Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull says he is troubled by the way Murray Goulburn has treated farmers and pledged to meet the dairy giant to "get to the bottom" of the milk-price crisis.
But the opposition argues more could have been done to support farmers facing a year of below-cost milk prices.
Murray Goulburn announced on Tuesday an opening dairy price of $4.31 for next season, further devastating farmers still reeling from a shock price cut from $5.60 to between $4.75 and $5 in April.
The producer said the price was a fair reflection of the global market, but farming groups say its 2600 dairy suppliers will run at a loss because it costs them at least $5 to produce the milk.
The Prime Minister said on Wednesday that if re-elected, he and Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce would meet Murray Goulburn's management and directors to discuss the issues facing farmers.
"There are a number of elements in the way these dairy farmers have been treated that is very, very troubling," Mr Turnbull told 2GB radio.
"This is a matter of real concern to the government, it's a real concern to Barnaby as Agriculture Minister.
"We will sit down with them and we will get a briefing from them and we'll get to the bottom of it."
Mr Turnbull's government made $555 million in low-interest loans available to affected farmers after the April price drop.
Labor's agriculture spokesman Joel Fitzgibbon said the government's intervention came too late, and that more could have been achieved had it joined his efforts to pressure the company to pay farmers more.
"From day one I would have been all over Murray Goulburn, insisting that they take responsibility for their errors and their abuse of their powers and that they use every mechanism available to them to keep that milk price higher," Mr Fitzgibbon said.
Chief among those mechanisms, Mr Fitzgibbon said, was for Murray Goulburn to pump the $42 million net profit announced on Tuesday into higher farm gate prices instead of paying it out as dividends.
Mr Fitzgibbon said he wrote to chairman Phillip Tracy suggesting this, but it was rejected because they were not facing "abnormal circumstances".
"They've lost their CEO, they've lost their chief financial officer, milk prices have collapsed under them, farmers are now in debt and if this is not an extraordinary circumstance I simply don't know what is," Mr Fitzgibbon said, while repeating his call for Mr Tracy's resignation.
Under Murray Goulburn's profit sharing agreement, two-thirds of profit is paid out to farmer members and the rest is paid to investors who bought shares during a $500 million capital raising in 2015.
That money was raised to pay for new factories and other infrastructure.
The co-operative's rules state it can funnel profits into higher milk payments during prolonged levels of higher competition and in other circumstances that make it necessary to protect its farmers' profitability.
Mr Joyce would organise a symposium of dairy farmers, processors and retails "to discuss industry solutions to the challenges that have been exposed by Murray Goulburn's retrospective farm gate milk price reductions and cheap supermarket milk", if re-elected, he said in a statement.
Murray Goulburn, which sells locally under the Devondale brand and makes half its revenue from international sales, says a global milk glut is depressing milk prices and that Tuesday's farm gate announcement is a fair reflection of the market.
