Climate change is no excuse to do nothing on drought
CLIMATE change is being used as a shield by governments to do little to help farmers in drought, writes ED GANNON.
DROUGHT-affected farmers have a real problem. It’s called climate change.
No, I am not talking about the cause of the dry devastation that has hit their properties.
And I am not pretending climate change doesn’t exist. The horse bolted on that long ago. It exists. Get over it.
The real problem is that climate change has become a shield for governments to do very little to help farmers when drought hits.
What we now have is a convenient excuse to brand every severe storm, flood, drought, frost snow dump as climate change.
A major drought — oh, that’s climate change.
A catastrophic flood — oh, that’s just part of the new normal.
But the real consequence of this is that governments are throwing their hands up in the air when a natural disaster occurs and appear to have a get-out-of-jail card for inaction.
The Herald Sun this week featured the devastating Gippsland drought on its front page.
The Weekly Times has reported ad nauseam since mid last year that the Victorian Government was ignoring the plight of hundreds of farmers in the state’s east, while all the attention was on what was happening north of the border.
The reason for this is the way governments had agreed to treat drought.
A few years ago all state governments agreed that they would not longer declare areas as being in drought. Instead, they would implement “drought-preparedness” measures to help farmers before drought hit.
That was all well and good until a drought arrived in NSW early last year and the two commercial TV morning shows discovered it, and tried to outdo each other in terms of ocker help a farmer mate.
The NSW state government, one of the great readers of popular sentiment, decided to break ranks and declared drought across 99 per cent of the state.
In doing so, they provided a raft of help for farmers, including subsidies for farmers to buy fodder.
This had the immediate impact of lifting the price of fodder across the rest of Australia.
Meanwhile, the Victoria Government was holding true to the no-drought rule, despite what was unfolding in Gippsland.
Bolstering that steadfastness was a view within government that this was now a part of climate change, so really, nothing to see.
So the farmers in Gippsland were left to fend themselves, while NSW farmers had concerts and telethons and the cash cow jumping up and down.
It was — and is — blatantly unfair.
The Gippsland farmers still don’t appear to be a high priority for the state government. A $5000 on-farm drought infrastructure grant has been derided as inadequate. It is believed more help will be announced later this week.
In a way we are all guilty. Natural disasters hit, it raises our interest for a few days and then we go back to our lives.
The far north Queensland floods will play out for months — if not years — but we all collectively shrug our shoulders and say its climate change and there’s nothing we can do about it.
And there are the crises that are not even making the headlines — for instance, farmers are spending up to $400,000 a month on water in northern Victoria to feed stock. And that is an area not even in drought.
I don’t know the answer for a better system of drought assistance.
But I do know that merely dismissing drought or flood as climate change is an easy cop out for a government.
• Ed Gannon is Editor of The Weekly Times and co-host of The Ag Show
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