Agmates Editor Steve Truman writes:
Nationals Senator Barnaby Joyce last night launched a scathing attack on Labor governments that worship market forces yet allow resources to be drained from regions.
Senator Joyce, was speaking at a dinner in Bendigo Victoria (Location) at the invitation of Nationals member for Northern Victoria Damian Drum. They are pictured below at the dinner.
He accused the Rudd and Brumby governments of neglecting rural Victoria and extracting its most valuable resources, without offering anything in return.
The Bendigo Advertiser was there and quoted Senator Joyce as saying:
“The key issue is that we have Labor governments who are continually putting the regions at a commercial disadvantage.
The regions are suffering higher power and petrol costs, and now the north-south pipeline will shift water from productive lands to service metropolitan Melbourne as part of a commercial deal.
If you say, let’s divide everything by market principles and expect farmers in the bush to pay the same amount of money for water as those in Melbourne, then I say get ready to starve.”
Mr Joyce has also called on Prime Minster Rudd to promote a version of the 2020 summit for regional Australia.
Mr Joyce also stuck by a single desk wheat marketing system, in spite of contrary Liberal Party policy.
“The single desk system was the best protection for small grain growers, particularly in Victoria where harvests are later.”
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Have your Say! Do you feel your rural or regional community is under threat by recently introduced Labor policy?
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The key problem is metrocentric governance of regional areas. As the single desk issue highlights, be they liberal or labor, they remain fundamentally metrocentric. Consequently, their primary interest is in obtaining their commodities at the cheapest rate possible.
That is why we have so-called “competition” laws that allow urban Australia to benefit from the concentration of supermarket purchasing power while preventing the same sort of collective bargaining by primary producers.
The question is, when will regional political representatives realise that the old social contract where rural areas submitted to the urban political majority in exchange for favoured access to a capital city market is well and truly ‘auld lang syne’?
How much evidence of systematic predatory policy does it take before it sinks in that scotish style devolution to new regional based states within the commonwealth are our only prospect of survival?
Now that Qld grazing lease renewals are only for 30 years, does anyone seriously believe there will be a future beyond if the negotiating government landlord is still the existing SEQ dominated one?
Thats 30 years, folks, to get some real structural change or start packing up right now.
G’day Ian,
What is the structural change that your alluding too and how would that work?
Thanks Steve, given the ease with which state governments can shut down or merge local councils, the option of empowered local government was never a realistic one. So the only way that we can change the “landlord” is to form new states, as provided for under both the federal and state constitution.
One new state in north Qld and another covering central and southwestern Qld would leave what is already, for all intents and purposes, a city state in SE Qld to please itself. As it already does.
Both new states would have twice the population and GDP of Tasmania. More importantly, they would quarantine the regions from the creeping electoral irrelevance that stems from rapid population growth in the South East. Currently, each new electoral redistribution sees another two bush electorates shifted to the south east. Bush electorates are already far too big but they will be bigger still in only 5 years time.
A regional state will get its own share of the GST cake to spend on its own priorities. And we can be quite certain that they will not be blowing their roads budget on hideously expensive tunnels or twin bridges that cost as much as 15,000km of bitumened country road.
That is the fundamental problem with a single, metropolitan dominated state. People in the bush are expected to pay for a share in ‘their bridge’ and ‘their tunnel’ while the problems at ‘our hospital’ are simply used as an excuse to shut it down altogether.
Metrocentrics seriously believe that a service delivered 800km away from your home is a service that has been delivered equally to all. And it is far easier and cheaper to change the state we live in than to change the attitudes of urban voters.
The kids have no future as long as urban swing voters have a seat at your table, a seat on your tractor and in your ute, every time you sit down. And it is time Agforce and other industry bodies started exploring the feasibility of proper devolution from Brisbane.
To fail to even investigate options is worse than just trusting fate, because fate remains uncertain. Doing nothing will hand the destiny of all regional queenslanders to people who don’t even live here yet, let alone give a damn for anyone’s future but their own.