Things are bad when you have to almost raise a petition to get a rural press reporter to cover an issue. Just received this amazing email from Agmate Peter Cannon:
HI ALL,
Just spoke to the Land Editor about this Bloody 460 Million DOLLARS that the Rudd government is giving out to overseas Nations to help their primary producers.Andrew Marshall said he needs more feed back from us the Australian producer on this issue before he would assign someone to write the article in the Land.
My thoughts are it’s a bloody disgrace, just another knife in Farmer’s backs where the hell are our Farm leaders on this issue?
Please ring Andrew Marshall 45704601. –NOW.
Pete.
Does anybody else find that whole thing just bizarre?
What the ‘bloody disgrace’ actually is, is that Andrew Marshall the editor of the Land Newspaper the flagship of the Rural Press 200 strong publications across rural & regional Australia needs to be convinced to put a reporter onto this story.
You’ll probably find that his skeleton staff is out covering the CWA meeting at Forbes, or perhaps they are having the day off after covering the picnic races or B&S ball in some far flung outback town over the weekend..
What about covering any of these issues that arose out of just last months budget.
Dangerous prevailing rural economic issues.
In case you can’t read the bullet hole points in the danger sign here they are below. Where you see a link, its to Agmates articles on the issue.
- Labors Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) will slug Australian Exports – Import competing industries with an extra $2,500,000,000 tax. (Agmates has 235 Articles here)
- Private Health Insurance rebate to be reduced putting further strain on already stretched public Hospital system in regional Australia. Here
- Drought support payments including all Exceptional Circumstances, to cease from July 1 2010. No replacement program announced. We first flagged this here way back on 31st Oct 2008.
- $12 million and 312 jobs slashed from the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry whilst $460 million is sent overseas to help foreign farmers. Here,
- Changes to the Youth Allowance to deny income support to thousands of regional students.
- The $5.8 billion allocated by the former coalition government for water infrastructure to save water for the Murray Darling and food producers remains locked up whilst water buybacks are accelerating. (16 articles here.)
- $23.1 million out of the Australian Broadband guarantee program established to provide internet access for regional Australians. Here
- Key research agency Land and Water Australia abolished along with $12 million stripped from the Rural industries research and development Corporation. Here
- A decision to limit the tax deductibility of farm losses will impact on rural property values and small rural communities. Here
- New infrastructure funding has been targeted at passenger rail in the capital cities rather than being targets at the nations rail freight network.
- Promised flow-through-shares to encourage mining exploration, investment and job creation in resource industries have been forgotten.
- The Rural Partnerships Program has been scrapped, costing communities an important source of funds for local infrastructure and community projects.
Its really interesting that last week Rural press finally ran this front page headline just last Thursday their papers screamed. Beef hardest hit by Rudd’s ETS
Of course it was old news to Australia’s most informed people on rural & regional issues the Agmates members. Since the release of the final Garnaut report last year Agmates has run no less than 110 articles saying exactly that. See Here.
See these articles in particular. here on the 10th of january, here on the 8th January, here 25th November 2008, here 31st october 2008, here 30th September 2008, 24th September 2008, here again 24th September 2008, here 18th September 2008, here 15th September 2008.
The handful of journalists that Rural press employ across its 200 publications must have been to busy covering the social events to have notice all of these vital issues bearing down on rural Australia.
Things are bad when you almost have to raise a petition to get them to cover a critical issue. But then again, how many Australians outside of the rural areas read their publications anyway – Answer, very few.
Still you can’t spend money employing Journalist to do quality Journalism and still make hundreds of millions of dollars profit from your advertisers each year – can you? After all that’s why journalist call it the ‘Rural Pressing’ the press.
The rural press business model involves buying up every publication and running a skeleton journalist staff. The model has been highly profitable with the architect since 1994 Brian McCarthy rewarded for his ’successful business model’ by last year being appointed as the CEO of Fairfax Media.
But that’s for another article another day.
*****
Agmates Editor & Founder Steve Truman
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