I’ve been asked to speak outside Parliament House tomorrow morning, to the ‘Convoy of No Confidence’. What an honour. 
Following are my speech notes:
THERE is nothing more basic to our physical well-being than food, and Australian farmers are amongst the most efficient and responsible food producers in the world. Yet they are increasingly demonised and their businesses right now under extraordinary and unnecessary pressure.
The pressure comes, at one level, from apparently arbitrary decisions made by this Commonwealth government, but the previous Coalition government was no better.
Decisions affecting agriculture increasingly reflect the values of an overweight metropolitan elite who have no empathy for, or understanding of, food production or food producers.
It is fashionable to denigrate the very people who keep our supermarket shelves piled high with affordable milk, meat, fruit and vegetable. And so GetUp! – with members who mostly sit down – dictate ever more impractical but fashionable policies.
Apparently ignorant of the recent widespread flooding in the Murray Darling, there is even a GetUp! campaign claiming the region is on verge of ecological catastrophe.
But if GetUp! campaigners got up, and got out to the Murray Darling, they would see that the Basin has come roaring back to life since the drought broke.
Soaking rains returned to the Murray Darling last summer. But you may be surprised to learn that despite the rain, the abundance of wildlife, and the full dams, many food producers along the Murray have a very limited water allocation.
There is water in even the largest storages, to the extent that some are dangerously full, yet many irrigators along the Murray are now on just 10 per cent of their allocation.
As Murrumbidgee irrigator Debbie Buller recently wrote to me:
“It is inconceivable that in a year like this when we all know that there is no shortage of water, that traditional owners of irrigation entitlements on the Murray and Murrumbidgee Rivers and traditional owners of storage in the Southern Connected System do not have access to their [full] water entitlements.”
“More than anything else, after years of struggle through the recent crippling drought and followed up by a series of devastating floods, we need to be given the opportunity to plan confidently for some very productive seasons based on current inflows, snow pack depth and dam heights.”
Instead Debbie and others are being encouraged to sell their water. Sell their capacity to grow food.
The grand plan may be to run all the water down to the Lower Lakes in South Australia, ostensibly for the environment.
But it is not more fresh water that the natural environment of the terminal, coastal lakes need, it is a functioning estuary.
During the recent drought, the obvious and natural solution for the drying Lower Lakes was to open the 7.6 kilometre of barrage holding back the Southern Ocean. But instead politicians and environmentalists, including the Australian Conservation Foundation, used the drying lakes to campaign against upstream food producers.
Yes, it is so fashionable to campaign against our most efficient food producers – our irrigators – to even blame them for the drought.
But as a nation we should be careful what we wish for. The implications of recent policy decisions affecting agriculture, particularly water reform, will be far reaching.
We live in a land of drought or flooding rains. Our climate is not benign and never will be – not even if this government introduces a carbon tax.
Without infrastructure and industry the Australian climate will starve you, or wash you away.
It is dangerous to take all we currently have for granted.
Fashionable, righteous campaigning has influenced government policies and undermined our productive base, our capacity to produce food. But these same campaigns won’t ever, can’t ever feed you.
Fashion is the lowest form of ideology and fashion can’t feed a nation.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Sounds a very fitting and relevant speech to me, Jen.
Australian food producers are still among the most competitive in the world and while we can do without much of the junk we import, we need food.
In these uncertain economic times, making sure of our nation’s food supply should be the No. 1 priority of any sane govt.
Getting Get Up!s and other enviro-wackos to accept the real world however, is probably beyond speeches.
Rest assured, someone has some figurines and factoids, maybe even some modelling, to show that agriculture doesn’t matter much anyhow. Just wait for it. They’ve been crossing Zombies with Hipsters in a special breeding program and and we thought it was tertiary education. Big mistake.
Go get ’em tomorrow, Jennifer!
Jennifer,
congratulations on being asked to address the Rally.
You notes show a considered and thoughtful response that makes up just part of why ordinary Australians are angry.
There’s no need for radicalism at something like this.
I wonder if (behind the scenes, because there’s no way they would admit to it) those who would not show at rallies like this are not watching footage and listening to exactly what is being said.
Tony.
Good for you Jen,
As usual you have managed to clearly explain some rather complex and vexing issues.
That is a rare talent.
Thank you for all the work you have done on this issue.
I particularly love your closing 2 lines re the Australian Climate and fashion and ideology.
Well done.
Best of luck in Canberra.
John Izzard has a few bon mots:
“What does a dollop of Heinz Big Red tomato sauce have to do with the Carbon Tax? What does a Peach Melba? What about baked-beans on toast—or a Pear Flan? Or a Spaghetti Bolognaise? If you eat any of these, or thousands of other basic food products—and the ingredients are Australian made—there’s a 90% chance you’re going to get whacked!”
http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/qed/2011/08/big-red-s-red-tax
How absolutely looney is this ALP mob. And a fair slice of the media are just as complicit.
