KP Cattlemen's Assoc retweetledi
Beth: "They want the land, Dad, and that is all you need to understand" In his work of fiction, Taylor Sheridan seems to get agri-politics in a way few of our agricultural leaders do. Humans have competing uses of land. Land for towns & cities, land for mining resources, forestry & renewable energy, and the big 3, land for conservation, land for indigenous use and the land we use to grow our food -agricultural use. We are rapidly losing agricultural land. In the decade from 2001-11 we lost 5.9 million hectares of Ag land PER YEAR & the competition is accelerating. We live in a market democracy, with a constitution that requires land to be bought and paid for (even if by compulsory acquisition). Of course there is competition for land use, of course there will be winners and losers, but there must be transparency & honesty in how this happens. Land use theft by stealth, by bad Govt policy led by activism & by the new Corporate ESG activism, has no place in our market democracy. The lastest battlefront is "deforestation". This battle has a pretty simple answer (even though there are those who say, an answer can't be simple), the UN's very definition of deforestation, boils down to land use and land use change. So who amongst our agri-political leaders is our John or Beth Dutton? Who has our interests at heart, purely? The job of Cattle Australia in the debate around deforestation, is to defend our patch, agricultural land use. It is not to overlay some compromised activist WWF / ACF position over the top of our land use. Particularly not when the consensus UN definition actually defends our use. To those headed to Canberra tomorrow, thank you. Most of the debates right now about Ag boil down to the simple argument of land use. Surely having some land set aside to grow our food & food for those who can't is the single most important human right. The crazy part of this debate is, and I'll quote Beth again: go for a walk around this place, you'll understand us better, tell me if there is land in better shape or more loved.
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