NOTE: This satirical piece is rooted in facts. Having been to Australia on tour myself, I also heard the claims of bureaucratic abuse from many of the farmers who attended my talks. While Monckton’s essay has some biting satirical humor in it, laugh at it, but know that the issues he writes about are all too real. – Anthony
Guest essay by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Captain’s Log, Stardate 2013.67: Antipodean climate extremists are going to have a field day with this one. In Australia (where else?) a pedigree Hereford bull has been named “Lord Monckton”. And the Prime Directive forbids me to intervene.
Peter Manuel, who farms many thousands of acres in the Lofty Ranges, became so exasperated with the Natural Resources Management Board of South Australia for interfering with farming that he arranged for Lord Monckton (the real one, that is) to visit the state and give a series of talks to farmers.
Peter is chief executive of Farmers’ and Landowners’ Group Australia (FLAG), which campaigns to defend farmers against the ridiculous environmental over-regulation that is destroying their livelihoods.
Earlier this year, I spent ten days with Peter and his family on their beautiful, impeccably-maintained spread high in the hills above Adelaide. The only way for us jackaroos to cover all the rolling acres and herd the cattle and sheep (in Australia, the word “sheep” is spelt “IPCC”) was on off-road motor-bikes, keeping a sharp eye out for snakes as we thundered across the rock-strewn terrain at speeds that would have been illegal on the roads.
After I had ridden (or slidden) fearlessly after my kind host down a shifting, rock-strewn 60-degree brae that no visitor had dared to attempt before, Peter announced that this year’s best pedigree bull on the farm would be named Lord Monckton, and would make an early appearance at the Adelaide Show.
Australia has more poisonous critters than any other continent – including the spooky, spiky officials of the ever-expanding Natural Resources Management Borg, who now outnumber police officers by a handsome margin in the country districts, where former precinct houses and cop-shops have been Assimilated and are now nests of Borg, dedicated to the eradication of farming throughout South Australia in the name of Saving The Planet against non-existent “global warming”.
Farming is Australia’s biggest business. Or, rather, it was. The number of farms in this vast, desert continent is down by 100,000, and, remarkably, the state of Victoria has already become the first in the Federation to become a net importer of food – in Australia, of all places, where a vast continent the size of Europe feeds a tiny population the size of greater London. Peter Manuel is determined that South Australia shall not be the next net importer of food.
The pretext for the Borg’s cruel attacks on farmers is Agenda 21, the U.N.’s sinister plan for global domination via environmental over-regulation.
The Borg, a universally-hated bureaucracy, are actively putting the U.N.’s nihilistic, anti-irrigation, anti-pesticide, anti-farming, anti-business, anti-environment, anti-population, anti-human, anti-capitalist, anti-Western, anti-everything Agenda 21 program into ruthless effect.
During my visit to the Lofty Ranges, Peter introduced me to a local farmer with a shocking story. For weeks bureaucrats with binoculars had hidden behind a shed and spied on his farm. Then, one night at 11 pm, They pounced.
Three of Them drove at the farmer in a pickup truck with a massive roo-bar on the front. He ended up hanging from the bar, with an agonizingly bruised leg. He had to be taken to hospital with bruising, lacerations and post-traumatic stress, and remains in pain to this day.
The Borg got to the police before he did, for he was still crook. They alleged he had driven at Them and not the other way about. Wisely, They did not pursue that allegation, but it was enough to ensure that the police disregarded his allegation against Them.
Instead, They took him to court for unlawfully extracting water from a nearby creek. In his absence – his injuries had rendered him unfit to attend – the rube judge in the local criminal court, on no evidence and taking no account of his condition, savagely fined him $18,000 for allegedly having used water from the creek near his property to irrigate his crop of lucerne on the day of the bureaucrats’ raid.
Fortunately, the farmer neither paid the fine nor did the 320 hours’ community service the hanging judge handed down on learning that he had not paid. Though the judge had inflicted what – even if a real offense had been committed, which it had not – was a flagrantly disproportionate fine, not everyone in the civil service is heartless. The judge’s order was simply ignored. The farmer went unpunished.
Just as well: for he had committed no offense. True, he had extracted water from the creek that day, but he had used it to fill his cattle-troughs. I have seen his permit granting him the lawful right to extract water from the creek for his household and for his cattle.
The court is soon to be asked to set aside its judgment and expunge the victim’s record of this non-offense. It may yet also be asked to issue a summons against the Borg ex proprio motu for conspiracy to attempt to pervert the course of justice and conspiracy to perpetrate wilful misfeasance in a public office.
The farmer who wanted to water his cows is by no means the only victim of the Borg’s regime of terror here in South Australia. Another farmer told me They had used satellite photos to estimate the size of his reservoir.
The dam’s true capacity, when professionally surveyed on the ground, was found to be 6.1 million liters, but their Mickey Mouse method, using satellites monitored by zitty teenagers eating too many Krispy Kreme donuts and doing/drinking too much coke/Coke, had incorrectly overestimated it at 10.2 million liters – a shocking error. The satellites can assess the area of a reservoir but not its depth. The Borg’s rule of thumb is calculated to exaggerate the depth of just about every reservoir.
All reservoirs above a threshold capacity are cripplingly and expensively regulated, allegedly to conserve water. As a result of this incident, farmers all over South Australia with reservoirs that the Borg say are just over the threshold for regulation are now demanding surveys to check Their math. But farmers have to pay for the surveys themselves.
In any event, there is no need for regulation at all. Farmers’ reservoirs represent less than 1% of the land area; and, aside from evaporation, they do not cause a net loss of water flow through the creeks and rivers. For Lord Monckton and his fellow cattle do not so much drink the water as rent it.
While I was in South Australia, at the height of the blazing summer drought, the Borg decided to let out a third of the water in the Mount Bold Reservoir, the only major public dam in South Australia and the main water supply for Adelaide, which is now desperately short of water. You couldn’t make this up.
Of course, They were not billed for the water They used to top up the ocean. Their excuse for this monstrous waste? “To maintain environmental flow”. Yet in the summer months the natural “environmental flow” is vanishingly different from zero. They should have left well alone.
Another farmer who cleared silt from a river on his land to assist the river flow was fined a staggeringly disproportionate $35,000 by the vicious judges, who are in the Board’s pocket and act as though they were in Their pay.
Yet another farmer was told a costly water-meter had to be fitted to his borehole, so he could be charged for using his own water, even though water used for his household and his cattle is by law exempt from any charges. No one had been to read the meter ever since its installation several years previously.
Another farmer who had annoyed the Borg by refusing to comply with an unlawful attempt to enforce upon him a regulation that did not apply to him, was told: “We can fine you for shifting a rock.”
Bullying notices along the roadsides here tell passers-by that they must not touch or disturb soil or vegetation at all. Presumably people are expected to hover a few inches above the ground. But most of the population are not Catholic, so they cannot do that. So going for a walk in the countryside is now illegal in much of South Australia.
The Borg are ordering farmers all across South Australia to plant thorny weeds all along the road verges: and Their reason is that “some clusters of acacia paradoxa will protect the river banks from kangaroo intrusion.” The kangaroos, an indigenous species, were here long before the Borg. But now, in the name of saving the natural environment, the natural environment and its iconic symbols, They are out to destroy the kangaroos.
Planting acacia paradoxa is a bad idea. Only bureaucratic panty-waists who have never ridden a farm bike would have thought it up. Spiny acacia is also known as the kerosene bush. As its name implies, it catches fire explosively. The bushes planted on the Borg’s orders will help bush fires to spread. One farmer put it to me bluntly: “That’s what the Agenda 21 maniacs want. They want to burn us out and drive us off our land forever.”
He is right. I have spoken to a sheep-farmer whom the Borg menaced with massive fines because, They said, he had more stock on his land than the arbitrarily low permitted maximum. They had double-counted his lambs, math not being a strong point with the hive mind. In any event, that farmer had plenty of feed for his stock, which were in magnificent condition.
The Borg wrote ordering the farmer to reduce his stockholding. He complained to a senior administrator (Locutus of Borg, perhaps). Eventually They climbed down – but without any apology. Instead, an official, furious at having been caught out in yet another error, told the farmer They would now arrange a forced sale of his farm.
Many other tales, such as the story of the prawn-farmer and the bogus koala claw-marks, will have to wait for another time. But the Borg felt the lash of the Viscount’s tongue. Towards the end of my visit to South Australia, they began turning up at my speaker meetings and muttering angrily to Themselves at the back.
No doubt Ban Ki-Moon, secretary-general of the useless United Nations, is delighted that his willing agents at the Natural Resources Management Borg are making the corrupt U.N. and its environmentally destructive Agenda 21 program even more hated than it already is.
Time to arrange a forced sale of the U.N.’s lavish New York HQ and send its pampered officials to do some real work on Australian farms. I have said it before and I’ll say it again. Let us convert the U.N. building to fancy apartments for the rich and famous. I shall take the penthouse.
Meanwhile, may the Natural Resources Management Borg and all their works wither and perish in the drought Their mad policies have needlessly created, and may Lord Monckton and his vigorous progeny thrive not merely ad multos annos but usque in saeculum. Make it so!
