It is quite obvious that the new prime minister, Scott Morrison, wants us all to know he cares about drought-affected farmers. It was mentioned prominently in his first press conference as PM and was the purpose of his first trip the next day. But if he is heading out to the bush and not mentioning climate change he is failing to actually listen – not just to those who know from their own experience that the climate is changing but from those advising on how governments should respond.

There is perhaps more romance with agriculture as an industry than any other. There is the nostalgia of the nation riding on the sheep’s back and Clancy of the Overflow seeing the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended.

Climate change making drought worse, says farmers federation chief Read more

The reality, however, is that agriculture (including forestry and fishing) is a small industry. In the latest GDP figures, its output accounted for just 2.3% of GDP – smaller than all other industries except for arts and recreation.

By comparison, mining and manufacturing each were worth 5.9% of GDP, health care and social assistance was 7.4%, construction was 7.5%, and financial and insurance services was the biggest with 8.9%.

There was a time agriculture was bigger than mining, but that time is long past:

Similarly, the importance of agricultural exports has shrunk. Whereas in the early 1970s almost half of our non-service exports were from the rural sector, now they are worth just 15%:

That’s not so much because the agricultural exports have declined but because mining exports have exploded off the chart:

It is also not a huge employer. Only five industries employ fewer workers than the 325,000 employed in agriculture. Back in the 1980s it employed 6% of all employees, now it is just over 2.5% – only manufacturing has seen a bigger fall in the share of employed:

And in terms of contributions to economic growth it also is rather small potatoes. Over the past 20 years only manufacturing, other services, electricity and gas, and arts and recreation have contributed less to the increase in the size of our economy.

Of the 60% increase in GDP since 1998, agriculture contributed just 1 percentage point.

But that is not to say it is unimportant. The impact of the drought has already flowed through to the GDP figures, with it being the only industry to detract from GDP in the past year:

And we can see that droughts have a significant impact on how agriculture contributes to economic growth. In the drought periods of the mid-1990s and early-2000s, agriculture at times detracted almost 0.8% points from annual growth:

To put that another way, had for example, the output of agriculture kept level in real terms during 2003, our economy would have grown by almost a third faster than it did.

But these things do have a way of levelling out. Every financial year the ABS calculates both annual GDP and annual “non-farm GDP”. Over the 20 years to 2016-17, non-farm GDP grew by less than 1% more than total GDP:

So why does the industry get so much attention? The clear reason is geography and intensity. While across the nation the industry may not rate highly, in some states it is more important than in others:

Tasmania, South Australia and Queensland for example are much more reliant upon agriculture than the rest of the nation. Over the past decade agriculture has provided nearly 17% of the growth of the state economies of Tasmania and South Australia. When things go bad for agriculture there, things go bad for the state.

And the thing about agriculture is because – unlike say health and education and retail, which is spread rather evenly cross city and rural areas – agriculture is greatly important in the rural areas. It may employ under 3% of people nationally, but in rural areas it is the major industry.

In South Australia, for example, in the regions it can employ up to 18% of all workers, while Adelaide, not surprisingly, sees very few agricultural workers:

In the Shepparton area of Victoria, 20% of employees are in agriculture while around Warrnambool nearly a third of people work in the industry. Needless to say, when a drought hits and the industry suffers, it hits these areas much harder than when a factory or retail centre closes in the much more diversified city areas.

So while on a national level our economy will cope with a drought, it has the potential to smash certain rural areas.

But is continual drought assistance the way to keep the industry going? As Ross Gittins has noted, a report by the Productivity Commission in 2009 on drought assistance found that it was not actually as all pervasive as we might imagine.

The report found that “during 2007-08, nearly half of Australia’s dairy and broadacre farms in drought-declared areas did manage without EC [exceptional circumstances] assistance. Over the six years to 2007-08, on average nearly 70 per cent of these farms managed without EC assistance.”

'No real appetite': former farmers chief lashes ministers over climate link to drought Read more

So those 70% of farms must be doing something right. Possibly they are preparing for such droughts better than the other 30% – a smart thing to do especially given the frequency with which they occur.

But more crucial is the commission’s major recommendation. It argues that “governments need to commit to a long term reform path that recognises that the primary responsibility for managing risks, including from climate variability and change, rests with farmers.”

If you are a prime minister going out to the rural areas and you’re not talking about climate change, and you’re not suggesting that droughts are more likely to occur and thus farmers need to take greater responsibility, then you are failing in your job.

Play Video 3:48 Australia's climate wars: a decade of dithering – video

You might get some nice vision of you standing next to a farmer looking like you care and, as Morrison did, you can hold up a photo saying how green it all can once again be, but without considering the long-term impacts you are just screaming into the wind.

When deriding renewable energy, government ministers love to note that the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow; perhaps they should also note that for farmers the rain doesn’t always fall, and that climate change will make such times worse. It is about time the government starts recognising that fact.