Mick Keogh, from the Australian Farm Institute, is well known to Australian farmers. He’s been a regular performer at our TFGA conferences too. Mick has his finger on the pulse of Australian agriculture. He knows more about our industry than anyone else I can name.
So I can understand his sense of outrage when a national newspaper (not The Australian, the other one) ran a prominent article, criticising the recent federal government announcement that it would offer limited concessional loans to some eligible farmers in trouble with drought and/or the slump in beef prices (due in part to the government-imposed reduced live cattle exports).
According to Mick, the article contained false assertions and inaccuracies, some of which are probably held to be truths outside the pages of that august newspaper.
Mick therefore replied.
“If there were journalistic awards for the most error-ridden piece of writing ever about agriculture in a national newspaper, then this article would be a certain winner,” he wrote. Don’t you love it when people start off a response with like that?
Mick took the scribe to task for his assertion that Agriculture Minister Joe Ludwig’s “subsidy of the rural sector is in keeping with Australia’s long-held tradition of propping up uneconomic rural operations. No other sector of the economy is given the latitude to run itself into the ground and then stick its hand out for government assistance.”
That’s the sort of statement that gets your finger twitching for the phone.
Mick replied:
“The facts are that the OECD has monitored levels of national agricultural subsidies for the past 20 years, and Australian agriculture receives the LOWEST – repeat that LOWEST – level of taxpayer subsidy of any national agriculture sector globally.
“No other national agriculture sector on earth receives less (sic) taxpayer dollars in subsidies, so how (scribe) can assert that Australia has a long-held tradition of propping up uneconomic rural operations is an interesting question.
“In fact, recently announced changes to drought policy have reduced Australia’s meagre agricultural support measures even further than the OECD data indicates.”
Mick then took the paper to task over seeking to equate subsidies to agriculture with those to the Australian car industry. We all know that they pale into insignificance when compared to the car industry.
I have queried in this space before why it is so vital that Australia has to have a domestic car industry. Other countries, including New Zealand, survive very well, thank you, on imports; cars they could never produce without massive government subsidies, like we do in Australia.
The Productivity Commission shows that in 2010/11, its latest figures, the value of assistance measured as a percentage of primary industry output was 3.4 per cent. Within that sector, the cropping industry received assistance equal to 0.6 per cent of output – this during a period when drought assistance was being provided to many farmers across the country.
The equivalent figure for cars and parts was 8.5 per cent; for textile clothing and footwear manufacturing 10.6 per cent; for wood and paper products manufacturing 4.7 per cent; and for metal products manufacturing 4.3 per cent.
So stick that in your pipe and smoke it.
Mick said that if the Australian agriculture sector were a single corporate entity it would have grounds to sue the newspaper and its scribe for defamation.
It is all very well to be right, though – and our facts are incontravertible. The real issue is that so many people have a very different perception of what the facts actually are – including many like the aforementioned scribe who, as an expert in the field, really ought to know better.
The challenge we face is in working out how to ensure that those who make decisions affecting our lives – and, more importantly, the people who influence those who make such decisions – are actually starting from a factual basis rather than a set of questionable assumptions.
One has only to look across the range of current government budget estimates as compared to actual performances to see where that ends up!
To use a very simplistic analogy, would it matter at a macro level if there were no Australian built cars? Apart from those in the car industry, it is unlikely most of us would notice, let alone care. We would all notice – and care – if there was no Australian grown food. You can’t eat cars.