Farming is still Australia’s biggest industry. Many are being converted to carbon farms now. Used to be productive farms, now they just sit there doing nothing but acting as carbon sinks. This is what some of the AU$10bil/pa get’s wasted on.
Hmmm. Judging from this article, Australia is still a net food exporter, by a large margin, and that rather than the ‘Borg’, much of farmers difficulties can be tied directly back to multinationals who are off-shoring labor to increase margins.
Fancy that.
http://www.smh.com.au/national/surge-in-imports-sends-australian-farms-to-brink-20120526-1zc2u.html
Ah, Lord Monckton…. A bull in the borgish China shop. What great read. Loved it.
Keep up the good work…. With the sweeping changes of state and federal Governments in our fair land down under….. Let us hope the Borg bureaucracy can be purged and their plugs pulled. 😉
Saturday the 7th is Federal election day…. I have my bottle of champagne chillin’…. Sportsbet has already paid out on a LNP win. It now just remains to be seen how big a win…. The adults are going to be in charge again. We’ll be putting their feet to the fire regardless.
Looks like we need to send in the Daleks. Borg V Daleks sounds good to me.
Conservationism has got out of hand, and conservationists who harass their honest hard working fellow man in this manner are the worst examples of humanity, Unfortunately, with the way the world is going, their numbers are becoming legion.
Great !
If the issue were not more dependency on bureaucracy for matters as important the world over as the supply of food is, this piece would just be great black humor, but as it is, it gives me the creeps. I too would love to have the UNO , the IPCC, undone, dismembered, and it’s assets publicly sold to redress the damages done to farmers, to home owners, to builders, to real estate workers, to the automobile industry , etc etc , everywhere.
Thank you Mr Anthony Watts, and Lord Monckton. Again .
Jdallen….. The Sydney Morning Herald is a Socialist rag and pro Labor party, pro Union and pro Green…. Most of it is misinformation crafted to look like informed opinion. At the moment they are trying to stir tensions by creating a media narrative that portray Australian farmers as Xenophobic rednecks destroying a “Sensitive environment” and Multinational business as rapacious vultures, when really they are merely investors who hold a 49% stake in the agribusiness that they have chosen to invest in.
The ecofascists want to pit farmers against each other so that they can get farmers fighting among each other then get Government to come and arbitrate and buy out “unprofitable” farms with taxpayer funds. “To save the environment you know.” The Eco fascists love that. Worked a treat with the Fishing industry decimation.
The fact remains that the Government eco regulation that farmers struggle under, including multinational concerns…. Makes agribusiness unprofitable. Nothing to do with land use and they have no financial reserves or ability to diversify their farmland, because of regulation, so as to undercut economic changes in the market.
As an example Government interference in private agribusiness enterprise, I hold up the Banning of Live cattle exports in Northern Australia…. overnight it decimated a whole industry. All based on propaganda and a Four Corners ABC anti live industry program.
Other examples would be water allocation restrictions in the Murray Darling basin…. Then there’s the QLD East Coast Prawn Fisheries, and other fisheries…. almost completely wiped out by eco regulation. Plenty of prawns. Too much bureaucracy. etc ad nauseam.
Let’s just wait for the inevitable comments:
That Bull is not a member of the House of Lords and so can’t be called Lord Monckton.
I would be a lot easier for multinational agribusinesses, which are interested in acquiring Australian farms, to buy said farms if all the farmers are broke.
Why would they be interested in buying Australian? In the next 20 years agricultural production in the North will crash, as the world grows colder. Farm land in countries unaffected by global cooling will be very valuable.
M Courtney –
Why not? We had Duke Ellington, Screaming Lord Such, Count Basie, etc., and I would be most flattered to have a fine animal like that called after me.
There is a clear difference between stock and domestic use of water, and irrigating a lucerne paddock – starting at the basics one would need irrigation equipment! I suspect there is more to this tale than told.
There is a popular bumper sticker here in OZ.
“Fertilize the bush, bulldoze in a greenie”
There is a federal election here on saturday, and our soon to be prime minister is already promising to remove the current Carbon Tax .
I suspect he is a closet skeptic, just needs to get into power before he can dismantle some of the current governments’ policy disasters.
What happens when the men from the ministry turn up and say Lord Monckton should be castrated? I hope they get the paperwork right for that job.
I did not find this article funny at all. The situation is horrifying. There should be more of this exposure. Thank you Lord Monckton – heartfelt from Australia.
Note well. Agricultural land is the investment to make. And there are those who know that.
Expect next MSN headline: South Australian Natural Resources Management Board shuts down all Barossa Valley vineyards north of Adelaide. “Despite being the fourth largest exporter if wine in the world, we have discovered extremely high CO2 levels when yeast ferments with grapes” said a spokesman. To prevent people destroying our planet, the NRMB monitor the 379,725 square miles of South Australia in a fleet of Utes. “The Brits sent a Lord over to question our decisions, I mean, you could fit four countries the size of the UK in our vast territory, and they only have a piddly wine industry, so here we have a huge problem. We’re gonna target every wine producer in the Mount Lofty Ranges before Christmas.”
(Sarc off) UK area: 94,060 square miles.
Australia is still home to some of the most committed alarmists on the planet. The SMH mentioned above had 3 scare stories on it today, and I expect them to hype the upcoming IPCC report to the max.
@ M Courtney 12:58
Neither is God.
South Australia are the home of the Australian Greens Party, and if that isn’t bad enough they keep voting in Labor (left) state governments who are the Greens natural allies. The state of despair is no surprise to this New South Welshman. What does annoy me is the other states have to prop up S.A. with our taxes, because of course S.A. doesn’t like mining anymore than they like agriculture despite their riches underground. So while S.A. was stagnating the rest of Australia was reaping the rewards of the Chinese desire for these minerals, but as they get some of the money indirectly anyway, they have no need to bother. Socialism on a state level.
“redc says:
September 4, 2013 at 1:48 am”
Indeed, but it is rather funny as well IMO. Last night I was talking to a self confessed Greenie who told me, with absolute confidence, that the oceans were turning acid with a pH of 8.1.
There is a very good chance the Greens will lose the balance of power in the Senate on the 7th with the upcoming Federal election. Given Bob Brown resigned from the greens before further rot set in I am hoping the result this Saturday will send a message to the South Yarra and Toorak yuppie latte-sipping city based “green belt” a strong message.
The SMH recently posted an article that suggested the “reverse” of global sea level rise was due to the big wet in Australia in 2010/2011.
Predictions that the South Pacific Forum would warn about rising sea levels drowning coral atolls prove prescient.
SBS news just reported this just after a description of a volcanic eruption that was ’caused’ by snow falling into the crater.
We Australians really need a real scientist to do fact checking on our national broadcaster.
The green believers want desperately to have full powers and control, but have little economic credibility, but they do exploit their electoral leverage well beyond their numbers, especially in the upper house (Senate) due to proportional representation and every trick in the trade, by trading of preference deals to get them over the line even by one vote. In such a system the least popular and competent person can often be elected and the closer an election, the more likely they will hold the balance of power in the senate. But that is not the whole problem.
The great problem is that “borgs” tend to like rule by regulation. In Australia laws get passed and in the fine print there is a clause that allows creation of regulations to make the law function smoothly, but instead they are expanded to include powers not contemplated by the actual lawmakers, thus the EPA, petty officialdom and the experts of borgdom now rule far beyond the laws that were created in parliament. They also have another trick and that is to make a reversal of the onus of proof, it is now by way of regulation that all the government official has to do is claim a breach of a regulation and the onus is on the defendant/accused to prove to the court that they didn’t commit the breach as alleged. Judges have a hard time calling officials to account as the legal onus is reversed and the officials make it difficult if not impossible to prove otherwise.
An easy way to lose democratic freedom and the right to appeal such dictatorial :”borgs” is to just allow legislation to pass without extreme and close inspection of regulatory clauses. Everyone who respects freedom should insist on such scrutiny and the inclusion of “sunset clauses” specifying a date by which regulations become invalid unless returned to open parliament for full discussion and debate as they get misused by the secret ambitions of the control borgs of our society.
The right of access and examination, and a right to a proper appeal process and open parliamentary processes must be maintained as it is so hard to reinstate the freedoms that we have already lost in Australia.
The farmers/ranchers should claim carbon credits for combatting sea level rise in withholding water from the ocean? While technically not carbon related, sea level is key to AGW so close enough? Does someone want to take a crack at writing a “scientific paper” describing a new breed of “methane-free” cattle? This research could be completed with only another $1B grant money. perhaps low-methane? either way, cattle must be net carbon sinks? or there would not be beef?
I am a leftist liberal by design. But even I think that it is high time for the Australians to vote a conservative government into office, which will roll back the excesses of the Ex-Gillard-Whatshisname-camarilla.
Agenda 21 amounts to nothing less than state terrorism. Enough is enough. Drive these borgs into the sea and let their entrails rust away, I say.
Have been wanting to ask this of others for some time. The above Oz theme seems an appropriate time to do so.
