 Good afternoon delegates and thank you to the organisers for inviting me here today, giving me the opportunity to discuss how to drive productive agricultural supply chains through innovative and responsive systems and infrastructure. While my fellow presenters have considered a lot of the macro efficiencies derived in agricultural supply chains, my presentation will look to provide examples of opportunities where initiatives are actually delivering efficiencies within the supply chain through an effective freight system. Firstly, however, I'll provide a bit of background into the Queensland freight network, which actually provides context then for some of those examples that I'll consider later on. Very quickly, 180,000 kilometres of roads, 150 locally controlled and 100,000 unsealed. We've got about 9,500 of rail line and we're really lucky to have a variety of railway line, narrow, standard and drill gauge. We have 15 imported and export ports, three international ports and two key intermodal freight terminals, which the Queensland Government is also looking to expand. Queensland has an extensive freight task, moving about 871 million tonnes. Despite the downturn and coal prices, resources still make up the bulk of the line shares of our freight volumes. However, second to the resource sector, agricultural commodities including livestock are important economic contributors in regional Queensland. The movement of agricultural commodities and livestock is largely skewed to road. It's higher than the state average, representing about 70 to 80% on road, depending on the commodity versus the state average of about 69%. The reasons for this are quite well known. Road offers superior door-to-door service. It's flexible, it's reliable and it can also provide competitive two-way loading rates. Approximately 29% moves on rail, largely made up of bulk commodities such as resources, however, some grain and sugar also moves on rail. Hasn't always been the case. The dominance of road up until about 25 years ago when we had in place regulated commodity permits, rail actually had a lot higher percentage of modal share. Moving to consider the challenges, constraints and the cost within our freight system. Vulnerable structures in both the agricultural production areas in both the road and the rail, such as aging bridges, culverts, road envelope and pavement depth and axle loadings. They limit the use of high productivity vehicles and the efficient transport of goods. I've got a picture there of the Eaton's Range there, which is one of the main roads out of Mackay High where we like to move oversize over mass equipment out into the Galilee Basin. You can see there the geography is not very conducive to that. Much of our rail system has very low axle load limits, around 15.75 tonnes per axle limit. Limits the efficiency of all the payload for rail and also the state of the track is also vulnerable to environmental events. And the track there is the one outside of Emerald after the 2011 floods. Further south, we're also very lucky to have a lot of our rail system heritage listed. So it's great for tourists, but you can see there with the Grand Chester tunnels, it limits our capacity to export commodities out of high-cube boxes such as cotton and grain. Agricultural and primary industries rely on freight bulk rail freight services for approximately four months of the calendar year, but it means that for approximately two-thirds of the year the rail system is underutilised for the movement of agricultural products. It makes it really difficult to get year-round contracts that aren't take or pay. And it is also difficult to get pathways when agricultural commodities are in competition with very high-value commodities such as coal. While geography increases our challenges, we also have a very expensive freight system. Australia's logistics make up approximately 50% of our—or can make up to 50% of our market price, whereas Canada is about half of that. If we look specifically at grain, port receivable, handling and vessel charges in Canada are about two-thirds of the equivalent charges in Australia, meaning that it's $14 per tonne in Canada versus $21 per tonne in Australia. Collectively transport costs can represent on average about 30% of total production costs. And I'm noting one of the earlier presentations. I think it was Tafts who actually said that we need to reduce the cost of production. Road—the freight and movement of our goods is one area where we can reduce the cost of production, as it's very high. In one grain producing region in Queensland, we had a look at the road rail cost of actually moving a tonne of grain to the Port of Brisbane. When we added in $65 for the road costs, storage up-country and port costs, also $65. The $130 in just transport costs represented over 50% of the total tonnage rate that they were getting in the market. Our port costs are also quite high in Australia relative to other countries, and that's something that I'll look at in a bit further on. Importantly, infrastructure upgrades alone won't deliver the benefits unless the comparative advantages of each mode are optimised through supply chain innovation and through a responsive freight system. Agricultural supply chains will benefit from innovative and strategic freight transport improvements and provide savings in end-to-end