Malcolm Turnbull with Paul Donoley (left) and Bruce Alexander during a visit to the township of Blackall, Queensland.
Perhaps it’s due to the fact that the pernicious influence of Barnaby Joyce on policy has been removed, but when Malcolm Turnbull spoke ahead of his tour of drought-affected regions in Queensland on Monday, he made sense. Farmers, he said, were going to have to adapt to a changing climate that was making rainfall more variable. “You’ve got to ensure we can do everything we can to ensure that farmers are resilient,” the Prime Minister said.
They were remarkable words coming from a Coalition Prime Minister, not merely for the acceptance of the impact of climate change, but for the implication that agriculture had to be prepared for greater variability rather than simply relying on governments to help out whenever drought struck. No wonder traditional Nationals like John Anderson — deputy prime minister when climate denialism was explicit government policy — immediately got their backs up.
The approach to drought policy during Barnaby Joyce’s long and disastrous reign as agriculture minister was to throw money at farmers. In Joyce’s 2015 Agricultural Competitiveness White Paper — that’s the one with a white heterosexual family on the cover as the symbol of Australian farming — a quarter-billion dollars in new concessional loans were announced.
Concessional loans are, as the Productivity Commission (PC) pointed out in 2009 in its comprehensive assessment of drought policy, at best a second-rate policy option. They’re not as bad as handouts, because they still leave recipients with some stake in using the money effectively. But there’s no justification for giving businesses cheap loans — either an investment makes commercial sense, in which case a bank will provide a loan, or it doesn’t make commercial sense and the investment shouldn’t be made at all. And there’s no benefit in providing assistance to drought-affected farmers anyway; it merely helps unviable, inefficient and marginal producers stay in business, at the subsidised expense of the majority of farmers who have invested in making their operations resilient. “Most farmers are sufficiently self-reliant to manage climate variability,” the PC concluded, noting that even during the ferocious drought of the 2000s, 70% of farmers hadn’t needed assistance. Drought relief rewards farmers who haven’t bothered to make the same investment in resilience despite knowing there will always be another drought.
Who knows, maybe Turnbull will oversee a new drought policy that stops punishing the majority of farmers who manage their operations responsibly and with an understanding of climate variability.
…”noting that even during the ferocious drought of the 2000s, 70% of farmers hadn’t needed assistance. Drought relief rewards farmers who haven’t bothered to make the same investment in resilience despite knowing there will always be another drought.”
That is not my experience. The Shiptons at Moulamein used the drought relief money to buy property and made millions. Farmers I know around Jerilderie used my photos in an attempt to access drought relief, and I can assure you they were very comfortably well off and managing after having acquired the land as squatters and kept expanding and kept it all in the family. No one size fits all here.
Turnbull is not the leader of this government, he`s a P.M in name only, a captive of the lunatic neo con christian hard right of the coalition, owned by the multi nationals and big business and soon to be consigned to the political history books, in years to come people will ask how this mob of fools ever got themselves elected or how stupid are the voters of Australia to ever have elected them in the first place, although its hard to find anyone that will admit they voted for them, and in New England the mushroom voters will probably go on supporting him and his like and spend their growing poverty gently strumming their banjo`s on the back veranda`s as their sun slowly sets and Barney`s Chinese and big mining masters buy up their farms at a cheaper rate each year.
Could Turnbull deliver a pup? A litter actually. One they called NBN, another was Double Disillusion …….
This reminds me of the time that minister responsible for live exports made some sympathetic speeches about the barbaric suffering it causes. It earned him some positive media coverage as a harbinger of genuine reform…and a month later he quietly announced that it would continue more or less “business as usual”…
But hey, that media coverage (including articles from Mr Keane) portraying him as some sort of brave principled reformer sure helped build his stocks politically…
So it’s good to see journalists learning from this experience and not allowing themselves to be blatantly manipulated again! Fool me once and all that…
After all, if we can rely on anyone to stick by their stated principles and face down the “scum of the earth” in his own government, it’s M Turnbull! I await the “reform” with baited breath!
Some regions of western Qld have been receiving drought relief for 40 of the last 60yrs.
So who are the slow learners, the givers or the recipients?