In the region of Oz where I reside we have our fair share of rabid enviro nuts as do other places in the world. Being a very small population and therefore knowing the history/life story of many of these folk I find a disproportionate number of these people have, in at least one previous life, failed dismally to succeed. This particularly is the case with regard to their business success but also often in their social and personal lives where they have covered their failure by quietly selling off the farm or closing the business and joining a local authority and are then given the imprimatur to tell every one how it should be done.
Is this unique to my corner of the world or is there a pattern?
As I sit for hours on my old tractor and think about this I have asked myself why such people are drawn towards “the environment” and I believe I have the answer!!!
Because all levels of government, local, state & federal are now “infested” with these people they have developed a system for their “on the ground” funding schemes. The major attraction for all the failed-but-now-environmently-dedicated receivers of this funding is that there is ZERO chance of the success or failure of any one of these taxpayer funded junkets or projects ever getting audited much less any of the promoters of this waste being held accountable.
I will describe just one of many examples: Several years ago thousands trees were planted amidst much hullaballoo in a nearby river flat/swamp. This project drew busloads of eager city folk from 300km away and with free trees to plant, free BBQ’s, free return bus ride, free accommodation, free evening entertainment, free water bottles etc, etc, it really made our local e-facisists look good.(even though nothing was actually “free” because local rate payers footed the bill through their council rates)
Now even the dopiest individual not involved in this exercise knows that ALL Australian rivers are “wild rivers” that run only on a seasonal basis and that when it rains big time in them there hills its gonna flood down that ole river and spread out for miles across the floodplain and temporally fill the normally dry swamp. Oz, being so flat, dictates that in such circumstances the water hangs around on these river flats/swamps, often for several months, before either soaking into the heavy clay soil or evaporating off in the summer heat as the river returns to its normal dry state. Any Australian native tree that is not designed to be inundated is going to drown. In fact very few Oz trees are designed to withstand longish inundation at all. Guess what these leaders in our environmental movement planted? Yep, 4 years after planting them, the few that actually survived the 4 years of drought were drowned during the aforesaid flood event last year!
And has anyone called these clever organisers to account? No, the silence is deafening! Zero accountability and Zero conscience as they prepare to apply for another fully taxpayer funded disaster.
Has anyone else observed people of a similar ilk repeatedly doing similar stupid things?
I would assume that the Borg have a price; and that that price is somewhat lower than the fines they threaten to hand out.
You just couldn’t make it up. thanks Lord Monckton.
Australia does have some real scientists, one being Prof. Bob Carter but your stupid government ignores him. Perhaps the forthcoming election will change things??????
Sounds like a bit of a ‘cock and bull’ story to me!
But having said that, it is a fact that under the politically correct, microcephalic post modernist Gen X regimes of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, Canberra bureaucrats have, from 2007, been dispensing real Strine taxpayers dollars to fast buck scumbags owning at least one helicopter apiece to scour the Outback for evil methane-farting donkeys, goats and camels and to gun down said evil creatures.
A bounty is then paid by said bureaucrats (to said scumbags) for every single one of those said creatures seen biting the dust on Minicam.
You wouldn’t read about it – and don’t!
Strange but true…..or at least more true that his Lordship’s spiel.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – “There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.”
The Borg possesses an abundance of both.
Old farmer said:
‘…..Has anyone else observed people of a similar ilk repeatedly doing similar stupid things?’
My oath I have.
oldseadog says: @ September 4, 2013 at 1:14 am
M Courtney –
Why not? We had Duke Ellington…
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.
We had a big black (dark chocolate) ram named Baaaarack O Baaaa Baaaa. He was much more useful than his namesake too.
KenB says:
September 4, 2013 at 3:33 am
………An easy way to lose democratic freedom and the right to appeal such dictatorial :”borgs” is to just allow legislation to pass without extreme and close inspection of regulatory clauses. Everyone who respects freedom should insist on such scrutiny and the inclusion of “sunset clauses” specifying a date by which regulations become invalid unless returned to open parliament for full discussion and debate as they get misused by the secret ambitions of the control borgs of our society.
The right of access and examination, and a right to a proper appeal process and open parliamentary processes must be maintained as it is so hard to reinstate the freedoms that we have already lost in Australia.
————————————————————–
An organization for that type of controls in the US is http://www.downsizedc.org .
They have loads of ideas and information and ways people can help the country.
cn
C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were prescient in these things. One should read Lewis’s “That Hideous Strength” and Tolkien’s chapter on “Cleansing the Shire” in the last book of his Lord of the Rings trilogy (an episode sadly left out of the movie). Sad depictions of our bureaucratic enemies.
Some things confuse me about this article. Why is everyone demonising a Swedish tennis champion, and is Lord Monckton also the “Wizard of Oz” ? 🙂
If you believe the above questions are for real, you have been assimilated.
But seriously, I feel for the farmers under this bureaucratic nightmare, I am sure they feel “resistance IS futile”.
“johnmarshall says:
September 4, 2013 at 4:22 am”
Maybe. However, none of them are in a position of influence unlike Karoly and Flannery et al.
I cant believe SA is planting prickly acacia…we have it here in Vic and a recent lightning strike in a paddock wouldnt have been much of an issue,,until?
it hit the roadside verges that are FULL of acacia some 10ft high impenetrable dense masses of it, the Foxes love it! so do the bunnies.
both feral and both eating lambs and wildlife..well that small lowburning paddock fire took off!
boy did it. we lost a couple of miles of fences both sides of the road probably 100 or more redgums got a savaging(most will regenerate.).but many had to be cut down, the towns entrance rd still looks pretty bad after a year on. The firies were fuming cos they simply could’nt GET access into the area due to immense heat, they had to work edges only..
greentards wont hear of it being removed cos birdies like it.
then we have Bracken fern
grows in degraded soils only toxic to stock, nothing eats it, rabbits n foxes again love it, sheep occasionally shelter at the edges., the daring ones with short lifespans:-)
in Vic we can burn and remove it.
In SA its protected.
so?
soils that are so acid and degraded the next step down is moss n slimes, cannot! be cleared and renovated and brought to productivity or even used for pasture grazing horses cattle or sheep etc
let alone a foddercrop.
insanity?
you betcha!
and I have a full warren of DPI Lands dept ferals over the rd, nice state of the art vehicles roll out everyday, and especially for triple time work on every public holiday!! they also seem to have a free use of whatever…system going cos cars private come n go at all hrs of day n night. yes like 2 and 3am.
they are free to invade your land if you dont have a locked gate and a biohazard warning up.
the biohazard signs are brilliant. IF you have any animals you can legitimately refuse access due to fear of THEM bringing seed weed or infectious material on your land.. I use one.
and to the chap above re failed n useless gits then getting power possies to ride roughshod over the remaining few farmers. YUP in spades mate!
come sunday..it will hopefully take a turn for th better. KRudd and labor green scum OUT of our lives
green/red tape cut! and we can maybe? get back to being productive
of course we now have syria war ( thanks USSA)to screw things up fuel prices and transport wise for added fun.
South Australia (and Tasmania) are parasites on the rest of Australia – we all subsidise them – and funnily enough, are both infested with greenies who oppose any economic initiative that might pull them out of the mire. SA has not only the highest power prices in Australia, but among the highest in the world because of the government’s infatuation with windmills and other energy boondoggles. The only reason Tasmania isn’t the same is because hydro power was installed before the rise of the greenies. It would never be allowed nowadays.
People with drive and talent leave both States to live somewhere where they can better themselves. Business finds them hostile, and does the same. Unfortunately, this is not an option for farmers who want to stay on their land.
It is a self-reinforcing cycle of decline. I don’t know how it can be reversed.
I’m sure most of these Borg sheep must live somewhere.
Clearly, in the spirit of fertilising the ground they live in, farmers should go take a leak inside the Borg sheep’s dwelling.
But actually, as they’ll unlikely get inside, maybe a piss through the letter box would be all they could manage just for now……….
Well, if the Oz farmers run into too much trouble, we could always use some more hard workers in the Canadian West.
LMVoB: “For Lord Monckton and his fellow cattle do not so much drink the water as rent it.”
L-O-L!
@jdallen
From the article you linked, “These compete with Tasmanian potato farmers, who, a McCain Foods study found, have among the world’s highest production costs.”
Could that, perhaps, be because of OVER-REGULATION that their production costs are so high? The article utterly and completely fails to even speculate as to why production costs in Australia and Tasmania are so high, yet most of us here are intelligent enough to figure out that the high production costs are directly related to what Lord Monckton is speaking about.
If you sought to disprove anything Lord Monckton said, I fear that you failed.
As long as they don’t throw your namesake on the barbie 🙂
Abundant Water for irrigating Australia, as patented by A. Pedrick in 1966.
See page 2, starting at line 86 for the idea’s description.
http://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/originalDocument?CC=GB&NR=1047735A&KC=A&FT=D&ND=3&date=19661109&DB=worldwide.espacenet.com&locale=en_EP
Is there an increase in corporate farming going on in Australia driven by environmental protection requirements which only large corporations have the resources to implement?
