ll just check the dates to make sure that’s correct. [Yes!] Anyway, it then followed that one week later I had accepted the position of director of the Institute of Plant Production and Processing in CSIRO. I got the impression that some of the staff were quite intrigued by this. In a way it was seen to be a bit of a thought that maybe I’d been a bit short changed by being dispossessed as the leader to the Department of Agriculture albeit to tee up SARDI. I had told Lynn Arnold that I’d been offered this position and Lynn Arnold said, ‘That’s great, that will continue the strong relationship between the State Government and CSIRO. What we should do is create a SARDI Board and you might like to be chairman of it’. Lynn at the time was on a fishing boat out in the Gulf, a very unusual activity for Lynn Arnold, I might say, to be engaging in something like that. I was talking to him on his mobile phone. So he was prepared for the fact that I would transfer to CSIRO so we then created the SARDI Board which had an initial membership and it became involved in the development of SARDI over the next five years and the SARDI Board had a good close working relationship with Rob Lewis and we met every couple of months, it was quite formal and its level of delegation and responsibility I described earlier.

So that would be what, roughly ’94 to ’99 you chaired the Board?

Yes.

Yes and then the move back into PIRSA, the Board was abolished?

In that form, yes.

Did you lose your connection with it or did you go on to new …

No, I was not involved in the new SAPIRD Board although I was invited to come to one or two of the priority setting sessions to make some input. There were other people involved in those, perhaps in a representative role for agriculture and one or two people from the university and so forth. I’ve always, because of my physical location on the campus even though it’s in CSIRO I’d be going around to the country [visiting CSIRO staff but] maintaining a fairly close, personal, almost a slight proprietary interest in SARDI because of my background both in the State Public Service and in research and development and in the origins of SARDI.

[26:40] Talking about the staff and working out the transfers. Did you headhunt certain people to say they were the sorts of people you needed for this new organisation? In addition to offering …

Many of the research staff were clearly involved in research as such. The major argument really was actually who got the research centres. PISA under Ray Dundon had retained the asset ownership of the research centres and even the farm staff that ran them in order to convert them into agriculture centres which provided the basis of both research and extension. This did give some angst to SARDI because it didn’t really command the staff responsible for doing the fieldwork on the research centre itself, nor did it really have command of the land on the research centre. So there was a negotiation over a year or two subsequently that resulted in that position being clarified and SARDI then more clearly getting control of the research and development facilities on the agriculture centre sites. It also resulted in other people starting to co-invest, most notably in Minnipa where the Grains Research and Development Corporation has put considerable amount of money into developing facilities for Eyre Peninsula grain-growing research. The Eyre Peninsula community has been a very strong supporter of Minnipa over the years. The total grain production of Eyre Peninsula is a pretty significant part of that in South Australia. So the GRDC has developed joint ventures there and the university has also been brought into those joint ventures. To some degree they would have their origins in the sort of co-location that [we were] doing on the Waite campus. That’s been a pretty significant development although I personally wasn’t particularly closely involved with that because the CSIRO wasn’t a participant in that process.

I was going to ask you about the decision to put SARDI up here at the Waite area.

Some of the origins of that go back to the co-location agreement and where the buildings that were to be built. One of the buildings that was to be built was an office building that would hold the headquarters of the university, the senior staff of CSIRO, and the senior staff and head office functions of the Department of Agriculture. When PISA was created, it then started to contain things that had no particular relevance to this campus, notably all the fishing people for a start and more recently Mines and Energy [Department]. So the decision was taken that the State government would not fund the erection of what was perceived to be the headquarters or administration building on the campus. So that site is still a car park and it’s opposite to the eastern door of the main Waite building. By then we had to identify where would the headquarters of SARDI be. There didn’t seem to a lot of sense in it remaining in the Grenfell Centre, even though the headquarters of PISA then remained where the Department of Agriculture headquarters were at the Grenfell Centre. The Plant Research Centre was nearing completion but it was still at the fit out stage and it was possible to make some rather small rearrangements that did provide a small headquarters area for effectively the Chief Executive, the Director of Research at SARDI and the support staff that they needed in terms of personal assistants at the Plant Research Centre. That was done quite quickly and when the Plant Research Centre opened the headquarters staff moved there and administrative staff (finance and so forth) … a small space was found for them down on the lower floor and that worked out pretty well because it did show that the leadership of the South Australian Research and Development was clearly on the Waite campus. Indeed, in more recent years it’s fair to say that Rob Lewis has provided much of the leadership and the continuing development of the campus.

Perhaps just pause and I’ll turn the tape over.

[31:33] End of Side A, Tape 5

Tape 5, Side B

[0:05] … personal situation in regards to the transitional arrangements, leaving the Department of Agriculture and coming to SARDI and ultimately CSIRO.

As far as the transitional arrangements were, obviously I was involved with quite a few things within the Department of Agriculture. Ray Dundon was the incoming Chief Executive of Primary Industries SA (PISA) but he didn’t have a significant agricultural background so, in fact, I continued (even though by then I was Chief Executive SARDI) to perform numbers of the functions that I had previously been doing as Director-General of Agriculture. The most obvious of those was the role that I had for representing South Australia at the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Resource Management – as I think it was by then – and the similar Ministerial Council meeting. So I continued to represent South Australia at meetings in late January of 1994. Gradually, by briefing Ray, I managed to transfer various things over to him.

I also did have some other activities going at the time. I was involved in a review of the Queensland Department of Primary Industries research activities with Ted Henzell who had been my predecessor in the job I later took up at CSIRO. I arranged with CSIRO when I took up the position as Director of the Institute of Plant Production and Processing that I would continue that role and we eventually produced a report suggesting some changes in the Queensland Department of Primary Industries. We had a number of overlapping activities, some of which I took with me, which in a sense were personal appointments of one sort or another.

Other things I did were to chair the selection committee for the Land and Water Resources R&D Corporation and I did that successively every two years for six years, initially, from the base of the Department of Agriculture and then later within CSIRO.