Mr. Tim Cullinan:

It is not a question of whether an early retirement scheme is a good idea. We all accept people need to be able to retire when they come to a certain age. Over the years, we have lost a lot of older people in farm fatalities, which is a tragedy in itself. The problem we have comes back to funding and resources. We have to channel the resources in the best way possible. We are looking at the vulnerable sectors. We started off speaking about viable farmers, particularly farmers relying on funding from Pillar 2. Obviously if we have a retirement scheme, the money will come out of that and we will leave other sectors short of finances. It comes back to the original problem of there not being enough money in the budget. We have to target the money at the vulnerable sectors. Looking at it, if people retire from farming now and sell their entitlement to get out of farming, the money going back to them should be tax free. We have a system whereby the rental income from leasing the land is tax free.