The British Powers That Be, not always the from the top of the gene pool regards intelligence, have declared that to keep cool in summer and warm in winter they will need to burn trees grown in the US to fuel their power plants. When the Aussies can no longer feed themselves will they come for our cattle and sheep? If so I strongly recommend we first send them hogs with the mandate they be fed raving bureaucrats, exclusively.
@Steve Short
Sounds like a crock and bull environment more than cock and bull. Maybe ‘cock-up and bull’.
The Aussie greens are surely a special breed. The combination of ignorance, para-science and enthusiasm is devastating the place. The lack of accountability is also interesting to watch from afar – as far as possible. The same lack of accountability seems to pervade climate ‘science’. Perhaps social science can tell us why.
Just to clarify for those who may be in any doubt, all of the stories I tell here about the sinister operations of the Natural Resources Management Borg are true. I have spoken personally to each of the farmers affected, and have verified the facts by discussion with officials and parliamentarians and by looking at the original paperwork, visiting numerous farms, and hearing the agonizing combination of fear and fury in the voices of those whose livelihoods are menaced by the new regime of terror.
I have couched the serious material in a light-hearted environment because in Australia that is the way: they are at their most serious when they are cracking jokes. The Roman poet Horace put it this way: Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci.. In plain English, “He who sugars the pill brings home the bacon.”
My, I do seem to garner a lot of fury. Regarding agribusiness, how might this factor in?
http://theconversation.com/australia-has-lost-control-of-its-agribusiness-to-foreigners-truss-14877
Here in the USA there is a law dating back to the ’70s called the Wetlands Protection Act. Among other things this Act has spawned a host of local Conservation Commissions, which are empowered to protect wetlands, waterways, and other bodies of water. These local Commissions can prevent a property owner within a couple hundred feet of the water from so much as moving a stone, erecting a fence, or cutting up a dead tree without filing a permit and gaining a permit from these Lords on High.
It has been pointed out that, while the goals of this Act are in principle laudable, its modus operandi is punitive, and encourages property owners to ignore it whenever possible, which is of course counter-productive. Moreover in effect it gives local authorities an ‘eco-easement’ on private property, without the compensation that an easement would ordinarily require. A much better strategy would be to reward property owners with tax breaks for following good-practice rules. But, of course, such an approach would be contrary to the bureaucratic mindset that loves to reward the enforcers of the ‘public good’ with draconian power over the hapless citizen.
Correction: Last sentence should read: “. . . without filing a permit and gaining permission from these Lords on High.”
Time to divert some AK47s to the farmers down under?
“rather than the ‘Borg’, much of farmers difficulties can be tied directly back to multinationals”
Who lavishly fund the conferences the enviros attend, and heap great rewards on those who do their bidding.
“Just to clarify for those who may be in any doubt, all of the stories I tell here about the sinister operations of the Natural Resources Management Borg are true.”
Oh, it’s eminently believable. There was a story here in the US of a woman who was hosting a “farm to field” dinner for business clients, to have “health inspectors” sweep in and demand receipts for produce from her own land. They declared some of the food to be “unfit for consumption”, then when she asked if she could use it to slop her hogs, they poured bleach over it.
And there’s a bill in Congress now that would require every farm that sells $5,000 or more in produce to submit their goods to the FDA for certification. A back-of-the-envelope calculation tells me that’s the production of about an acre of apple trees.
Beta Blocker says:
September 4, 2013 at 8:57 am
Is there an increase in corporate farming going on in Australia driven by environmental protection requirements which only large corporations have the resources to implement?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
If it is like the USA it is not the resources it is the Political Clout to make sure the little guy gets clobbered and the big corporations get a free pass.
A humorous account of how bureaucratic favoritism works in the USA:
Bureaucratic Orwellian Resource Godfathers
Blatant Oppression Restrictive Government
Boundless Opportunists Rapacious Geophiles
Rob Crawford says: @ September 4, 2013 at 12:04 pm
…Oh, it’s eminently believable…. there’s a bill in Congress now that would require every farm that sells $5,000 or more in produce to submit their goods to the FDA for certification. A back-of-the-envelope calculation tells me that’s the production of about an acre of apple trees.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
As Doreen so nicely put it LET THEM EAT GRASS!
I am afraid that is probably the best method of dealing with the problem. Sit on the land but do not use it for producing food.
Perhaps US farmers should consider either biofuel or carbon offsets instead of food.
Is there any other information out there? I look to California.
How ever the link in the article goes no where. As another article at the same website says…
June 27th, 2013 Urban Forests & Carbon Markets “Cashing-in” on urban forestry projects by selling credits for carbon stored in growing trees has been elusive. Several urban forest organizations have developed voluntary carbon market projects, while the City of Santa Monica’s 1,000 tree planting project is the only one in the compliance-based market….
Why am I not surprised that there is no way a family farmer can get into the Carbon offset market?
Svalgaard and Mosher: 5th column.
In 1938 the worlds richest man said “Own nothing, control everything”. Corporations & Gov’ts use this to “own” the people and what is theirs.
No wonder Australia is seen burning away on the satellite photos taken at night. Did they invite the Borg before encircling them with red hot death?
Man the pitch forks. Full steam ahead.
This article perfectly illustrates the maxim that without personal property rights, all other rights are academic.
Rob Crawford says:
September 4, 2013 at 12:04 pm
“Just to clarify for those who may be in any doubt, all of the stories I tell here about the sinister operations of the Natural Resources Management Borg are true.”
Oh, it’s eminently believable. There was a story here in the US of a woman who was hosting a “farm to field” dinner for business clients, to have “health inspectors” sweep in and demand receipts for produce from her own land. They declared some of the food to be “unfit for consumption”, then when she asked if she could use it to slop her hogs, they poured bleach over it.
And there’s a bill in Congress now that would require every farm that sells $5,000 or more in produce to submit their goods to the FDA for certification. A back-of-the-envelope calculation tells me that’s the production of about an acre of apple trees.
==========
I suggest several farms – each with about 0,8 acre.
AUTO
Paul Maeder , In my copy it was called, “The Scouring of the Shire”, – a much better verb. You need plenty of elbow grease to scour.
Just Steve says: @ September 4, 2013 at 2:20 pm
This article perfectly illustrates the maxim that without personal property rights, all other rights are academic.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
That is in a nutshell what Agenda 21 is all about.
If you can not OWN property you ARE property.
The Ag Corporations came up with Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) or Livestock Confinement Operations. Now the corporations/elite have come up with Concentrated Human Work Operations with the euphemistic name of Transit Villages used to hide the fact that they are nothing more than an updated version of medieval feudal estates. We, the ‘Free-Range Serfs’ are about to have our wings clipped. No Energy = No Transportation = Confinement.
There is a darn good reason Livestock Confinement Operations de-beak poultry, de-horn cattle, dock the tails of pigs and shoot the animals full of antibiotics or feed them antibiotic laced feed. Overcrowding causes illness, stress and fights.
I wish like heck I was a deranged Conspiracy-nut but the news all over the internet says otherwise.
Tips for Selling the ‘Urban’ Experience to Suburbanites: Many of us involved in the creation or advocacy of “sustainable” cities, neighborhoods and metro regions know what we’re mostly for….
National Multi Housing Council
Sustainability in Action
Wall Street Journal: California Declares War on Suburbia: Planners want to herd millions into densely packed urban Corriders. It won’t save the planted but it will make traffic even worse.
California’s Private Property War
The ‘micro-unit’ mini-apartment building is coming to New York
San Francisco considers allowing nation’s tiniest micro-apartments 220 square feet (That is less than a 15X15 ft motel room)
Jdallen says:
September 4, 2013 at 12:21 am
“Hmmm. Judging from this article, Australia is still a net food exporter, by a large margin, and that rather than the ‘Borg’, much of farmers difficulties can be tied directly back to multinationals who are off-shoring labor to increase margins.”
I’ll skip the entirely appropriate Ad Homs and point out that this is what happens when one is regulated into non-competitive (read ‘artificially less capable’) status.. You demonstrate that emotionalism is your compass, and Logic a quaint, dimly understood abstract concept.
“Multinationals” are vastly more competent at producing things, Bureaucrats vastly more competent at destroying things.
There is nothing more anti free market than a large corporation. See: lobbyists. And that isn’t a liberal position, rather a libertarian one.
The statists are everywhere:
More here:
http://www.alaskadispatch.com/article/20130903/gold-miners-near-chicken-cry-foul-over-heavy-handed-epa-raids
Thanks to Drudge for this latest example of EPA thuggery. Time to elect conservatives who will put the kibosh on these eco-Borgocracies! And join Mark Levin in the program outlined in his new book, The Liberty Amendments. It may be our last chance to stop the bureaucratic monster leviathan the 20th century has bequeathed us.
/Mr Lynn
PS What happened to the handy Preview option? Seems to have disappeared.
There is an easy way for Australians to understand why the greenies and regulators do what they do. If you are an Australian, stop using the phrase “OUR government.” The proper phrase is “THE government” or even more accurately, “the Australian Occupational Government.”
If the government does not put YOUR welfare foremost, then they are not YOUR government.
