AN aggressive 1980s campaign against banking foreclosures - Bank Watch - will be relaunched in Queensland by North West Queensland mayor and landowner, John Wharton.
The campaign, due to begin in February, will unite the rural community behind farmers suffering crippling debt.
It will devise strategies to stop foreclosures, quarantine debt to speed recovery, and help banks and their farming customers agree on joint debt strategies.
The Richmond Mayor is the public face of farming foreclosure in Queensland after the Commonwealth Bank subsidiary, Bank West, sent receivers to take control of his family holdings at Richmond and Einasleigh two months ago.
He will address an inaugural meeting of the new Queensland lobby group in February.
Since news of Mr Wharton's plight was broken by Queensland Country Life, he has been swamped by calls from landholders concerned about their own financial vulnerability.
"I will talk to the meeting about receivership, what farmers should do to avoid it and what to do if it occurs," he said.
Bank Watch was formed in South Australia in 1988, after years of drought on the Eyre Peninsula left local wheat farmers heavily burdened by debt.
Public meetings led to a stake-out by campaigners at a highly publicised mortgagees' sale of properties at Ceduna and Cungena. The group campaigned to allow heavily indebted farmers to be protected from foreclosure until they were free to leave at a time of their own choosing.
Mr Wharton said Queensland Bank Watch would not target banks, but inform landholders of their rights, offer advice, work co-operatively and develop strategies to avoid the forced sale of rural property.
"It will help people to be better at finance," he said.
"They will be better prepared in their dealings with banks and more readily understand the documents and statements they receive. We are good business managers, but it is still possible to be shafted because of your finances.
"In South Australia it was the same process we face today in the North West and in Queensland as a whole," he said.
"Down there, Bank Watch stopped the process, but up here, we are still recovering from 2009. Many people are worried about their debt. I say to them to go and talk to their banks to look for a restructure of their debt.
"People talk about the good season and the high prices, but if you look for a comparison with the price of farm inputs, we need a lot more than $2 a kilogram. We'd need $3.50 or $4 a kilo to be on par with the rising price of a Toyota or a kilometre of fencing.
"We need to see the return on whole cows at more than $3 a kilo.
"The prices aren't there and that is why today even the biggest cattle operations return no more than a 1 percent margin."
The proposed Queensland model would be open to all interested parties.
It would provide counselling, negotiate deals on behalf of clients, and renegotiate and restructure farm debt packages.
In some cases, Bank Watch would lobby financiers to park part of a farmer's liability to enable the farming enterprise to recover.
"In too many cases, banks seem to operate on the assumption that their clients will win lotto tomorrow," Mr Wharton said.
"They have clients $5 million in debt who can service a debt of no more than $3m.
"The same people have a property worth $3m and the banks have no strategy to help them resolve the situation in ways that are mutually beneficial.
"There are options. You can park a parcel of that debt and set about dealing with the liability one parcel at a time."
Mr Wharton said a second strategy to increase farm profits through online bartering would be launched by a group of North West Queensland beef producers at the same time.
He said the scheme, to eliminate the need for cash payments by trading stock for agistment on common terms, would enable producers to reduce their tax liability.
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