Farmers, Murray in election firing line

It is now official.  The federal election will be on October 9 and there is much talk about the Greens potentially holding the balance of power in the next parliament.

Environmental activists started their campaigning some weeks ago and the reputation of Australian farmers is going to take another battering.

The "dying" Murray River resonates as an issue and it will be played up during the election campaign as the environment vote is courted.

Sarah Moles, from the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), recently told over 200 people at a function in Brisbane about the "devastation" along the Murray River.

She said this should be a warning to all Australians that agricultural practice -- "white fella" agriculture as she described it -- is unsustainable.

While presenting no data, the WWF campaigner specifically and repeatedly mentioned Shepparton as a town in the southern part of the Murray Darling Basin that had been destroyed by salt.

In reality, Shepparton is a healthy regional centre proudly servicing many picturesque orchards, wineries and dairies in the Goulburn Valley.  The fruit cannery in Shepparton is the largest in the southern hemisphere.

The Murray River and its claimed ill-health is a national issue.  It reaches as far away as Darwin, with cotton growing banned by the Northern Territory government last November on the basis that irrigation and cotton had "devastated" the Murray River.

During the election campaigning The Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), supported by Greenpeace and the Wilderness Society, plan to reinforce the concept of a "dying" Murray River and the need to take 1,500 gigalitres from irrigators -- irrespective of the facts of the matter.

The Australian Greens are asking, remarkably, for even more than the conservation groups.  Greens leader, Senator Bob Brown, is claiming irrigators along the Murray need to give up 3000 gigalitres of water (equivalent to six Sydney Harbours).

The National Farmers Federation (NFF) might have responded to this outrageous claim from Bob Brown with more outrage.  But instead the organisation helped legitimise his proposed big flush by promising dialogue with the Greens after the election (The Australian newspaper, August 5, 2004).

The NFF has a long history of doing deals with environmental activists on their terms.

In May 2000 the joint NFF-ACF plea for $6 billion to repair the Australian landscape from the ravages of agriculture was reported everywhere.

This stunt helped fix, in the Australian psyche, the concept of a landscape being destroyed by salt and agriculture.  This concept is increasingly exploited in activist campaigning including election campaigning.

For the first time in some years the banning of broad-scale tree clearing in NSW and Queensland does not feature in the election campaign documents of the conservation groups.

Then again, they have already convincingly won this one.

I often hear representatives from farm organisations claim a successful outcome from a negotiation on the basis that "it could have been much worse".

At some point these organisations need to understand that the Conservation Groups and the Greens only use the last negotiation as a jump-off point for the next round of concessional demands.

It could get much worse, particularly if the Greens end up with the balance of power after the election.

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