Farmers turning ploughshares into swords
Farmers are fighting back, fuelled by a view governments aren’t paying enough attention and city dwellers have been swayed by activists.
Farming nearly killed James Jackson, and since there’s a way of stopping what happened to him happening to other farmers, he wants the government to do it.
Jackson and his family run a grazing property near Guyra in northern NSW. In 1992 he was shearing some sheep.
“I would have nicked one and it would have been the blood,” he tells The Australian.
Jackson soon found himself fighting for his life for a week in intensive care — he’d contracted Q fever, carried in livestock, pets and some native animals including kangaroos.
There’s a vaccine for Q fever, but the overall process of having it administered can involve multiple medical visits and tests and several hundred dollars in out-of-pocket expenses.
Jackson, who heads industry body NSW Farmers, wants federal Health Minister Greg Hunt to put the vaccine on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. He says if there is one thing he’s determined to achieve in his presidency, that’s it.
It’s one of the anomalous quirks of the health system that movement on Jackson’s call is stuck in a bureaucratic quagmire.
When The Australian asked Hunt about it, he flick-passed the inquiry to his department, which said it couldn’t put the Q fever vaccine on the PBS because the manufacturer, Seqirus, had not applied for that to happen.
Seqirus in turn came up with a complex reply as to why it hadn’t applied and wouldn’t, saying among other things it would require an assessment of “cost-effectiveness”, and that “employers are responsible for protecting workers”.
Farmer activism
Jackson says he will not allow this standoff to continue, and he has a plan to break it.
He has formed what he calls “an alliance of the willing” with other bodies, including the Country Women’s Association and the National Farmers’ Federation, to lobby.
Beyond that, he has proposed the alliance pay for billboards, much like the film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.
The message on the billboard would be pretty simple, Jackson says: a picture of Hunt and the words: “Greg Hunt, why the f..k is Q fever vaccine not on the PBS?”
Jackson’s Q fever campaign is one example of a growing trend of farmer activism around the nation. It’s fuelled by a view that state and federal governments aren’t paying enough attention to rural concerns, and that the urban population has been swayed against farming by radical environmentalists and animal rights activists.
There are two strands to farmer activism, which can be divided into the “hard power” of protest and overt criticism of government, and the “soft power” of subtle campaigns to win hearts and minds.
In the first category, irrigation farmers including Chris Brooks have led big rallies in regional NSW against the Murray-Darling Basin Plan under which the federal government has bought back irrigation water entitlements to transfer to environmental flows, a contributing factor to why some irrigators are on zero allocations of water.
There’s a link there with politics: faith in the traditional defenders of farmers and other rural folk, The Nationals, has diminished in many areas so that the activist Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party now controls three western NSW state seats it won off the Nationals, giving it half the state by land area.
GRAPHIC: Farmers sowing dissent
Quad bike win
Other farming groups have launched single-issue campaigns with a bit of in-your-face protest.
A few months ago the NFF — including president Fiona Simson and chief executive Tony Mahar — took quad bikes complete with a sheep dog to the lawn of Parliament House in Canberra to protest against the federal government’s lack of action on making the bikes safer.
That produced a win: last week the government mandated new safety standards requiring that all new quad bikes display a warning label alerting riders to the risk of rollover and be fitted with an operator-protection device.
Like Jackson’s concern about Q fever, Mahar says the issue is about as fundamental as you can get: farmers’ lives.
“Quad bike accidents have already claimed nine lives this year and 230 since 2011, about half from rollovers,” he said at the protest.
There have been other campaigns with a bit of grunt: AgForce, the Queensland farmers’ association, engaged in a protest in Townsville last month against the state government’s Great Barrier Reef protection bill which, farmers argue, is not based on science but would restrict their agricultural activities.
Hearts and minds
AgForce chief executive Michael Guerin delivered a rousing speech to close the event and led the crowd in chanting “fair laws for farmers”.
The bigger game, though, is not loud protests but a battle for hearts and minds in the arena of public opinion — the contest of soft power.
Jackson says anti-agriculture propaganda is disseminated by urban journalists, particularly at the ABC, which “has just been relentless in putting our guys under pressure and out of business”.
