1 June 2026
Samuel Laffer is QFF’s Senior Policy Officer - Agriculture, leading coordinated, sector-wide responses to complex policy challenges spanning land use, safety and compliance, environment, energy, input and output security, and innovation. This diversity of policy priorities reflects the overlapping commercial, regulatory, environmental and operational pressures that Queensland farmers contend with every day – and that they often face all at once.
Sam’s role involves tracking these policy settings, identifying where they’re generating unnecessary friction for industry, and working with QFF’s members to build the evidence base for reforms that reflect how agricultural businesses operate. Coordination is critical to how that work gets done, staying across a wide range of government processes simultaneously, connecting the dots across QFF’s advocacy priorities, and making sure QFF’s policy positions reflect what is genuinely happening on the ground.
In practice, this means Sam is rarely working on just one issue at a time. In any given week he will be working across a land-use consultation, an electricity tariff analysis, a safety regulation review and an emerging carbon market opportunity, all running in tandem.
The stakeholder mix is equally broad. Sam regularly engages with QFF members, Corporate Partners, commodity and industry bodies, State and Federal Government representatives, regulators and allied sectors where policy decisions flow directly into agricultural businesses.
A big part of what makes that engagement useful is Sam’s ability to translate dense regulatory language it into something practical and actionable. The goal is twofold: making sure QFF can advocate accurately on behalf of our peak body members and making sure our members themselves understand what a proposed change will mean for how their industry operates.
Seeing the bigger picture in agricultural policy development
Sam says that the real issue is never a single regulatory or legislative change; it’s the cumulative weight of policy complexity landing on farm businesses all at once.
“Rules and laws get developed in silos, with little thought given to how they interact across planning, environment, energy and water, biosecurity and everything else. The result is duplication, uncertainty and a kind of compliance fatigue that drains productivity without improving outcomes,” Sam said.
“What tends to get missed is that a farm isn’t simply a business unit you can regulate in isolation. It’s a workplace, a family enterprise, a land management operation and a critical part of a regional supply chain, often all at the same time. Policy that doesn’t account for that reality rarely delivers on what it set out to achieve.”
Sam at QFF's recent Corporate Partner Networking event.
L-R: QFF Non-Executive Director Georgie Krieg, QFF Senior Policy Officer Samuel Laffer, CANEGROWERS CEO Dan Galligan, QFF President Aaron Kiely, QFF Non-Executive Director Kay Tommerup
Sam says that the Queensland agriculture sector needs a shift from regulation that focuses on compliance for its own sake, to policy that’s genuinely focused on outcomes - reducing unnecessary red tape without compromising safety, stewardship or community trust.
“Good policy must be designed with industry at the table from the start. It’s evidence-based, proportionate, and built to support investment and innovation, not to quietly make both harder than they need to be,” Sam said.
“Farm viability hinges on regulatory settings that give businesses genuine confidence to adapt, invest and take on employees. When policy is unpredictable or out of step with operational realities, producers don’t collapse overnight, they just quietly stop growing, stop hiring, stop committing capital. Those costs are diffuse and slow-moving, which is exactly why they’re so easy for policymakers to overlook.”
“However, when regulation does work well, the benefits reach well beyond the farm gate. It strengthens supply chains, supports regional jobs, and underpins the kind of food security outcomes that the broader community tends to take for granted, until they can’t.”
How QFF works with our members to develop policy positions
Sam’s role provides the critical link between what our peak body members’ growers are dealing with on the ground and what QFF is advocating for at a policy level.
Working closely with each of our peak body members, Sam extracts the specific concerns of Queensland farmers – packaging their insights into submissions and briefings, to support direct government engagement.
QFF members receive regular updates on regulatory developments and straightforward advice on what proposed changes mean in practice. While the policy issues Sam focuses on shift from day to day the through-line across his work is always the same: track the developments, build the evidence, and keep members and government engaged to advance agriculture in Queensland.