Tory Shepherd: When should we stop helping our farmers?
OUR farmers are extremely vulnerable to extremes. Good and bad weather, pests and disease. But there are smarter ways to smooth the bumps than through hand-outs, writes Tory Shepherd.
FARMERS are right up there when it comes to Australia’s sacred cows.
Maybe a bee’s appendage behind the diggers on the do-not-touch scale (It’s a crazy-brave move to accuse one of our decorated veterans of doing anything wrong.)
That’s why it’s controversial to question the logic of the storm of help for our drought-ravaged farmers. It feels good — warm, fuzzy, useful — to reach out to those in need. There’s nothing a politician likes better than to don a hat and boots and stride through the countryside splashing cash where there’s no water.
New Prime Minister Scott Morrison made dealing with the drought his first order of business, promising to extend drought relief (while also praying for rain and declining to discuss the role of climate change).
I don’t want to sound baleful, but there are now hundreds of crowd-funding sites raising money for bales. Hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars. More than that when you count all the different state and federal programs.
No one’s denying that they’ve hit hard times. But experts are increasingly questioning whether it does more harm than good to prop up farmers who are struggling to keep going as dams dry up and crop prices ratchet up.
On Tuesday, experts from the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences said there was a “dilemma” in helping farmers in distress.
If farmers know there’s a handout likely in the bad times, they have less incentive to prepare for and prevent those bad times. There’s a temptation to squander the good times, maybe overcapitalise, knowing that there’s help when the next year fails.
How does that look to the sensible ones who understand the ups and downs and manage them strategically?
That lack of pressure to tighten the belt means the chickens could really come home to roost as climate change deepens and droughts get more intense and more common. A poll out yesterday shows most Australians — 63 per cent — think climate change is happening and we’re behind it. What’s more, the Essential Research poll shows most people — 56 per cent — think we’re not doing enough about it. We’re certainly not if the Government won’t even talk about climate change in connection with the drought.
And there’s more — the folks at ABARES warn in The Conversation that the focus on farmers in crisis — while ignoring all the farmers who were perfectly well prepared for a dry year — could damage our reputation. There’s a worry that, instead of the image of a clean, green, fertile land we want to project as we export our food to the world, we’re starting to look a little shaky and unreliable.
There are hundreds of crowd-funded schemes for farmers with little oversight.
Then there’s the “milk-washing” attempts of the big supermarkets, who started charging customers a surcharge on milk, promising the money would go to producers.
Livid Agriculture Minister David Littleproud called it a “half-baked” farce because Coles and Woolworths just put the levy on their own, generic milk with no guarantee of who would get the money.
Our farmers are extremely vulnerable to extremes. Good and bad weather, pests and disease. And it’s true they don’t get as many subsidies as some other nations, which messes with the export business.
But there are smarter ways to smooth the bumps. There are tax shelters so farmers can squirrel away money in the good times, and insurance schemes to help them in the bad times. Some government schemes give farmers cheap loans to help droughtproof their businesses; to get water tanks, for example.
ABARES points out that education plays a role helping primary producers make better strategies and become more self-sufficient. They also give the thumbs up to anything that stops farming families falling into poverty.
The warm fuzzies aren’t the way to help our farmers through the big dries: cool evidence-based strategies are the way to come up with long-term solutions.
Sloppy policies, murky grants and self-promoting generous stunts are about as useful as Mr Morrison praying for rain.