Stand by farmers

DEAR City Cousins,

The people of the bush need you. Your farmers and graziers are being suffocated under layer upon layer of rules, regulation, bureaucratic red and green tape and having our ability to feed you destroyed. I just wanted to write and let you know that if there was ever a time the bush needs friends, it is now.

I don’t want you to wake up one morning and realise the cost of your groceries is greater than your weekly wage. I don’t want you to have to eat the inferior produce from another country, as there are so few farmers left in Australia to grow the food for your dinner tables.

I don’t want you going into a grocery store only to find the shelves are nearly empty, as the supply lines from the outside world have been cut, and the imported food items can’t get through.

City friends, our core business as a family farmer is to keep the produce in this nation at a premium, so you have as many choices as you want to feed your family.

The great Australian produce is rapidly being replaced in the grocery stores, by imports due to free-trade agreements, and many of you are unhappy about this, as the food is often many weeks or even months old and the origins are not always clear.

Most of you would always prefer to buy Australian, but are feeling frustrated as this is becoming increasing harder. I too feel your annoyance.

I just want to let you know that the Queensland Government, under the guise of “saving the koalas and the Great Barrier Reef” has now stolen your future food security.

How have they done this I hear you ask? Well, the Government has decided the easiest way to meet climate change agreements and “save” the koala and Great Barrier Reef, is to stop farmers being able to manage the vegetation on their own land, and make pseudo national parks out of the farms and grazing properties, with no compensation being paid at all.

Let me give an analogy: You own a four-bedroom, twobathroom house on a block of land worth X and overnight the government rezones that land and then says that your house block is no longer allowed to be four bedrooms and must now be turned into a two-bedroom treehouse with one bathroom. Your equity in that house would plummet and yet your mortgage with the bank would remain.

The truth is, broad-scale tree clearing was stopped in Queensland in the middle of the 2000s and due to the virulent nature of vegetation, the trees have grown back thicker than they were before and are taking over. Most of the clearing in this state has happened on the coast in koala country, where the urban development has exploded.

I am telling you all of this to ask if you would stand with the farmers. We are not the destroyers of the land, we are people who love and care for our land and the animals.

I am asking you, our city friends, to stand up to the Government and tell them that you are a farmer’s friend, and mates stand with mates and have their back, and you trust the farmers to grow your food and fibre. #iamafarmersfriend