Andrew Bolt: Murray Darling farmers subjected to false prophets of gloom
The Murray Darling Association is meant to help farmers in Australia’s great food bowl but will instead force them to suck up lectures from two false propehts — a global warming extremist and an “indigenous historian”, writes Andrew Bolt.
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Tim Flannery? Bruce Pascoe? If you want proof Australians are losing their brains, check the speakers hired by the Murray Darling Association for its national conference.
The MDA is meant to help farmers in Australia’s great food bowl, but will instead subject them to speeches from two false prophets of our great new unreason.
How can irrigators treat Flannery as a water expert when they know this global warming extremist in 2007 claimed “even the rain that falls isn’t actually going to fill our dams and our river systems”?
How often have those farmers since seen floods on the Murray, Darling and Murrumbidgee? How often have they seen Australia’s biggest dam, the Warragamba, fill to the brim, including this year?
Same deal with Pascoe. Why is he still taken seriously?
Pascoe, made a professor in indigenous agriculture by Melbourne University and promoted as an “indigenous historian” by the ABC, will now lecture the MDA on how to “build an industry for native foods, grains and grasses”.
Again, reason flies out the door. This is New Age dreaming of the kind that – taken seriously – would leave us poorer and hungrier.
The MDA advertises Pascoe as “a writer of Tasmanian, Bunurong and Yuin descent”, even though both the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre and Boonwurrung (or Bunurong) Land and Sea Council say he’s a fake, and genealogical records suggest he has not one Aboriginal ancestor.
(The very white Pascoe refuses to show public proof of his Aboriginal ancestry.)
His promotion of Aboriginal “agriculture” is based on claims in his best-selling book Dark Emu that Aborigines were not actually hunter-gatherers but “farmers” living in “houses” in “towns” of “1000 people” with “pens” for animals.
As Australia’s greatest historian, Geoffrey Blainey, confirms, there is zero evidence of such towns or farms. The citations Pascoe gives are inventions or misrepresentations.
But Murray Darling farmers must now suck up a lecture by Pascoe on native “crops” such as button grass, which Western Australia’s Department of Primary Industry warns “depletes soil moisture and nutrients”, is the “first species to experience heat or moisture stress”, and “ can result in toxicity for sheep and cattle” with overgrazing.
Pascoe also pushes kurrajong seeds, so uneconomic that they sell for around 15 cents per seed.
What has happened to sweet reason? And what will now happen to our agriculture?