MATTERS OF PUBLIC IMPORTANCE – Agriculture

Farmers in this country do it tough enough as it is. They struggle to stay on the land, especially through the vagaries of different weather and commodity fluctuations. We have a situation right now where our government is making their lives harder through its obsessive pursuit of completely
ineffective climate change policies. The government has decided to pursue a climate reporting mechanism which even its own figures say would cost Australian businesses over $2 billion a year, and some of those businesses will be farm enterprises. Under this absurd approach, a bank or insurance company will have to assess not only the carbon emissions of its own operations but those of its customers. Let’s say one of those customers happens to be a cattle grazier in Central Queensland, where I’m from—Rockhampton, the beef capital of Australia. That grazier, banking with, let’s say, ANZ, will have to assess, write down and tabulate all of the methane emissions from their cattle; from the fuel use on their property and the associated carbon emissions; and from any construction they do, with the embodied emissions in things like concrete, steel, et cetera. It is a bureaucratic nightmare being imposed on them by this government, a red-tape tsunami imposed on our hardworking farmers along with many other businesses across the country. What is it going to do? It’s going to do absolutely nothing. Obviously, the incoming Trump administration is pulling out of all this stuff. As to anything we do, what our farmers collect: what’s going to be done with the
information? It will be collected, it will be sent down here, there will be people employed to tabulate and report on it, and then nothing will change except that a whole lot of people will have had their lives made a whole lot more frustrating.