Nobody’s asking anything like the questions that were asked about the GST.
So the question then has to be asked – where is Abbott’s pledge to blow the barrages? Why does the Opposition not champion this issue.
“Yes it is so fashionable to campaign against our most efficient food producers – our irrigators – to even blame them for the drought”
The price of food is the governing factor of civilisation:
http://www.thegwpf.org/international-news/3674-the-cause-of-riots-and-the-price-of-food.html
What a flea-brained question, Luke. With our acquiescent, greenie oriented media, that has not ever become an issue.
Abbott can’t even get traction when he states the screaming obvious.
He’s not the least bit short of issues, only media support.
The MSM aren’t even interested in a Princeton Professor’s wisdom:
“Happer discusses what he calls the “contemporary moral epidemic” of climate alarmism: the notion that increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide, will have disastrous consequences for mankind and for the planet and advocates a sober and balanced assessment based on empirical observations, not computer models.
“CO2 does indeed cause some warming of our planet. Other things being equal, more CO2 will cause more warming. The question is how much warming, and whether the increased CO2 and the warming it causes will be good or bad for the planet,” Happer writes.
When you’ve got the CME high ground, reality is never a problem.
I went to last weeks CO2 tax protest and we had at least 6500 people there.A lot of people cannot go to Canberra because of pure economic necessity.A day off work and the cost of travelling puts a severe dent in budgets of many who are just surviving.
Don’t trust any of pur pollies,since they are all beholding to the banking,military,industrial complex.Our country is owned and controlled by Global Corporates.We are just the debt slaves that make their wheels turn for profit.A carbon tax will be final nail in our coffin.
” advocates a sober and balanced assessment based on empirical observations,’ BRILLIANT – obtain one replicate Earth – increase CO2 to 600 ppm and observe over 100 years. Report back,
So you think that the precautionary principle where all our skills and jobs are exported and those 600 ppm arrive a decade earlier and we will be too broke to do anything about it if there is a problem, is the way to go?
That’s not just obtoose, that’s KEN U B SODUM!
OT but from Bolta’
“No better time to drop these taxes”
“Bluescope Steel will today announce the shutdown of one of the nations three remaining blast furnaces and the loss of at least 1000 jobs.”
YES, WELL TIMED .THE SCREWS ARE REALLY TIGHTENING ON JOOLYA NOW. A COUNTDOWN TO GIVE HER A BIT OF ALARMISM. 3 2 1 BLASTFURNACES……CLOSE STEEL INDUSTRY.
Luke,
Abbott won’t “blow up the barrages”. In fact the South Australian Liberals are the problem. It is the South Australian dairy farmers who campaigned for the barrages and who now use the lakes to water their cows and irrigate their pastures… many with a riparian right so they don’t even pay for the water.
The SA Liberals are dictating national water policy…
PS I’ve just made some minor modification to the above notes. In particular, NSW General Security Murray irrigators do have an allocaition… even if it is only 10 per cent.
Ah so the Murray problems in this instance have nothing to do with carbon taxes and Labor and the Greens but SA Libs?
Seems we missed out on a big event. Sorry but I spent most of yesterday morning chasing my internet connection after it went off sometime Saturday.
I did call one or two offices to see if the ALP were responding to the rally but was told truck numbers were way down from the expected numbers given the advance media. Estimates of folk on the hill varied from 200 to 600 (ABC am radio). Now that must be disappointing!
Today’s Canberra Times front page story has another angle. Local government is angry cause we pick up the bill for organizing traffic control etc while Canberrans in large numbers stayed home for the day. Peak hour traffic went easy as it happened. What a fizzer!
Debs; I charged the Lumix early in order to study the assembly out at our show grounds but was tipped off it too was largely empty. I had hoped to chat with some of your suffering mates from interstate but it seems the quieter ones also stayed away.
We generally meet a lot of owner-growers at our w/e markets. Plenty of the usual junk hardware from China but that’s all.
Buyers note; our local ethnic owned green grocer/deli had snap peas from China on sale here yesterday. What’s wrong with our growers?
To put this convoy in “ALP” perspective, yesterday the Government had another soldier death and the closure of export steel production to deal with, also the boat people wont go away, the world’s economy is still teetering on the brink and so on. But imo David Pope’s Canberra Times cartoon quite sums it up again this morning.
Recommended reading for Canberra watchers under Popes View – wait for the post though
http://www.canberratimes.com.au/multimedia/26428/popes-view-august-2011.aspx?page=4
“Buyers note; our local ethnic owned green grocer/deli had snap peas from China on sale here yesterday. What’s wrong with our growers?”
Could it possibly have something to do with a govt that makes it ever more difficult for the small producers so that they and their co-ops get taken over by multi-nationals who always source their product from the world’s cheapest?
