Regarding the thread title, AUI it's more a north-south thing than east-west. Many (though by no means all) southern dairy farmers are thriving, while in Queensland the industry's been hit a lot harder.
It seems a lot of people blame dollar milk; I think that's unfair. Consumers shouldn't have to pay more just because some of our farmers are struggling. If they want consumers to pay more for milk, they should produce a better product. I'd quite happily pay $2 for a litre of pascalised, high omega 3 milk from A2 cows, but I've yet to see such milk on sale, and I bet they'll try to charge much more than $2/l when it eventually becomes available.

Do we really need milk?

Humans seem to be the only animals that drink it after they are weaned (excepting animals that are given it by humans).

It'll be alright. Stop worrying. Plus the farmers can always sell their properties to the Chinese and get out of the game. There are plenty of Chinese wanting to come to Australia and take over things like farms.

Some will not be aware meat exports from this country started with the by product of the dairy industry
The black baldy calves went to America as hamburger
Right now the very best land NSW has in dairying is drought stricken and looking bad
I will pay higher prices forever to help but some of us never care for who made it just price
We need politicians to understand our exports are increasingly going to be food related and get behind dairying

Why not just sell all the farms to the Chinese? They have just as much right to own them as anyone else.

Of course dairying is finished, anywhere that doesn't receive enough rainfall & requires irrigation, because we won't pay enough for our milk.

A school mate, was a dairy farmers kid. They had a 400 acre farm, with about 200 cows, milking 70 on average. Three related families ran it, one the farm, one did the milking & the third delivered the milk to your billy can, back in the days of fresh unadulterated milk delivered to your door, with no plastic bottles.

The operation employed 12 family members & another 6 or so workers. Most of the kids went through uni, when it was expensive.

I have a dairy farmer mate today. He is well over 80, still working 7 days a week, to help his son, who is now the farmer. They have 450 acres of good river flat country heavily irrigated, [fortunately from an unregulated river so the water is affordable, regulated irrigation water is too expensive for dairy returns], supporting 300 cows, milking 140. There is just the 2 of them, & the sons wife who does the clean up after milking, after the kids are off to school, while the men run the farm.

There are no staff, they can't afford any. The son works about 100 hours a week, my mate about 70. I can't imagine why the hell they do it, not counting the wife's labour, the income is about $16 an hour. I guess 3 generations of farming the same land is a strong attraction. They are the last in a district that had 20 dairies 60 years ago.

We won't pay enough for our food to make it worth growing. We had an orchard at Young when I was at school. Today I can buy peaches at Coles for less than we were paid for ours back in the 50s. Sure they are not quite the choice fruit we grew, but still pretty good. Just how much longer people are going to be silly enough to work their butts off producing our food for lousy returns is a serious question?