Patrick says:
September 4, 2013 at 6:12 am
Maybe. However, none of them are in a position of influence unlike Karoly and Flannery et al.
Patrick, Karoly and Flannery are the puppets of power, the Borgmasters choice to sprout bulls**t and propaganda, the non experts granted “expert” status to sell lies, misinformation and of course handsomely rewarded with Australian taxpayers money, and the worst example of what is wrong in Australia today.
We have too many borg departments with too many would be, could be urban borgs comfortably feeding at the taxpayers trough and working on new ways to exploit their fellow citizens, country people are regarded by them as rubes and rednecks, to invoke American terms and the subject of much laughter, story telling in their comfortable air conditioned city headquarters as to how they fixed up/fitted the good honest farmers that were once valued for the productivity and work ethic in building the backbone of a once strong economy buoyed by the export of farm products throughout the world.
Borgs love to destroy and mock tradition, honesty and the Australian traditional values, including a fair go for all. They have an urban deathlock on education and what was naively once described as public service to our country.
Good to see that an Aussie farmer has got the right name for Lord Moncton. After all, what do bulls do?
Here are a few things that Monckton either forgot to tell you or got completely wrong.
Agriculture at the farm gate represents around 3% of Australia’s GDP. It is many decades since Australia was evenly remotely ‘riding on the sheep’s back’. Most of Australia is desert, semi-desert and fairly erratically-watered rangelands. After Antartica, we are the driest continent in the world. Our soils are amongst the oldest in the world, and are also amongst the most fragile. Most of our soils are nutrient-poor, and so poorly structured that they fall to pieces under very little agricultural strain and are then gone with the wind. One of Australia’s great gifts to other countries has been the development of exceptionally good skills at farming ultra-dry farmlands with minimal soil loss.
Much of South Australia’s water comes from interstate from the Murray Darling Basin. South Australians generally, and South Australian farmers in particular, reckon that their country cousins upstream must have been pilfering water by various means because not a hell of a lot of it gets to South Australia any more, and what there is of it is getting saltier and saltier. And what with increased population in the Basin, by the time it gets to South Australia it has been through more cows and more people than ever before. Fortunately for the South Australians there are some water quality borgs upriver who maintain water regulations, inspections, quality standards, and fines. Bad borgs – right?
Still, maybe they need some more alert and active borgs to stop all that upstream water thieving, hey? Whoops. Forgot. Moncton’s farmers good. Borgs bad.
Here are some good reasons why most Australian farmers are worried about what agriculture has done and/or is doing to the environment:
(1) irrigation salinity and dryland salinity
(2) over-allocation of freshwater
(3) erosion
(4) soil acidity
(5) siltation of rivers
(6) massive national introduced weeds problem
(7) tens of millions of feral animals.
The discerning reader will get it that in each and every case the environmental problem costs farmers lost production and increased costs. In many cases the environmental problem has got so bad that it has driven farmers off their land altogether.
Fortunately, the smarter farmers, which is the overwhelming majority of us (just a few beefies, but hey), get it, and have been working through peak farming bodies and through great innovations like Landcare, with both left and right governments (aka borgs in Monckton’s ridiculous article) for some decades, to address these systemic issues properly. Excellent progress has been made in some areas – particularly in relation to irrigation salinity, for example. Some areas are a work in progress. Some areas have hardly begun.
There is a reasonable view that in some areas government cut backs (which means less borgs) have damaged the interests of farmers. There used to be hundreds of farm extension officers who worked directly with farmers to, for example, carry out soil erosion conservation works using part-farmer and part-government funding. These borgs have largely gone, more’s the pity. I have had a farmer tell me that recent cutbacks in anti-fruit fly activities by the government had resulted in large scale fruit fly infestations in one of Australia’s premier fruit irrigation areas. For government ‘activity’ read borgs, regulations, inspections and fines. Bad, right? In Monckton’s lunatic view, ever borg is bad borg and every farmer is a good farmer.
Do we sometimes get over-officious officials? Hell, yes. Do we sometimes get irresponsible famers? Hell, yes.
OTOH, we already have enough exotic feral animals in Australia without foreign smartarses like Monckton hooning around, muddying the waters, generally demonstrating their ignorance, and confusing the issues.
This is a great post by Lord Monckton. Those who doubt the veracity of the stories of Borg repression in Victoria and South Australia (home of the Australian Greens Party) can rest assured that there are similar and worse to come out of NSW and Queensland, and Tasmania too. Fingers are crossed in the rural community for the forthcoming election in the hope that an incoming Liberal government will sweep away the Green-madness that has threatened the Primary production sector.
Conservatives make no sense Mr. Lynn and I’ll provide you a prime example: abortion… If it weren’t so disgusting, it would be amusing how these people want government “off our backs” when it comes to business and financial regulation, yet insist on climbing into bed with us to enforce their version of morality.
The GOP care most about staying in power, protecting their wealth and that of their shareholders/ rich contributors.
Not wages for the working poor. Raise the minimum wage to keep pace with inflation and much of the economic reason for abortion will disappear. When Republican big businessmen pony up and pay fair wages so working parents can survive, there will be much more incentive to keep the baby. Don’t tell us about the sanctity of life and then abandon the baby and mother and leave them to fend for themselves.
“Assumilate” vs. “Exterminate”! Should be an entertaining contest.
Another great read from his Lordship.
A few years ago an aunt of mine sent us a postcard she found on holiday in Scotland, it was a picture of a gate to a field in which the farmer kept his bull it said “Free entry BULL will charge”.
It sounds like the Borg are finding Lord Monckton can charge as well!
James Bull
mods, typo: Assimilate not
AssumilateI even previewed! (Using the CA Assistant Greasemonkey script).
BTW, I am not sure how it works in the US but in the Australian outback, to ‘bullsh*t’ means to sort of not tell the truth, stretch the truth, exaggerate, to carry on like a pork chop, that sort of thing. You get the general picture The farmer who named a bull after Lord Monckton was either having a lend of the bull or a lend of Lord Monckton. Take your pick.
The medium to long term solution is to make the politicians accountable, not just in blank cheque elections every three or four years. It’s to make them accountable 24/7 by empowering the people. The only way to do this is by massive pressure on the politicians: http://www.cando.org.au
“climateace says:
September 4, 2013 at 10:44 pm”
Don’t worry, soon all the green waste in Aus will be put to better use.
Beware the Borgan (Bogan) Climateace who isn’t! Often exposed on Joanne Nova, tries to be sheepish with a woolly cloak that doesn’t disguise the wolf underneath, probably a paid associate of Flannery and Karoly, and if we have any luck looking for a new lobby job after Saturday!!
KB
You sound like someone should name a bull after you as well.
Seven wrong out of seven is pretty thorough:
(1) Not a bogan but I did have a ute once.
(2) Have heard Nova’s name but that would be about that.
(3) Have a few cattle on some of the best flats in Australia, right next to a permanent river and with a handy lot of megs in secure water rights; if I was into sheep it would be fat lambs. No wolves our way. If there were we would shoot them.
(4) Independent financially.
(5) Have never met Flannery or Karoly and do not intend to.
(6) Don’t get paid by anybody but thanks for the implied compliment.
(7) I couldn’t care who wins on Saturday and will probably not vote. It is a crap election with crap choices. Rudd has had more positions on climate change than the kama sutra. Abbott intends to spend $3 billion on direct climate action when what he really thinks is that climate change is crap and carbon dioxide is weightless. We farmers have told him that his price per tonne of CO2 soil carbon sequestration is not enough to cover costs. He isn’t listening. Inspiring stuff?
You could always try sticking to the point: which is that Lord Monckton does not get farming in Australia, and is out of his depth when he thinks it is amusing that a famer has called a bull after him. Down our way them would be fighting words.
“climateace says:
September 5, 2013 at 3:26 am”
Don’t see you misquoting Gillard or Rudd, only Abbott. What Abbott said, about climate change driven by emissions of CO2 from human activities, was “The argument was absolute crap”. In this respect Abbott is completely correct. Is it OK for Gillard to call CO2 carbon pollution? Weather he made a mistake about some of the physical properties of CO2 is, largely, a distraction. When have you known a politician to be 100% reliably correct about everything, especially science? The good thing about Abbotts direct action plan is that it can be abolished in an instant without the need to repeal any legislation. Given the LNP will redirect the $10bil clean energy fund, $3bil is a bargain! I am quite happy for Abbott to abolish spending on things like “…the role of public art in climate change…” so go Abbott, go the LNP.
I think “you” farmers need to stop worrying about sucking at the taxpayer teat with regards to CO2 sequestration and start growing stuff.
Ed, ‘Mr’ Jones says: @ September 4, 2013 at 4:26 pm
“Multinationals” are vastly more competent at producing things…”
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
No they are not. The reason is simple really and it is called the Peter Principle.
