Reasonable people must confront vigilante vandals

There is no umpire in the political debate. There’s no rule book. What you get away with wins.

The debate is boring in the middle so the one you hear is on the edge of the bell curve. Debate at the middle of the bell curve is arguing the colour of the kitchen; it is inconsequential to the construction of the house.

The Labor Party’s tactics now are to stay in the middle, but it will still be the preference beneficiary of those shrieking on the far Left. This is a consequence of compulsory preferential voting.

Every time the far Left fails on one front, such as the cash-for-cruelty campaign where anti-sheep export activists offered money to workers on ships for film of distressed animals, they open another — this time animal activists’ Aussie Farms website, a direct attack on farmers, their families and homes.

If we listed the addresses, phone numbers and pictures of houses of misguided activists on an interactive map, we would be labelled extremists, outrageous and un-Australian. The Greens would go into meltdown. These people don’t want a reasonable discussion, they want property invasion. But apparently as farmers we just have to suck it up and they can play however they like.

They aren’t doing it for curiosity’s sake, they are doing it because they believe animals are people and people are animals and trees have the same rights as both. If animals have the same rights as people then you can’t eat animals and it becomes a virtuous cause to free the animals from the serfdom of their paddocks.

Once more the minority on the militant fringe impose their noble and enlightened world view on that group called the rest of society. This same mob of fringe dwellers believes the drought was inconsequential to the Menindee Lakes fish kill and their solution is to close the irrigation industry, which means the closure of farms and, of course, many towns in the west of Queensland and NSW.

In the past these people have targeted the fishing industry and the timber industry, and in the future it will be the mining industry.

They won’t be happy until we are living under sheets of corrugated iron foraging for weeds and other herbaceous delicacies. Then they will have their perfect society. The same activists spend hours of their no-doubt copious free time at the keyboard for myriad so-called environmental groups masquerading for, or duped by, the left fringe.

One of their “art of war” mechanisms is to make the defence of our industries as mute as possible.

Do you believe in global warming? Then you can’t argue against their views on power.

Do you believe animal cruelty is wrong? Then you cannot debate the live sheep trade.

Do you believe biodiversity is important? Then you can’t support the timber industry.

You have to accept the premise of their argument before we defend our industry and too often we fall for this trap. They want the middle ground to keep moving to their ground on the far Left.

And make you, if you quite like the idea of steak and vegetables, an extremist.

They occupy social media as a thousand bogus and belligerent voices. Away from Twitter, they have their media tribe who present as Clark Kent seeking out the truth but yearn more for the virtues of a keyboard Che Guevara.

I love reading about Kim Philby, the legendary Cold War British double agent who for years fed information to the KGB. He had so many fooled in England with his mantelpiece chat. I read Graham Richardson on this page last Friday, Labor’s man pirouetting around making you think Labor is not so bad. The art of the double agent is not to be known. Their art form is to make you believe they are one of you.

Yes, politics is a binary business, and the only way to hold your position is to put an anchor in the ground and defend it.

Reasonable people who understand how our economy works, how private enterprise should be respected, and that a cow has a different set of rights to a person, these people need to show the same passion defending farmers as the extremists have found in attacking them.

It’s time we untied the other hand from behind our back.

Barnaby Joyce is the member for New England.