Is there more clarity overpricing in New Zealand?

Look, I think it's a very different pricing mechanism in New Zealand, and it's sometimes very hard to compare our pricing system to New Zealand.

They have a moving yield price.

It can go up and down.

There is yield price discovery along the way.

And I think that's part of what may make it easier for Australian dairy farmers if we had a live pricing mechanism.

And there is some work going on around what that might look like so that we know what the milk price is at any given moment during the season so that when we get to milk price openings where processors have to announce, farmers have a better understanding of where where the milk price actually is at that point in time.

Just finally, while I've got you, Mark, what is the mood at the moment in the dairy industry?

He says private firefighting equipment is now essential and the government should start recognising this.

North of my area, up through the Hamilton Highway, the Lismore area, there's a high reliance on private equipment.

But that's also prevention equipment, so tractors with speed discs pulling brakes through as quickly as you possibly can around a fire edge.

I mean, that's a critical aspect.

of our response to fire the government should be recognizing that as a critical asset that farmers and private operators are providing there should be some sort of recognition to the time and effort the fuel wear and tear on machinery that's doing that work and then in the outways we're relying on private vehicles way too much to provide command and control And within my group, we've got 15 brigades.

It covers a big chunk of the outways.

We have one command vehicle for the whole of that area.

Another major problem Mark Billing said his region faced fighting the fires around the Otways was the lack of fire preparation around key infrastructure.

Do they have a

point? Yeah, totally get it.

And it's a good point, right? So I think the shackles that were put on us within VFF at the time meant that we couldn't engage well with dairy farmers within Victoria.

We couldn't get – or couldn't be nimble with messaging, and there was a whole range of reasons.

But the biggest one was there was a significant cut in the UDV budget at the time as well.

So – and at that point, there was a lot of money coming into VFF through dairy farmers.

So the anomaly that that created created friction, obviously, at that point.

conversation between dairy farmers are you all frustrated at how slow it is