Smaller organizations especially those where the owner knows everyone working for him can not and will not tolerate ar$e-kissing incompetents for long. They just can not afford to. Small businesses are much more responsive to customer needs. (I am still, after five years, fighting with Tractor Supply about carrying more than one bag of sheep feed per week)
Small businesses drive job creation, growth
So what do multi-nationals have going for them? MONEY Money to starve out small competitors. Money for Campaign Donations and money to buy-off officials so they can form Cartels – monopolies/monopsonies.
An example is the little-publicized organization called the IPC– the International Food and Agricultural Trade Policy Council, shortened to International Policy Council that was instrumental in getting the World Trade Organization Agreement on Agriculture passed. This article is all about the results of that (self-snip) agreement. The Draft was written by the VP of Cargill (grain trador), Dan Amstutz, Clinton’s Senior Trade negotiator. The IPC is controlled by US-based agribusiness giants and so is the USDA/FDA. SEE: The Corporate-Government Revolting-Door (pun intended)
Another example of politics and money not innovation is Dwayne Orville Andreas, past CEO of Archer-Daniels-Midland Company(ADM). Perhaps America’s champion all-time campaign contributor.
So how is that working for you Mr. Andreas? ADM profits soar 550 percent as ethanol margins improve
The rest of the Ag Cartel did quite well too.
2007: Monsanto posts record $8.6B in sales: For the fourth consecutive year, Monsanto Co. reported record sales…
2009 Monsanto Posts Record Profits
April 2012: Monsanto posts record second quarter, sales jump 15 percent
Aug 2011 Cargill reported record profits of $4.24 billion, beating the previous high of $3.95 billion from 2007-08, and a 63% increase of the $2.6 billion it earned last year…
The bankers/financiers profited too. It is just the little people rioting and starvingin over 60 countries that bear the brunt of the manipulations. How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis
This thread is about runaway government bureaucracy, leading to ‘soft tyranny’ (and not so soft, with armed EPA agents descending upon innocent Alaskan pan miners). The only counterweight is conservatism, which would rein in the leviathan, because true conservatives (not necessarily Republicans) are for limited, constitutional government.
It would take us far off-topic to pursue your assertions. Just remember that conservatives espouse Liberty, which of course ends when your fist hits the other guy’s nose—especially if the other guy is a helpless baby in the womb. And raising the minimum wage is the best way of ensuring entry-level unemployment. That too many people are stuck in entry-level jobs is a direct result of the stagnant economy. The solution is growth, and that requires that we get the government Borgocracies off our backs.
/Mr Lynn
[snip Gail – some of the content of this post has no business here – Anthony]
Ed Mertin says: @ September 4, 2013 at 11:58 pm
Conservatives make no sense Mr. Lynn….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I would suggest BOTH of you read Jo Nova’s excellent article (by Dr Evans) Climate Coup — The Politics: How the regulating class is using bogus claims about climate change to entrench and extend their economic privileges and political control. followed by another article America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution: The only serious opposition to this arrogant Ruling Party is coming not from feckless Republicans but from what might be called the Country Party…
Both articles make it clear we have a privileged ‘Aristocracy’ (Parasites) and the rest of us who are intent on gaining a stranglehold on the rest of us via red tape. If we do not figure that out FAST, we are headed back into a dark age of tyranny.
I also suggest reading DEMOCIDE: DEATH BY GOVERNMENT … 20th Century Democide, 169,202,000 Murdered …Just to give perspective on this incredible murder by government, if all these bodies were laid head to toe, with the average height being 5′, then they would circle the earth ten times. Also, this democide murdered 6 times more people than died in combat in all the foreign and internal wars of the century.
THAT is what we should be concerned about because first world countries are not immune. Forget the false agendas thrown up to confuse the masses.
climateace says: @ September 5, 2013 at 3:26 am
….if I was into sheep it would be fat lambs. No wolves our way. If there were we would shoot them….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Don’t try that here in the USA. You will get fined. We can’t even get rid of the @#$% coyotes! (A friend just last week had coyotes chew a large hole in the side of his horse without killing the poor thing.)
Don’t lump me in with that Ed Mertin. I’m with you, as is Mark Levin, who with his The Liberty Amendments: Restoring the American Republic may have the means for the Country Class to take back the USA and the Constitution from the Ruling Class and the soft tyranny of the government leviathan.
/Mr Lynn
Somehow, the vision of Lord Christopher Monckton sitting quietly watching Star Trek The Next Generation doesn’t fit for me.
J.H. says:
September 4, 2013 at 12:54 am
Propaganda you say? No, I saw the footage on Four Corners. How about somebody break your legs and then torture you to make you walk. Why don’t you think first, you heartless cow!
“Slacko says:
September 5, 2013 at 9:07 am”
One documentary. One cow. I saw it too, crewel in all its reality. There was no proof it was a beast from Australia.
Patrick
‘What Abbott said, about climate change driven by emissions of CO2 from human activities, was “The argument was absolute crap”’
Fair enough. My main point was, and is, that the pollies are all over the shop when it comes to CO2/climate change. What sort of prime minister has a policy to spend $3 billion of taxpayers money, including some of mine, on the basis of what he himself has publicly declared to be a crap argument?
Gail Combs
We get wolf derivatives, aka escaped pig dogs – let loose by seriously irresponsible pig hunters – causing whole areas to become impossible for sheep farming. The feral dogs come in and kill or maim serious numbers of sheep and lambs in a single night. Not pretty, not profitable and not a humane (sic) way of death.
The Borgs and farmers used to work together on this sort of stuff but increasingly the Borgs are telling farmers that it is their farm, they can fix the problem themselves. You would think that the rugged, anti-Agenda 21, self-reliant farmers would welcome this decision by the Borgs to leave farmers to their own devices. Uh, uh. What you get is loud farmer calls for more Borg activity, not less.
There are still some good Borg initiatives on the go right now with respect to feral dog control. Large scale regional aerial dog baiting is one of the more cost-effective Borg ways of protecting farmers from their hunting mates.
I notice that the usual paranoid crowd are chanting Agenda 21 and so on and so forth. This is pure ignorance. The fact of the matter is that nearly all on-farm environmental problems (aka they reduce productivity or increase costs to farmers) are regional or national problems.
I will give you an example. Australia has a huge artificial dryland salinity problem. While there are regional variations, the main driver was clearing of the inland slopes of the Great Dividing Range. This increased water recharge and mobilized squillions of tonnes of salt. The salt is basically carted to downslope discharge areas and into streams. Some of the latter have become too salty even for stock drinking water. The salinity affects farmland and it also affects urban infrastructure. (The salt basically breaks down clay particles so salted soil surface looks sort of it is a bit it has melted and flowed a little. It can be quite pretty to look at. Anyway, where dryland salinity discharge areas are urban or rural infrastructure places, house foundations break up, electricicy poles lean drunkenly, and roads break up, etc, etc.
The point is this: no single uber self-reliant, Agenda 21-fearing farmer who is getting dryland salt from his upslope farming neighbours can ever, ever hope to address his dryland salinity issues by himself. He needs Borgs, and he needs them very, very badly.
The history of Australian irrigation in the absence of regulation and Borg-enforcers follows a similar pattern. If you let individual upstream farmers sort it out they would be very inclined to use as much water as they could get their hands on and send silt and salt downstream. Farmers are, after all, individually competitive and I have certainly often seen situations where it is farmer v farmer rather than farmer v Borgs. If I have heard farmers say it once, I have heard it a thousand times: ‘farmers are their own worst enemies’.
Anyway, back to regional and even national farm environmental problems (erosion, salinity, weeds, ferals, soil acidification, etc, etc) – farmers make them and Borgs (and urban taxpayers’ money) are often called in by farming organisations to fix them.
One handy way for the Borgs to track down farmer water thieves, BTW, is that their farmer neighbours dob them in. After all, the water is being stolen from somebody else.
I finish with an anecdote.
Dethridge wheels are used to monitor irrigation water usage. The wheel is set in on-farm irrigation channels and rotates so many times per fixed volume of water. What water thieving farmers do is get a big stick and jam the wheel. The water continues to flow but the wheel has stopped measuring. Any way, the water bailiffs (aka Monckon’s dreaded Agenda 21 Borgs) started noticing all these sticks stuck in Dethridge wheels – in a treeless landscape. A couple of Borg busts later, and the farmer water thieves really got their act together. Dead european carp started getting themselves stuck in Dethridge wheels. Plenty of european carp in the channels. After all, they have pretty well taken over the native fish fauna in the entire Murray Darling Basin. Anyway, the farmer water thief carp lurk worked fairly well until a water bailiff Borg got a carp out of a Dethridge wheel which was still half-frozen.
BTW, I don’t like the conformation of Lord Monckton in the picture above. I like my herefords to have a straight back and the one above has a sway back – and at a very young age. Not a good look, IMHO, and I would keep my cows well clear of semen from that little fellow.
Climateace
I may have unwittingly conflated you with a poster of similar style and content (variation of blog name), therefore withdraw my last comment! Hopefully with a change of Government in Australia the one sided climate debate will also be put aside for a more mature and inclusive scientific approach.
All recent Australian governments (including the right-wing Howard Government) have temporarily banned live exports in the face of graphic cruelty footage. In the past 12 months the live trade industry has voluntarily temporarily banned live exports in the same situation itself without the need for government intervention. This shows that the industry is actually getting a handle on the risk-management side of things.
