Portfolio — 25 March 2026

The Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, Ms Collins, had a substantive day across both communications and the House chamber on 25 March 2026, advancing two distinct but thematically coherent portfolio agendas: regional agricultural resilience and export regulatory reform.

On the communications side, the Minister announced $7.94 million in Australian Government Future Drought Fund support for a five-year research program led by Charles Sturt University in partnership with the NSW Government [TA-260325-agricu-34e6342fd560]. The program targets drought resilience for winegrape, apple and cherry producers — a specific and commercially significant slice of Australian horticulture.

Trial sites will operate at a commercial apple orchard in Batlow and a cherry orchard in Gulgong, with demonstration sites extending across the Central West, southern NSW and Tasmania, testing practices including soil amendments, deficit irrigation and soil moisture monitoring technology [TA-260325-agricu-34e6342fd560]. The Minister framed the initiative around collaboration between government, industry and research institutions, with outputs to reach growers through workshops, factsheets and orchard walks — a dissemination model that signals intent to move findings from trial sites to on-farm practice.

In the House, the Minister moved the Export Control Amendment (Clarifying Obligations Relating to Registered Establishments) Bill 2026 through second and third reading on the same sitting day [TA-260325-house-8e0b2c08f739:s016]. The bill's operative effect is to decouple export operations at registered establishments from mandatory registration listing unless prescribed export conditions apply — allowing multi-product facilities to operate across product lines without each operation requiring separate registration entries.

Beyond reducing compliance burden on industry, the bill broadens the government's capacity to issue documents under the Export Control Act, enabling it to provide the assurances that trading partners require and thereby strengthen market access for Australian exporters [TA-260325-house-8e0b2c08f739:s016]. The bill also extends regulatory oversight to a range of currently non-prescribed goods: wool, honey, pet food, skins and hides, rendered goods, pharmaceuticals, food and beverages, stock feed and feed additives — goods that have operated outside the export assurance framework and will now be brought within it [TA-260325-house-8e0b2c08f739:s016].

The House agreed to the third reading by leave, completing the bill's passage through the lower chamber.

The two streams share a common thread. Both the drought research program and the export control amendments position the government as reducing friction for agricultural producers — one by building farm-level adaptive capacity against climatic risk, the other by streamlining the regulatory environment for exporters. Together they reflect a portfolio approach that attends simultaneously to production-side resilience and market-access facilitation.