transit times and the total transit costs. These costs then, or whether the efficiencies generate these savings, they can then be passed on to customers or to the primary producers. It's well documented and accepted that rail is the suitable motor transport for moving many agricultural commodities. However, the infrastructure issues that are cited earlier and the constraints means that it is often not flexible and doesn't deliver sufficient payloads. It can be unreliable and all of this is actually contributed to the decline in its market share in Queensland. Central barrier to overcoming these issues is cost. Cost of upgrading lines to competitive axle load limits, the cost of actually purchasing bespoke rolling stock that then isn't utilised for much of the year and that underutilisation and the underutilisation of the blow rail assets also result in inefficiencies and a lack of productivity. The provision of container handling facilities and an expanded general cargo capability at ports outside Brisbane would also reduce the cost to producers from moving freight from North Queensland such as refrigerated meat all the way down to the Port of Brisbane so we can export it out of the Port of Brisbane. A network of inline intermodal freight hubs or terminals would support optimisation of the freight network and provide efficiencies including reduced impact on road amongst other benefits. High productivity vehicles deliver a higher payload which can improve productivity efficiency and whilst some PBS or HPVs operate in standard configurations under guidelines we're looking towards the use of PBS regulated vehicles to actually generate higher payloads and increase the efficiency and productivity in this mode. I think probably the greatest opportunity to enhance productivity however in the agricultural sector in particular is through better sharing, coordination, rationalisation and utilisation of data to improve the efficiency of the supply chain and the lost productivity associated with as I mentioned before the underutilisation of the freight infrastructure and I'll cover that off. Quickly looking at Yamala intermodal terminal the principle underlying Yamala is the supply chain efficiency through better utilisation of the infrastructure and utilising the comparative or maximising the comparative advantages of each mode. Yamala is located outside of Emerald basically it's being set up as an intermodal terminal to facilitate fuel into the Galilee Basin about 268 B-doubles leave Mackay each day to take fuel out into the Galilee it's best suited to go on to rail with an interchange at Yamala and then go out on road. What underpins the efficient use of this or the efficiency generated by this intermodal terminal is the containerisation and the standardised logistics platform using flatbed rolling stock with click-on containers versus the purchase of bespoke rolling stock which is highly expensive and underutilised throughout the large part of the year. The advantage also is the back-loading opportunities for a large amount of agricultural products generated in and around the Emerald area with contestable demand spread across a wide variety including grain, citrus fruits, wood chips and forestry products that can then be exported using the standardised logistics platform where the actual containers just click on to the flatbed rolling stock. Fuel road trips, road freight movements and improved safety are one of the large benefits to be generated from the Yamala intermodal terminal including also the opportunity for back-loading opportunities as I mentioned previously. The use of a flatbed standardised logistics platform also overcome seasonality issues with improved utilisation of infrastructure which again points to improved efficiency. Since 2010, A-doubles have been used to move grain into the Port of Brisbane they're about four metres long than the previously used B-double and they can carry two 40-foot containers and four 20-foot containers and the only combination that can do that. For a four metre length increase the A-doubles provide 25% productivity gain and they're also a lot safer. They're regulated under PBS. They can stop quicker than B-doubles and are more agile thanks to the Dolly system which actually enables them to take the two 40-foot containers. Very soon now that some of the vulnerable structures are also being upgraded the A-doubles should be able to run at HML high mass limits which equates to be about 85 tonnes. When that happens, one of the biggest producers of containers in this country I think they are the biggest producer, JV Australia will be able to take two 40-foot meat containers to the Port of Brisbane which will represent a huge productivity gain. However, efficiencies need to be considered along the whole supply chain so currently the QTLC in conjunction with the Queensland Government is looking to optimise the use of catalytic infrastructure such as the Toomba second range crossing where Type 1 road trains will be permitted to go through the tunnel and to make sure that we can actually take those from Toomba all the way down to the Port of Brisbane but therefore optimising across point of production to the point of export and not just part of the network. Supply chain coordination offers the agricultural sector an opportunity to reduce costs through improved