Limiting choice is not fair dinkum

The Fair Dinkum Food Campaign is winding its way to Canberra.  It is a farmer protest about cheap imports undercutting domestically grown food.

The protest has financial support from the Tasmanian Government and moral support from Agriculture Minister Peter McGauran.

Such a campaign would be very useful if it drew attention to excessive costs imposed on farmers by governments and unions.  But it's not about that.  Instead it's a whinge that the major food retailers are doing what we pay them to do -- find the best value for the consumer.

The protesters want Coles and Woollies to take domestic produce even if this means higher prices being foisted on consumers.  Imagine farmers' reactions if they were forced to buy locally made tractors rather than from the cheapest source.

Australia has ample land, water availability that is among the world's highest per head (notwithstanding our vulnerability to drought), and a benign climate.  It is, therefore, astonishing that we should find ourselves uncompetitive in vast areas of agriculture.  But the answer cannot be to deny the consumer the cheapest product.

Such policies move us on to the slippery slope of protectionism.  Farmers' anger -- and that of those politicians egging them on -- should be directed into removing the regulatory loads that reduce their competitiveness.  There is any number of these, including:

• Measures that take water from farmers in pursuit of fabricated environmental needs.
• Bans on new dams accompanied by bogus claims that Australia is running out of water resources.
• Measures banning the use of GM technologies.

It is vegetable farmers that are the leading lights in the Fair Dinkum Food Campaign.  Ironically, the Bracks Government permitted trade unions to sabotage the proposed Saizeriya series of factories.  Located around Melbourne, these would have vastly increased the market for Australian horticultural products.

But union intransigence and demarcation disputes stopped the Japanese company in its tracks.

This is only the tip of the iceberg regarding the stranglehold militant unions have on food processing industries.  Especially in Victoria, I have shown how comprehensively union control has hogtied management in the food industry.  Many food processors are simply chugging along waiting to close their facilities once they gradually become outdated.  Few are renewing their plant or expanding to take advantage of the considerable areas of agricultural production in which we are world competitive.

Rather than railing against the symptoms of their lack of competitive, farmers' indignation should be targeted at the causes -- too much regulation and union control of the factories that are the outlets for their produce.

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