No farmers, no food
OUT in rural Australia, off the highways and byways, on the roads less travelled, live 3% of Australians who are basically unnoticed, under-rated and easily forgotten, except they produce the foodstuffs that keep the bellies of the other 97% fed. Or indeed they used to, until free trade agreements took over and changed the shelves of the grocery stores, so they now resemble a gathering of the United Nations, and you must play a game of “spot the Aussie” and scan the labels in the slim hope of finding something actually grown and produced in Australia.
It is not because the Australian farmers are no longer producing enough to supply their fellow Australians the substance of life, but rather, most of the local produce is being shipped overseas, as fast as the middle men can whip it out of the farm gate.
You could be excused if you thought farmers must be living high on the hog, on the back of all this exporting of Australian agricultural products, to meet an ever-increasing demand from overseas customers, but sadly this is not the case.
Australia is awash with red and green tape, which is straight out of the “bureaucrat’s manual for subversion of a nation”, and which is being aided and abetted by the animal and environmental activists and their Marxist climate change agenda, which is being legislated into the lives of every Australian at rapidity that defies any logic, and consequently sending Australia broke.
With all of this, it makes you wonder why anyone would want to be in agriculture.
There are still the tenacious few, who cling on in the hope tomorrow will be the start of a turnaround back to an Australia that encouraged primary production, celebrated innovation and championed common sense.
An Australia that knew what it was to be hungry, and valued the people who grew the food and fibre, and trusted them, as they knew the only thing that stood between them and possible starvation, was the family farmer.
I personally feel that Australia is now in a very vulnerable position, when a meagre 3% of the entire Australian population, who have the skills and generational knowledge, grow the food and fibre for the nation and increasingly the world, but who are under constant attack from those who wish to see Australia weakened and defenceless, unable to feed itself, beholden to foreign countries for our food. Foreign countries see the value in our farming and grazing lands. They are buying it up hand over fist to ensure their own food security, or else are mining it for our fine quality coal or tapping into the coal seam gas reserves to fuel their own cooking fires, leaving Australia gasping for energy.
Along with the looming reality of our GAB being poisoned through CSG mining and the stripping of the aquifers of irreplaceable and life-sustaining water, and using it as a waste residue, agriculture is under sustained attack. We need to take back the power and refuse to be driven into a corner from which there is no escape.