utilisation of data in a shared logistics platform. This is an initiative that I keep banging on about which everyone thinks only relates to coal but I'm going to point out today some of the principal supporting supply chain coordination which can be applied to the ag sector to improve productivity and efficiency and largely relates to what Hermione was discussing before around visibility and traceability in the system. The Hunter Valley coal chain coordinator basically provides a helicopter view of the entire supply chain as well as essentialised planning and monitoring service on behalf of all of its members. Its aim is to ensure minimum total logistics cost and maximise volumes in accordance with the collectively agreed needs. It also recommends where infrastructure and investment are along the supply chain. The key component of the supply chain coordination function is slot management which actually coordinates production volumes with train capacity and shipping schedules. I'll just... Here's an example of actually how the Hunter Valley coal chain operates is, as you can see there, there's 1,000 kilometres of rail tracks, 1,600 annual train deliveries, 40 coal mines, 1200 coal export vessels and the handling of 80 different coal blends. It has excelled in identifying and optimising innovative efficiency and investment improvements in the Hunter Valley coal chain and on a smaller scale... I mean, a lot of people argue agricultural commodities can't collectively get together and coordinate on that kind of scale. In Queensland, the Dalrymple Bay coal terminal coal chain coordinator, I'll only say that once, actually operates on a smaller scale through producers, Rio Tinto and Peabody Energy, working with Pacific National to again coordinate on agreed-to needs volumes, shipping schedule, rail slot management to actually ensure that everyone's productivity is maximised and the minimum logistics costs are incurred by optimising that supply chain through optimising of the infrastructure and the systems within it. The principles can be applied to agricultural supply chains providing volume slots, shipping receivable times through the provision of production forecasts and contractual needs, rail capacity and constraints and port loading information. And we recently had a case in Queensland where we had a bumper chickpea crop. No one knew that we were having a bumper chickpea crop, including the transport people, so we had no capacity to actually fill the vessels that were arriving, resulting in the National Heavy Vehicle Regulator getting a call, I think, on Saturday night to get special permits for a whole range of high productivity vehicles to take all these commodities down into the port. And so the whole idea of the supply chain coordination is that that visibility would be within the system and we can actually adequately plan according to the needs of those producers and the shipping schedules to maximise the use of the rail network to achieve the lowest common, lowest logistics costs with the most amount of efficiency within the system. Critical to the success of these initiatives is the sharing of and efficient management of data and beyond infrastructure upgrades, innovation or agricultural supply chain data and information management is required to optimise productivity. Another data sharing system which promotes visibility and traceability as a port community system, it seeks to optimise supply chain productivity through an open commuter system which allows all the supply chain participants to rapidly and securely exchange information after a single submission of data by the data owner. It connects the multiple systems operated by the various operators within the supply chain. So if you're thinking shipping, container numbers, voyage numbers, receiver addresses, all those kinds of things, they're actually in operation in a number of ports throughout the world and have proved their worth in terms of the efficiency they derive as well as the productivity they generate. In Australia, a couple of entities are working together with various ports around Australia to develop and implement a port community system here. What we do need to explore further, however, is what value could be conferred to agricultural supply chains. I noted earlier that our port costs are extremely high, that our freight transport costs are extremely high component of overall production costs. So what kind of value could be conferred from a port community system to agricultural commodities, particularly in the reduction of data error as well as the duplication or repetitive inputting of data in multiple times throughout the supply chain. It's worth looking at given the costs. In summary though, infrastructure upgrades alone are not going to be the panacea to improving productivity, not even in Queensland in the agricultural supply chains. We need a whole of supply chain approach, not an industry approach, particularly within agricultural industries to consider how it can optimise our freight system through innovative approaches to coordination and to the use of data. It needs to be whole of supply chain. We cannot seek to optimise one part of the network and expect that there will be efficiency gains that flow through up from downstream where there may be impediments blocking inefficiency and productivity. That's all. Thanks.