Every natural event, from fish kills to dust storms, Jackson says, is spun as being the fault of farmers.
He says the problem goes right back to schools, where “the curriculum has been green-washed for some years” with children taught “farmers are environmental and economic vandals”.
In July, Jackson gave a powerful address to the NSW Farmers annual conference in Sydney where he said it was time for farmers to fight back.
Jackson told delegates they should stand up against a “witch hunt” by anti-farming activists, urban “latte-drinking hipsters”, and GetUp.
“It is time to put a right to farm in place,” he told delegates to wild applause.
Boosting image
Jackson, a veterinarian, urged delegates to get off the defensive in the public debate and on the front foot to remind urban Australians what a good job they did for the country.
On Monday, the NFF set in motion a campaign to precisely this end.
At its Leaders Summit in Canberra marking its 40th anniversary, the NFF launched the first stage of an initiative called Telling Our Story.
It released a video it hopes will gain wide traction on social media, with an upbeat message that urban Australians and farmers are on the same team working to the same greater goals.
The NFF hired Hausmann Communications, which teamed up with Moree, NSW-based film production agency Rabbit Hop Films and production house Heckler to make the short film.
It is a clever, well-shot piece of work.
“Why do you do what you do, getting up while the rest of the world is asleep?” it starts out.
It shows a farmer getting into a tractor at dawn, but then cuts to an urban scene of a millennial hipster waking up at 6am, and getting in his not-at-all-bad looking car to drive to work at what looks like a high-powered office job in the city.
The video then flicks back and forth between marvellous farming scenes in cotton and canola fields, and the millennial and other urbanites going about their lives in offices and on motor scooters.
Along with stereotypical scenes such as a poddy lamb being fed on a bottle, there’s a bit of hi tech: the video voiceover says “you can see the world is changing” as a drone takes off over magnificent countryside, while the cotton field has a sophisticated-looking piece of machinery doing something or other.
“You see we are all pushing in the same direction, all on this journey together,” the voiceover says.
“In the city or the country, we are all part of the same cycle. We are Australian farmers.”
The video is the soft power element of the NFF’s Telling Our Story campaign, a deliberately inclusive, benign message to percolate into urban living rooms.
Urban disconnect
It follows an opinion poll survey commissioned by the NFF and conducted by JWS research that finds while in general Australians view agriculture favourably, many feel disconnected from the farming community and question some of its practices. “It was acutely important to us, not just to act on gut feel or anecdotal information, but, using scientific research methods, to ask the Australian community for their perception of farming and agriculture,” Simson says.
“Many of the contentious issues are a result of the widening gap between farmers and rural Australian and urban-based communities.
“In the decades before, people had a country cousin, grandparent, aunt or uncle.
“Changes to our nation’s demographics have seen these links to the bush and agriculture diminish.
“This gap is leading to a lack of understanding about the process by which our food came to be on our supermarket shelves and the story behind our natural fibres.”
While the NFF did not spell out which were the “contentious issues”, the suggestion is that urban dwellers are concerned about how farmers treat animals and the environment.
To allay those concerns, the NFF will launch a multi-pronged campaign including education, marketing and public relations.
All of a sudden there seems to be a lot of initiatives in the primary sector to mix it up in the battle of public opinion — suggesting there’s a perception that the battle is being lost to radical greens and animal activists.
A coalition of farming, fishing and forestry groups last week announced it had launched a program to deal with what it calls “the challenge of community trust”.
The NFF, the NSW government and 10 rural research and development corporations say the program will run initially for three years.
What’s called The Community Trust in Rural Industries Program has as its lead researcher Kieren Moffat, chief executive of Voconiq, a CSIRO spin-off company.
Moffat tells The Australian the initial focal point of the program will be a massive opinion survey, canvassing 5000 people around the country who will be invited to express their views about primary industry in an online exchange.
Moffat says similar research has shown “the trust in industries in general, and trust in institutions like government, have declined over the past decade”.
“It reduces the freedom for industries to operate, and may not be keeping up with expectations,” he says.
“Mining has been dealing with this for decades, and now the agricultural industries are thinking, we are going to have to deal with this.”