Nationals betray the bush — again

Among the death and destruction left in their wake, one can observe some positives that have come from the devastating bushfires that ripped through New South Wales and Queensland.

One is that the conservative taboo on linking bushfire intensity and frequency to the climate crisis has been broken. The other is that the National Party has well and truly revealed itself to be no friend of regional Australia.

The desperate attempt by Nationals leader Michael McCormack to dismiss any reference to climate science as the preserve of "woke capital-city greenies" — in stark contradiction to the clearly expressed views of firefighting experts and people in the bush — marked a genuine turning point.

The frantic insistence by former Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce that the Greens bear some responsibility for the fires, even though the Coalition has been in power for several years, both federally and in NSW, was truly unhinged.

Once upon a time, the National Party was characterised by its "rural socialism", a mixture of rural pork-barrelling and support for farmers. Those days have long since gone.

It now functions as a simple sidekick for the extension of the Liberals’ ruthless neoliberal agenda into the bush. The Nationals’ unconditional support for coal mining and billionaire cotton producers, at the expense of the Darling River ecosystem and downstream agricultural industries, is brutal proof that they represent agribusiness and fossil fuel capitalists, not family farmers.

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Agricultural experts urge a halt to Shenhua coalmine

An open letter from eight former agronomists and soil scientists, including five who worked for the Department of Primary Industries, has urged NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian to halt Shenhua’s Watermark coalmine and protect the Liverpool Plains from mining.

The letter said the agreement the government reached last month with Shenhua to renew its coal exploration licence, paving the way for the mine to proceed, puts at risk “the future of one of the major contributors to food and fibre security”.

Last month the government paid Shenhua $262 million for just over half the exploration licence area of the proposed mine at Watermark in northern NSW. Energy Minister Don Harwin said the buyback would ensure there was no mining on the fertile black soils of the plains.

But the agronomists said limiting the proposed open cut mine to ridges would still likely affect surface and groundwater flows in the plains and downstream regions.

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Behind the corporate takeover of Australian agricultural land and farms

By Elena Garcia

As the demand for Australian farm products skyrockets in Asia, corporate Australia is buying up drought-crippled but viable rural properties at bargain prices.

Conservative federal MP Bob Katter proposed legislation late last year that would force banks to allow farmers two years to sell foreclosed properties instead of forcing 6-week fire sales. Katter cited sources in the agricultural industry on forced bank sales, saying that with only two months to sell, a farmer would be lucky to get 40% of market value for their property, but with two years to sell a farmer could expect to obtain 80% of market value.

The legislation would also stop banks imposing confidentiality agreements that allow them to bully their victims with a range of dirty tricks, now being investigated by a Senate banking inquiry.

Action is being mounted in the Federal Court alleging that ANZ forced farmers into “engineered defaults” and entrapped them into signing changed loan contracts when it bought out the loan book of the Landmark group in 2009.

This corporate bullying has a terrible social cost. Lifeline figures show that when a severe drought hits a rural community and financial and emotional stress levels climb, suicide rates increase sixfold.

A new Rural Bank

A record 86% of Queensland is now drought-declared, following three failed wet seasons. Many farmers are without the funds to re-stock their properties when the drought breaks. It is in this context that the banks are forcing foreclosures of properties that have not defaulted on mortgage payments and selling them at only 40% of market value.

There is a dire need for a government with vision to re-establish a Rural Bank to offer long-term loans at 2% interest and cheap farm insurance to viable, sustainable rural businesses, so that farmers and their communities can continue to produce clean affordable food, manage the Australian landscape to minimise bushfires and keep our water catchments clean.

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Sustainable Australian agriculture under corporate attack from mining, banks and agribusinesses

By Elena Garcia

A new wave of land grabbing is turning farmland into industrial monocultures.

In the past few years, private investors backed by corporate interests such as global banks, financial firms, hedge funds and food giants have bought a huge amount of farmland across the global South.

Oxfam's 2012 Our Land, Our Lives report on land grabbing said foreign investors had bought enough land in the past decade to feed 1 billion people. Oxfam singled out the World Bank, which has boosted its finance of intensive, large-scale agriculture in the global South from $2.5 billion a year in 2008 to $9.5 billion in November 2012.

The World Bank refused Oxfam's call to put a freeze on its loans to land grabbers, saying its investments were not adding to the food crisis, but providing “major new investment in agriculture to improve the productivity of large and small farmers while protecting the environment”.

However these investments are being used by corporations to buy up prime food-producing land, just as free trade treaties come into play that will allow them to sue governments that affect their profits by attempting to regulate their use of that land.

As at least two-thirds of the land grabbers intend to “export everything they produce”, Oxfam said these business plans “will come into direct conflict with the need for more land to feed a growing global population”. Most firms that take the World Bank's money use the land to produce biofuels to feed cars, or commodities to sell on overseas markets.

Researchers Shepard Daniel and Anuradha Mittall said in a 2009 study: “Not only does land grabbing mean that farmers will lose their land, but these lands will be transformed from smallholdings or communal lands into large industrial estates connected to far-off markets.”

The new wave of land grabbing is also turning the farmland into industrial monocultures, which rely heavily on chemical inputs and produce huge greenhouse gas emissions.

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Mining industry slammed at Queensland Water Summit

By Elena Garcia

The flooded and abandoned Ensham mine.

About 50 people attended the Queensland Water Summit in Dalby on September 23. Despite its midweek timing, a wide range of people attended from across the state, including farmers threatened by increasingly severe drought and mining company pollution of their water sources, to community members, doctors and clergy from communities impacted by coal seam gas, underground coal gasification and coalmining.

The summit was organised and funded by independent Senator Glenn Lazarus, who spoke briefly but mostly listened to the concerns raised by attendees.

He also coordinated a feedback session at the end of the day to collect practical suggestions from participants on how best to sustainably manage Australian water resources. He will submit them to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, along with his repeated invitation to Turnbull to visit the gasfield-affected communities.

Four speakers gave presentations. Associate Professor Larelle Fabbro from Central Queensland University spoke on the need for sources of water that do not dry up, within a historical Australian weather pattern of floods every five years and droughts every 10. Climate change will mean more intense events.

Dam problems

The large dams called for by the Nationals as the means to "drought-proof Australia" change water quality and encourage toxic algal blooms. The longer water is stored, the poorer its quality; and the bigger the dam becomes, the more the water quality changes for the worse, as the water mixes less. In summer the surface heats and the cold bottom layer rots and breeds highly toxic algal blooms often invisible on the surface. Many types of toxic algal blooms have still not been identified.

Large dams can also prevent many fish species from migrating from fresh to saltwater to breed.

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