Vikki Campion: Government’s focus on climate change an insult to people who can’t afford to eat

Despite claiming they can do nothing about the cost of living in Australia, your government is jetting off to Dubai because they believe they can change the temperature of the globe, writes Vikki Campion.

For those who can no longer afford dinner, you will be happy to know your government is jetting to Dubai for their No.1 priority: action on climate change.

As the most simple home-cooked Aussie staple of lamb chops and mash soars to more than $25 for a family dinner, the Albanese ministry is set for a UN junket on lab-grown meat and methane taxes.

Minister for Climate Change Chris Bowen is off to spruik Australian land to renewables carpetbaggers at his second COP as minister, where last year he signed us up to a global methane pledge.

Department of Energy and Climate Change bureaucrats told an Australian delegation to the global conference this week that this time he would focus on promoting and accelerating foreign investment into the Australian renewables sector.

While he flits around the Australia Pavilion, oblivious to the working families struggling to feed themselves, he will have little focus on agriculture.

Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen is off to COP28. Picture: NCA NewsWire / David Swift

In fact, COP28 has scheduled presentations to “understand why there is a critical need to invest in alternative proteins”, including “cultivated meat”.

It will also launch “a new, global initiative to address dairy methane emissions” called the Dairy Methane Action Agenda — sure to make milk more expensive and force more Australian farmers out, featuring “innovative approaches to public-private methane reduction in the agriculture sector”.

The price of lamb, and other meat, will only rise with more climate change measures. Picture: Zoe Phillips

It is easier to be a big thing in Dubai at the Australian Pavilion than to get the ACCC to answer the question of why a lamb that — at the farm gate, killed and dressed, each with 32 chops and four roasts — gets farmers between $3.50 and $5.00 a kilogram, is selling at the major supermarkets for between $17 and $34 a kilo.

Breezier still to pose around the coffee machine with pro-wind, pro-solar head-nodders than to stop and examine why potato growers are getting 50c a kilo, but shoppers are paying between $3 and $3.80 a kilo.

It’s cheerier to sign international agreements for Instagram, rather than drill down into how those pledges will push up the price of groceries or power, for those already struggling to afford to pay $25 for a simple chops and mash dinner for their family.

Taxing dairy farmers, who are paid about 71c a litre for milk, on the methane cows make, will drive more farmers out and milk prices up. Milk’s hard to find in a major supermarket for under $2.15 a litre — imagine how expensive it will be once you have kicked the survivors to the kerb.

When the agent, the processor, and the farmer say they are absorbing extra costs as much as they can, they blame the price of trucking, transport, fridges, and warehouses.

And instead of driving down energy costs and relieving land pressures, the minister will be overseas telling wealthy climate opportunists that there is more to swindle from Australia than they are currently getting — people are prepared to pay even more.

The price of milk is also set to skyrocket. Picture: AFP

If investment in Australian renewables is going so well, why has he announced more subsidies for them? And if they are cheaper, why do we need to subsidise them at all?

Do you want politicians to offer a better deal on how you pay for dinner or a better deal for foreign companies to put up transmission lines and wind factories across countryside that should be producing steak, chops, carrots and spuds?

Do you want your politicians to concentrate on the cost of living in Australia or climate change in Dubai?

Our current federal government is afflicted with the dilemma of distraction, with a priority list of constitutional referendums and climate policy and vat meat.

But the party that was all about the cost of living before the election now seems to believe there is nothing they can do.

Labor Senators in the Select Committee on the Cost of Living report released in May said: “The drivers behind Australia’s current cost of living circumstances are largely global and being experienced by other similar economies.”

Please.

It’s somewhat of a paradox that people who believe they can do nothing about the cost of living in Australia also believe they can change the temperature of the globe.

Wonder why it’s almost impossible to get cheese for under $10 a block? Drive through the old dairy country in Far North Queensland or the Mid North Coast, and play “spot the working dairy farm”.

Australian milk production has declined consistently for the past two decades and is predicted by the Department of Agriculture to fall again next year, along with the value of sheep meat to fall by 14 per cent, while the ever-helpful banks are talking about lending only to farms that are net zero.

If the only farm that can get finance is a laboratory growing vat “meat” while paying a “carbon offset” on bits of scrub in The Pilliga, with technology imported from an airconditioned billionaires’ climate conference, we are doomed.

Minister Bowen, before sitting at the table for the a la carte dinners with ministers in Dubai, should stand in the queue at the food banks in Western Sydney with those who cannot afford their grocery bill and are given the basic essentials. He might not even have to leave his seat of McMahon to do so.

Ask those people if they want action on methane or the dignity of being able to afford dinner.

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