GRDC to stay in Canberra

Uncertainty has surrounded the GRDC in recent months amid a strong push by the Abbott government to relocate its head office to Wagga Wagga in NSW, as raised by Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce.

Mr Joyce has also demanded the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA), Rural Industries RDC and the Fisheries RDC move head offices into regional locations, promising final decisions by the year’s end.

Mr Clark said he and his organisation had discussed the relocation plans extensively with the minister, the minister’s office and research partners.

He said the board had now settled on a model that would initially have four regional spokes, with one office to be located at Toowoomba, Queensland and another at Dubbo, NSW.

The other two spokes will be located at Adelaide and Perth where GRDC has existing regional offices.

“The intention is that the Adelaide office will eventually move out to perhaps Roseworthy or another research type site,” he told Fairfax Media this week.

“The office in Perth has the potential to move to Northam, if and when the GrainsWest initiative that’s been in the news lately is completed.”

Moves are underway to establish GrainsWest as a not for profit company owned by the WA government backed by Royalties for Regions funding.

The new facility would deliver targeted research and development work for the grains industry and be based at an Innovation Centre in Northam with satellite operations at Geraldton, Merredin and Esperance.

Mr Clark said the GRDC had been talking to Charles Sturt University “extensively” and he understood they’re “quite keen” to increase “critical mass” at their Dubbo campus, opening an opportunity for the two groups to co-locate.

He said there was no immediate reason why spokes are not based in Southern NSW and Victoria now but stressed the new operating concept would evolve over time.

“We are trying to establish this at minimum cost to the grains industry,” he said.

“Every dollar that we spend that’s not in research potentially costs the industry $15 in lost research benefits.

“If we spend $1 million moving people around unnecessarily it’s a $15m in productivity enhancement loss for the industry, somewhere down the track.

“We’re trying to do this at a minimal cost to maximise the effectiveness.”

Mr Clark said the GRDC’s head office in Canberra would retain about 45 to 55 staff while three of the four spokes would have five staff each.

“The hub will be in Canberra for the foreseeable future but none of these are things are set in concrete,” he said.

“However, we could not justify the cost of, both in dollars and in lost momentum, of moving the hub out of Canberra, when we took a good look at it.

“Any growth at the GRDC in future is going to be very biased towards getting more people out into the regions.”

Mr Clark said increasing local administration capacity of the $200 million per year RDC’s “coalface research” would improve the effectiveness of research outcomes to growers, without adding costs to industry.

But he said the GRDC needed to carefully evaluate each particular move around any of the regional spokes and how they’re managed.

The northern region spoke, he said, would only comprise two staff members - including a soils and nutrition general manager.

“But there is potential down the track and our model will continue to evolve, to have more people out in those regions as we go,” he said.

“It’s worth remembering though we already have offices in Adelaide and Perth and in many ways we’ve already got staff in a lot of other places because our farming systems group is administered locally.”

A formal GRDC staff survey estimated about 70 per cent of GRDC staff would not be willing to move if the head office was relocated to Wagga, while 25.37pc said "maybe" and 4.48pc said "yes".

Mr Joyce also wrote to Mr Clark earlier this year asking the GRDC to cover the estimated potential $31.2 million relocation cost.

But Mr Clark said the relocation cost would be “wrapped up” in the costs of reorganising the business which “frankly was going to occur anyway”.

He said the GRDC was already pushing ahead with plans to reorganise its business model and increase its efficiency.

“We’ve kept the minister informed all the way along of our thinking, but it was actually a decision of the board, not the minister,” he said.

“We initiated those discussions a couple of years ago and the minister has been aware that we’ve been working on this from the beginning.

“We have been going through a re-engineering of the entire business model and that’s given us an opportunity to look at how we’re doing things and how we can do them better.

“That was well underway before this relocation issue really hit the headlines.”

Mr Clark said he was “absolutely committed” to the GRDC’s new operating model because it was “the right thing for the GRDC to do”.

“GRDC has not made any public comments about the public debate that’s been going on and the bidding that’s been going on for different towns and so on because frankly we’ve been getting on with the job of reorganising the business,” he said.

“We were trying to let that stuff wash over us so it didn’t become a distraction to what we hoped would be the most effective model for the grains industry.

“At the end of the day, our sole concern is to get the maximum dollar benefit for each dollar invested with us for the grain growers, to increase their profitability, and other agendas are quite frankly are a distraction.

“These things can change but to best of my knowledge he’s (Mr Joyce) very happy with it.”