AT least four top cereal-breeding scientists with experience that cannot be replaced are among 40 staff who will lose their jobs at the Leslie Research Station in Toowoomba.
Primary Industries Minister Tim Mulherin has avoided any reference to 'sackings' and given assurances that displaced staff will be paid redundancy or offered other jobs.
He delivered the pre-Christmas bombshell amid widespread rumours that another 50 staff would go from DPI Fisheries.
The Leslie Research Station has a proud record of wheat and other cereal plant breeding, and is esteemed throughout the nation as a source of improved farming production and science.
The gutting of the Leslie station, and the almost inevitable sell-off of its land, buildings and facilities by the Bligh Labor Government has provoked uproar from a wide spectrum of Opposition politicians and primary industry.
The Shadow Minister for Primary Industries and Fisheries and Member for Condamine, Ray Hopper, described the scuttling of Leslie station staff as a "horrible Christmas card".
"It is absolutely disgraceful for the Minister to tell so many loyal and long-serving staff they weren't wanted and to take redundancy or move on," Mr Hopper said.
"What sort of person would do that to staff and their families on Christmas Eve?
"The Bligh economic mess must be a whole lot worse than we're being told - for so many staff in a production-linked department to be speared.
"The Minister has destroyed an irreplaceable grains research facility that was paid for by growers.
"We're supposed to be in the Smart State, so how smart is it to destroy a highly respected research centre when we're being told to adapt our production and farming systems to climate change?"
Mr Hopper said the rumour of intention to discard 50 staff from fisheries early in the new year would be a shameful contradiction of Labor's often-trumpeted policy of greater fisheries protection.
The hollow promise would not be possible with even fewer fisheries staff to enforce new regulations.
Mr Hopper said Labor already had sold off the State's only tropical dairy herd at Kairi in North Queensland and now was targeting essential grain and fisheries services.
Mr Hopper reminded farmers that before the last Queensland election he promised an injection of $140 million into primary industries services, including $40 million for biosecurity over the next four years.
He pledged to carry out that promise to its fullest extent if the LNP won the next Queensland election and he became the State's primary industries minister.
He said the present Labor policy was to make the once-great Primary Industries Department a money-collecting vehicle for Queensland.
He said food producers were "the ones to suffer most".
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