The basic message to us farmers is that the ovewhelmingly urbanized voters of Australia will not tolerate being confronted with graphic images of cruelty while they are eating their lamb chopes in front of the television during the evening news. By far the majority of Australian voters live in a few big coastal cities. Most of them have never been on or near a farm. I can tell you first hand that they just don’t get it. But here is the thing. If they don’t want animal cruelty, they will pester the Borgs until it stops. That’s what happens in democracies.
The live trade industry basically has two choices: it will either eliminate cruelty from the live trade supply chain or it will have to get used to sudden live trade bans.
Blaming the Borgs, as happened with Gillard but not with Howard (oddly enough), is very, very short-sighted. It is up to industry to makes sure that they have their anti-animal cruelty under 100% control woe to go.
If the industry does not get their act together, the voting population will push the Borgs into action. And if the cruelty keeps going the special animal pest groups (and they are very pesty) will get what they want – a total ban on live trade.
KenB
No worries. I am sure that it is a completely random event and well-within natural variations but we have had our hottest summer (and some very, very nasty bushfires) and we are also having our hottest winter since records began in the 1850’s and that during a neutral ENSO.
Fingers crossed?
Climateace
Of course I do not agree with your claim of hottest summer, that is merely smearing desert heat averaged across Australia, and conveniently enhanced by the up to three degrees that GISS wiped off old (Australian historical temperature records) meticulously gathered by the BoM and its early equivalent as LIG thermometer temperatures.
If you also look at the major urban cities, our modern population growth heat enhanced figures (UHI) temperatures add some three degrees or more in the case of Melbourne and Sydney and easily confirmed by a lay person by observing the change in temperature as you drive from the country into the urban environment.
Last summer was rather mild and certainly nothing out of the normal for most Australians that have lived through very hot summers in our past, it is ludicrous to claim tenths of a degree as records when the past LIG temperature records have been so vandalized by such “adjustments”.(always downwards to sensationalize modern records, by the way) to allow UHI enhanced modern “temperature readings” to appear hotter.
Tenths of a degree? gosh they should be 3 or four degrees hotter plus the addition of the acknowledged Century trend of under one degree celcius increase. So I call Bullsh*t on that claim.
If you want more confirmation the same sly adjusters at GISS stayed away from interfering with the CET temperature record in the UK – too many eyes watching that long temperature series to risk tampering with that one. Further read the official BoM history and obtain a copy of the 1913 BoM report and compare the heat, drought, flood records back into the early 1800’s and yes they did have Stevenson screens and standards to meet even before the BoM commenced its stewardship.
You sell a plausible line, but without merit when closely examined it is just propaganda and it is well beyond time to apply some rational thinking AND science to the test the Climate Change Commission (Borg hive) meme in Australia.
On the live cattle exports, farmers do all that they can in funding the best handling and humane methods of slaughter and we would rather carry this out in our own abattoirs, but we paid to have our best handling practices adopted in the destination countries. That some countries and cultures do not adopt that equipment and procedures is a matter for diplomacy and learning between those cultures, though I suspect that for most animal rights activists, even our best practices and methods of slaughter could be declared barbaric, when presented on television with a vegan slant and sensationalism.
KenB
I am happy to go with the BOM stuff any day of the week. I know some BOM people so I don’t suffer from denialistic paranoia about their so-called unscientific behaviour. It turns out they are pretty normal.
OTOH, you can go with whatever the doubt merchants scratch together. IMHO, at the end of the day, it will be the general lived experience that persuades people – not BOM, not the doubt merchants, and not climate fools like Rudd and Abbott. Wheat cockies in WA are walking off their farms. Not enough rain any more (and a few other problems, of course). The Goyder line is said to be on the move south. Maybe so, maybe not. A mate of mine who lives in the Top End and who drove down at Chrissie reckons that he could not believe how bloody hot it was. Another mate of mine has a mate who has some sort of fishing rights in South Australia. This mate’s mate reckons that the water has been hot and the fish are getting hard to find. Maybe, maybe not. And so it goes. I am pretty well resigned to the fact that people are going to get around to really wanting to stop AGW when it is too late for lots of things. As Ned Kelly would have said, ‘Such is life.’
I largely agree with your last paragraph. At the time, I thought it was foolish for the industry to try to pretend that the government was to blame when it was simply atrocious risk management by the live trade industry.
I note that various commentators on the topic above have failed to integrate two other salient features: one has been the disastrous abnormally dry Wet Season in a lot of Queensland cattle country. The need for producers to ride a season out by holding onto stock collided with a huge lack of feed both on the ground and transportable in. The other feature is the Indonesian Government’s strategy of becoming completely self-sufficient in beef production. Palm oil residue is the key to that. Australian live cattle exports to Indonesia are due to disappear as a matter of Indonesian Government policy. They are prepared to allow that to increase prices of beef in Indonesia. So, the only real question is when that will happen.
As noted above, those activists are determined to close down the live trade so the industry has to get it 100% right, IMHO.
I would add that if the sheep industry doesn’t do something serious about mulesing soon they are in for a hammering as well. And yes, I know all about blowfly strike – I have seen it plenty of times. But as I said above, most Australian voters have never been on a farm in their lives.
Many thanks to Lord Monckton for another excellent post!
Here in the Borg-occupied Italy, EVERY kind of water has been included, by law, in the Proprierty of the Governement.
You have to ask a permission not only for drilling a well (here in the Turin’s Province, if you’re a farmer you need about 18 months of time to have it, after a long bureaucratic nightmare), but also for just to collect the rain water falling over your piece of land.
And once you’ve got the permission, you have to pay a tax on it, in both cases!
“We can fine you for shifting a rock.”
Well, here in the Borg-occupied Italy this can be true in many places, thanks to our “landscape protection law”… Or, at least, you have to get a permission before you shift the rock, submitting a “landscape impact assessment” written by a professional architect and supported by photoshops illustrating the future view of that landscape after you shift that rock…
climateace says:
September 5, 2013 at 7:32 pm
Patrick
‘What Abbott said, about climate change driven by emissions of CO2 from human activities, was “The argument was absolute crap”’
Fair enough. My main point was, and is, that the pollies are all over the shop when it comes to CO2/climate change. What sort of prime minister has a policy to spend $3 billion of taxpayers money, including some of mine, on the basis of what he himself has publicly declared to be a crap argument?
Good point. When questioned about this he pointed out that the scientists disagreed as to the cause of global warming and on the recent 7.30 ABC report he thinks that the human race ‘contributes to emissions’, that cause global warming.
He thinks that it is possible to reduce emissions without taxes or trading schemes, but to do it by technological innovation. He used the example of a trucking company that bought more efficient trucks.
He also wants to plant trees and regenerate farmland, laudable aims and cheaper than offered by other parties.
The beauty of this site is that it actually discusses the causes of climate and seeks an understanding.
Hopefully this will inform all politicians and those of goodwill.
Lewis
I take it you are being party partisan rather than cool and considered when it comes to policy analysis.
(1) CSIRO says the soil carbon sequestration outcomes are far too uncertain to enable good measurements of the outcomes.
(2) Farmers say that the proposed payment in Abbott’s policy per tonne of sequestered carbon is not enough to make it worthwhile for them.
(3) The tree planting was to have been done only on public land because the Nationals hate trees being planted on good farmland (given the various tax break rorts of tree-planting companies and the somewhat shocking consequences for investors, the Nationals have a point). The trouble with planting the trees on public land is that there is simply not enough public land of silvicultural quality available for the quantum of trees promised
“Lewis P Buckingham says:
September 6, 2013 at 2:10 am”
It’s an election year and, as with any politician, Abbott will say whatever needs to be said to win. I can think of plenty of infrastructure that $7bn of the $10bn clean energy fund can be better spent on stuff that is actually needed. Such as a second airport for Sydney ($3bn). I do not view high-speed inter-city rail is viable in Australia. The most efficient way to transport people, given the population density, in Aus is by air. That’s why we use air. We can invest in hospitals, schools etc etc. Communications such as roads. I have yet to see a box of mangos transported from where they grow to where people live an eat over a fibre-optic cable.
Regarding climate change, there is still no evidence to support the hypothesis that emissions of CO2 from human activities are *DRIVING* climate to change in a bad way. There is no evidence. None. Nada. Zip.
If there is a crisis of climate through change, then those who claim so need to start behaving like there is a crisis.
“climateace says:
September 5, 2013 at 11:24 pm
I am happy to go with the BOM stuff any day of the week.”
At your peril. Go to the BoM website and download their data. See any significant trend? Last time I looked there was none. By the way, how many thermometers do you think the BoM uses to calculate a national average? 112. That’s one thermometer for every ~68,500 square kilometres. The BoM have also vetted weather data from NIWA in New Zealand and have been found to have manipulated the data in favour of a warming trend. And still the hoax continues, perpetuated by “scientists”.