We ain’t seen nuthin’ yet!
And that’s exactly what Jen is saying.
Rumor on the ground suggests Julia will lose the PMs job by Xmas and be replaced by a rational person (Simon) who will say let’s not go ahead with the carbon tax until our competitors do likewise.
Labor will still be decimated at the next election, but they may avoid becoming a rump.
Jennifer all the best for your speech this morning and I agree with the content and I know you will be received by the crowd.
At the moment the MDB has a storage capacity of 86% full and I heard this morning this is a record for August as well.
Total storage of MDB is 22,214 GL and the current capacity is 19,170 GL.
So much for silly Timmy’s predictions for severe lack of rainfall and ongoing drought. But why did these stupid Labor premiers buy his garbage and waste billions on desal plants?
http://www.mdba.gov.au/water/waterinstorage
Yes Neville, it really makes you wonder how the ALP could have had so much seriously bad judgement in recent state and fed spheres.
It is due, almost entirely, to chasing the green vote.
And this green vote is the result of our increasingly “clever” youth.
Voting age should be raised to 25.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Nobody predicted a drought of the duration it was. Nobody predicted its end (well apart from the actual season when La Nina was super strong). A previous La Nina in the Millennium drought period didn’t dent the drought.
Neville should give us his procedure for deriving water security and infrastructure provision – the next drought is always out there. Will be it be 1 year or 5 in a row? And remember the PDO is not predictable. A predictor but not predictable?
Have yet to see any sceptic logic on water security.
‘the next drought is always out there’
Yes, but assuming CO2 doesn’t cause global warming we can say with some certainty, based on past natural variability, that Australia can expect a decade of ‘good seasons’.
Yeah Luke, it’s hard to make predictions, particularly about the future. And it helps if some of those get lost:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/08/22/climate-predictions-in-1974-famous-glaciologists-predicted-the-world-going-colder-from-1974-until-2010/
“Have yet to see any sceptic logic on water security.”
Well, up until recent times, that’s all we ever had and it worked fine.
Back in those days when we were a little closer to the slippery edge of nowhere, we couldn’t afford the luxury of these mad ALP blunders.
It seems as though today, nobody cares or takes responsibility for anything. Look at what’s happening at the Wonthaggi Desal:
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/unions_feast_on_labors_green_madness/
Wake up Australia!
And Jimmy H would be wishing some of his got lost, too:
http://i51.tinypic.com/29zv894.jpg
SD; it’s time you realized that little huddle over at wuwt counts for naught with me, likewise with bolt, and jones and co. Paid waffle yes but our msm still handles truth
http://www.canberratimes.com.au/multimedia/27200/convoy-of-no-confidence.aspx
But modern looney logic and lack of MSM criticism is not restricted to water problems although it is the same ideology:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/8713093/The-BBC-steadfastly-avoids-the-facts-about-the-wind-farm-scam.html
gav,
Go into a huddle, roll up in a ball, fingers in ears etc, but it is the message, not the messenger you have to deal with and they are coming like an avalanche but you ain’t seen nuthin yet.
Got any answers?
I know that living in the false world of Canberra with a Labor/Green govt gives you some fat but the next election will rip all that off.
Only global warming will save you.
Jennifer,
Did your experience match this boradcasters view?
http://www.2gb.com/index2.php?option=com_newsmanager&task=view&id=9833
SD,
and still dropping:
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2011/08/22/weekly-enso-index-drops-below-the-la-nia-threshold/
I think it is more likely that S A politicians have too much influence in water policy rather than driving it. The A C F, Getup, Labor and the Greens are also buying in and influencing the policy for the reasons that Jen has highlighted so well in this presentation. The mindset does involve A G W Climate Change & etc. To think otherwise is missing how all of these major reform policies, including the carbon O2 tax are related.
It also involves the use of international treaties like Ramsar & Kyoto.
One of the main excuses the Federal Government is using to muscle in on water policy is climate change data and climate change models.
Note the word excuse 🙂
B T W how did it go Jen?
Hope the speech went well!
SA needs for someone to break the standoff and expose the barrages for what they are: dams that hold onto over 2000 GL of water in a shallow basin (that used to be an estuary), now providing a bloated water level of fresh to brackish water used by trailer sailors, carp and cows.
You might have to give this speech a thousand times Jennifer.
It’s been too easy for the local activists to concoct an alternative history of the barrages that suits them and plays into the hands of environmentalists and politicians who want to get elected.
Will we ever understand the mad left, now it’s racist to oppose this idiot govt over the co2 tax.
Like Bolt says I hope the Combet loon takes up the kind offers from the nice Nigerians when they phone or email him. Being a leftie loon I’m sure he’ll send them his private information pronto.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/combet_smears_its_racist_to_oppose_his_carbon_dioxide_tax/