CSIRO is the same organisation who in 1935, then called CSRO (I think), worked with the Qld govn’t and sugar cane growers to introduce the cane toad to fight a beetle problem. CSRO approved the introduction because the CSRO itself wanted to introduce the European toad in other parts of the country. How did that work out for Aus?
Until the BoM and the CSIRO can demonstrate the ~3% of 400ppm/v CO2 is driving climate change in a catastrophic way then I will continue to take their view on climate change (All based on computer modelling) as pure hypothesis, conjecture. And so should everyone else IMO.
climateace says: @ September 5, 2013 at 8:04 pm
….The Borgs and farmers used to work together on this sort of stuff…..
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
And therein lies the problem. USED TO. The USDA, FDA… in the USA also used to work with farmers now they work FOR the multi-nationals. He!! the multi-nationals head the d@mn departments now! The Amazing Revolving Door
I suggest you read:
HACCP’S Disconnect From Public Health Concerns HACCP is international. The Corporations do the inspections, government just looks at the paperwork and has shut down testing labs. Cutting 80 Percent of Pathogen Testing for Produce, USDA Begins Shutdown of MDP
The new law pushing HACCP/traceability on farmers in USA (again international and driven by WTO) Trojan Horse Law: The Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009
The method used to scare the public: After HACCP went into effect in 1996 for food processing factories the Food Borne Disease rate doubled. Instead of being “Today, America has the safest food in the world.” as stated Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman in 1997, every outbreak of illness made headlines bringing ‘unsafe food’ into public awareness. The USDA instead of cracking down hid the problem. SHIELDING THE GIANT: USDA’s “Don’t Look, Don’t Know” Policy for Beef Inspection
Stanley Painter, Chairman of the National Food Inspection Unions, stated in his testimony at the congressional hearing on the Hallmark Dower Cows:
The USDA did an ‘investigation’ and “Their observations also concluded that the chairman’s allegations were unsubstantiated.” [pg 73] Senate Hearings
[Last two links removed by US government]
more on this fiasco in my comment link
This is all part of a long range plan not random occurrences. History, HACCP and the Food Safety Con Job
climateace says: @ September 5, 2013 at 11:24 pm
I am happy to go with the BOM stuff any day of the week….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Then I suggest you go and see what some independent auditors found.
After WUWT volunteers looked at the USA weather stations and found all sorts of problems. People in Australia took a look at their information. Australian temperature records shoddy, inaccurate, unreliable. New Zealand independents did the same BREAKING NEWS: NIWA reveals NZ original climate data missing so it seems The Goat ate the Data. NZ lawsuit
climateace says:
September 6, 2013 at 3:26 am
On your first point this is a US site so its OK to be a bit partisan.
1]So carbon sequestration is an intangible, so what?
Farmers in Goulburn are using conservation and permaculture to retain soil fertility and build up humus in otherwise poor soils devastated by erosion and ferals. Anyone, including politicians, who support this type of activity are to be applauded.
It sure beats buying carbon credits from Nigeria.
2} That’s just tough, its good practice to retain humus and organic materials in the soil.
I foresee that the plan will be dropped as it becomes evident it does nothing for climate.
2] Bob Hawke wanted to plant a billion trees, if its good enough for him, its good enough for me.
But then we don’t want to be partisan.do we?
“KenB says:
September 5, 2013 at 8:12 pm”
No, I don’t think you did. I have seen this “handle” before, definitely here at WUWT. May have been some years ago, maybe 2010? 2013, “climateace” pops up again. Pure speculation, but the “handle” and posts seem similar to me.
“Lewis P Buckingham says:
September 6, 2013 at 6:44 am”
How did Aborigines survive the ~60,000 years before “modern” humans arrived from Europe? Climateace moans about water quality from the Murray-Darling basin, what “climateace” forgets is that there are now 50,000 farms draining from that basin that were not there as late as 1950.
Climateace, you sure are a mine of misinformation, but then when I see you confidence in the Modern bought and sold political C.S.I.R.O competing for Climate Commission largess, you should speak to some of the scientists who once worked there when it was an honest scientific organisation rather than the organisation that issued a broadsheet backing up Flannerys claim that we had seen the last of the rain, and moving forward we had nothing to hope for but drought, meanwhile our climate did exactly as is has done many times before, produced the heavy flooding rain that traditionally comes after a drought breaks, and it did just as it has in the past and no doubt will do so in the future, and you conveniently gloss over the Queensland floods and extended wet seasons. all just alarmist propaganda that hopefully will be properly challenged by scientists who no longer have to toe the line of government taxing desires, and conflating harmless carbon dioxide with evil black carbon (Oh how many times did dear Julia use that term to raise a belief that C02 was black carbon particles, the sooty stuff that some other countries emit, but we scrubbed out of our emissions for some thirty years or more) I don’t even know why I am bothering to challenge your beliefs as there are plenty of facts on this site, and credible scientists to advance your knowledge if you are as you claim.
Have you even read the 100 year official history of the BoM, and the chapters on the competition for the C.S.I.R.O. to politically capture supremacy over certain functions, or the problems of using computers and climate modelling to seemingly predict weather, when they were not then and still not now fit for purpose due to the variability and chaotic nature of weather, and the pressure to put aside traditional meteorology for faith in computers – a good read might open your eyes, and of course source documents and papers can be found via the extensive references given throughout the 100 years of the BoM, and if you look at the graphics printed on the inside of the covers you will see representation of the actual rainfall (blue being among the wettest one third of historical observation and red areas amongst the driest one third of historical observation starting from 1910, its pretty easy to track the yearly changes, droughts floods etc, and you might also see how in a large continent like Australia even in the wettest years there will be parts of the continent that are coloured red and in the drought years their are blue areas of heavy rain. White areas are amongst the middle one third of historical observations. With such variable rainfall patterns it is easy to dwell on one dry event somewhere in Australia, or a flooding event elsewhere and totally misrepresent the worst in my short lifetime memory as something worrying or scary, but the data collected meticulously by the science does not unless it is molested like our past high LIG thermometer temperatures.
I think you need to listen and learn more before spouting current climate propaganda, as others will call you out on the science and data as they rightly should – Are you here to learn and understand or to mock. A good test would be your belief in the existence of some consensus, as used to be claimed in regard to Climate science. Its missing at the moment just like the accelerated warmth that didn’t arrive for some 15 years or more and has been now recognised as “a hiatus in warming” causing some concern as it ever so slowly trends down – yep keep your fingers crossed!! and those mates suitably updated.
Cam Banks. RE CSIRO Research
Cam Banks on his northern NSW grazing property foresees massive potential to bury carbon.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/federal-election-2013/carbon-farmers-await-a-carrot-20130905-2t862.html#ixzz2e98gOZyJ
Looks as if an Aussie farmer thinks its worth ten bucks to sequester a ton of carbon.
I don’t think the climate will change because of it, but the microclimate of the soil will benefit, and the money stays in Australia.
Sorry for not responding quickly and also that there are far too many points raised above for me to address so I will just focus on a few. I post as climateace from time to time on WUWT. From memory the last time I posted was when the bushfires were doing considerable damage during our hottest summer on record. As far as I can recall I have been pretty consistent in my views – but who knows? Things change.
RL Buckingham: I did not say that CSIRO is not intensely interested in promoting soil sequestration of carbon. What I was saying was that there are far too many uncertainties about how much gets sequestrated under what circumstances to either build a market around it or to get any firm idea about what you are buying for tax dollars. It is, therefore, poor public policy at this stage. I believe that soil carbon sequestration has an excellent future.
In relation to a billion trees that was well before carbon sequestration was a significant public policy issue. I don’t think they were ever all planted and I am willing to bet that drought killed off lots of the ones that were planted. Whether the plantings ‘worked’ to minimize salinization and/or stave off our extinction event, I don’t know.
The CSIRO of today is vastly different from the CSIRO of 1935.
Despite the attempts of doubt merchants to pick away at the edges, I believe that BOM and CSIRO are credible science organisations. Like every other organisation they get things here and there from time to time. But they fix things up and then get them right eventually. I have no time at all for paranoid conspiracy theories. OTOH, nitpickers are useful because from time to time they improve the eventual outcome at the margines.
My main point above stands: farmers need Borgs.
“climateace says:
September 7, 2013 at 1:33 am
The CSIRO of today is vastly different from the CSIRO of 1935.
Despite the attempts of doubt merchants to pick away at the edges, I believe that BOM and CSIRO are credible science organisations.”
The CSIRO today is the same as it was when it was called the CSIR in 1935. Just like NASA is the same today as it was in the 1960’s. The difference you infer in the CSIRO, and quite obvious in NASA, is politically based science programs, the major one being climate change.
If you believe what the BoM and CSIRO tell you, my suggestion is that you get a second opinion.
“climateace says:
September 7, 2013 at 1:33 am
My main point above stands: farmers need Borgs.”
Given the shattering result of the Federal election, we now can leave in the past the ALP/Green/Independent minority ALP lead Govn’t, with it’s internal, kindergarten like bickering, I’d say you farmers will have fewer “Borgs” on tap. Time to stop selling land/farms to China. The Chinese won’t care where the water comes from, they will simply buy the water supply or move. Mark my words.