by ROGER CROOK – AUSTRALIAN farmers and miners are battling to survive the Albanese Government’s obsession with a net-zero emissions target.
The value and strategic importance of agriculture and mining to Australia has been neglected by both sides of politics for too long.
- Australia is unable to defend itself and, increasingly, it cannot feed itself.
- Food imports have nearly doubled since 2003.
- Australian food processors have either closed down or relocated overseas.
The main game is all about receiving international praise from those loyal to green energy and the Paris Agreement.
For decades the decline of strategic stability and economic strength has been overlooked by all three tiers of government.
DEFEND
Ponder this; Australia is unable to defend itself and, increasingly, it cannot feed itself.
In 2022/23 Australia imported food worth about $28b; food exports were just under $70b, so, the net exports were just over $40b.
That $28b is probably double or $56b by the time it gets to the supermarket: Australian consumers spend more than a billion dollars a week on imported food and drink, the vast majority of which could and should be grown and processed in Australia.
Australia is an island, blessed with a climate that stretches from tropical to temperate.
The arteries through which our national blood flows are sea lanes across great oceans. If they close, we perish; it’s as simple as that.
Australia has the ability to be self-sufficient in food, yet it has become progressively reliant on others; from the other side of the world – months and oceans away.
Does Prime Minister Anthony Albanese or his Agriculture Minister, the uninspiring and agriculturally illiterate Senator Murray Watt (a Labor apparatchik rewarded for factional loyalty), realise that if the sea lanes close for just a month, shelves in our supermarkets would rapidly empty.
Why hasn’t National Party Leader David Littleproud, Shadow Minister for Agriculture; a proud country boy and advocate for the regions and the agricultural, horticultural and pastoral industries, brought this matter to the attention of Peter Dutton?
For decades, politicians in Australia have failed to appreciate that ignoring agriculture and the food processing industry has been a mistake of monumental proportions for which we will pay dearly.
If this challenge is not addressed; if hostilities break out in our region, and we are constantly told this could happen (think Taiwan); then Australia will be as vulnerable as Britain was in 1939.
On the outbreak of WWII Hitler blockaded the Atlantic in an attempt to starve the British into submission. If it had not been for the British Merchant Navy, America and the British Empire he would have succeeded.
EMPIRE
In 2025, Australia does not have a merchant navy and, most critically, does not have an America or an Empire ready and willing to quickly respond.
These days, international shipping avoids conflict zones due to the hight cost of insurance. Transits passing through the Suez Canal have decreased by 40 per cent due to the activities of Houthi rebels in the Red Sea.
Ships now traverse the Cape. This has increased sea freight cost from Europe to Australia by about 20 per cent.
The international weight of opinion is that we’re closer to another world conflict than at any time since the Cold War.
Australian has less than six weeks fuel in store; diesel, petrol and avgas. This includes ADF supplies.
A similar situation now applies to food; imported food on which we increasingly rely. It is a dire situation.
We are a trucking nation. When trucks run out of fuel, this nation stops.
The Coalition knew this when it was in power and, like Labor, did nothing about it.
Why are Australians unaware of the vulnerability of their food supply? The answer is propaganda!
We are convinced and comforted by the lie that Australia produces enough food to feed 75m people, three times our population.
Our population is about 27m. That’s an extra seven million since 2003 and our food imports have nearly doubled since then.
So where does this chest puffing propaganda come from?
Australian farmers are among the best in the world. They produce virtually every skerrick of fresh food we eat; all the fruit, vegetables and meat we consume is Australian and the best in the world.
That’s where it stops.
Australian food exports are what are called “unimproved”. That is, we produce and export millions of tonnes of grain, wheat, barley, oats and canola in bulk containers.
Our next biggest export is meat. Again, it is sold either as carcass or cut up in boxes. Some is also exported live; again unimproved.
Where the claim that we are feeding the many millions comes from is, I presume, in the calorific value of that food. We export calories in the form of unimproved foods.
The food we import is classified as: “Substantially and elaborately transformed”.
In other words, the food Australia imports has had value added to it. It’s in bottles, packets and tins; it’s what adorns the shelves and sits in supermarket fridges.
Many Australian food processors of old have either closed down or relocated overseas; bizarrely some now export to Australia food grown in other countries.
Did you know Heinz no longer lives in Australia? Next time you buy their baked beans, soups or tomato sauce, you will not be buying Australian. Heinz is just one of many.
“Clean and Green” and the “Food Bowl of Asia” was the aspiration in days gone by; now we import food from the EU, America, New Zealand and Southeast Asia. Nobody even raises an eyebrow.
DITCH
About 15-18 per cent of imported food comes from across the ditch and about 20 per cent from Europe.
How come, you may ask, New Zealand can afford to feed Australia? The answer is that they don’t, at least not on their own.
New Zealand has a Free Trade Agreement with China. New Zealand buys bulk frozen vegetables from China, repacks them under their NZ brand and exports to Australia.
Look carefully at the pack and you will see something like 10 per cent NZ & 90 per cent imported.
China is feeding Australia both through New Zealand and on its own. Eight per cent of the food we import comes directly from China.
Was that ever mentioned when all that fuss was made when China imposed cruel crayfish and wine embargoes on Australia? Did we retaliate and cancel food imports from them? Of course not!
Our supermarkets are also selling bottled fruit from China. Quite insidiously, the Chinese product is packed in a matching plastic bottle as that from Ardmona.
Has that been mentioned publicly? The Chinese, through our supermarkets, are attacking Australian fruit growers.
I have even seen jars of peaches from Bulgaria of all places.
It’s hard to believe that a country that grows the best spuds in the world imports potatoes and frozen vegetables from Holland.
They travel about 16,000 km in a freezer ship to get here. Yet they are competitive and often cheaper than what’s grown and processed in Australia. How can that be?
We are surrounded by oceans yet about 70 per cent of the fish we eat is imported, the majority, again, from New Zealand.
I don’t know if New Zealand more cleverly fishes the ditch between us and sells us the proceeds, or whether they’re importing fish and re-exporting.
Seventy to 80 per cent of the bacon and ham we consume is imported; again from Europe and America. How can it be cheaper to import processed pig meat than to grow and produce it in Australia? All fresh pork is Australian grown.
We grow the best wheat in the world, yet 10 per cent of the food we import falls under the categories of flour, cereal products and bakery. We import breakfast cereals from America and cakes and biscuits from the EU.
VAST
We grow the best durum wheat in the world, yet we import vast amounts of pasta from Italy.
We can grow tomatoes all year round in this country, yet Italy enjoys a 70 per cent market share of our tinned tomatoes.
If the Coalition were to formulate a policy to restructure and reinvigorate the great Australian agricultural industry from producer to processor and, in so doing, make this nation secure and self-sufficient in food again, they would be elected in landslide in the forthcoming federal election.
They won’t of course. The Paris Agreement and net-zero are more important to them. “Saving the world” seems to be the goal of Australian politicians – heaven knows why.
They will ignore the fact that China, America, India and Russia – who are not signatories to the Paris Agreement – produces 60 per cent of the world’s emissions.
All but one (Russia) thrive; while Australia (and much of Europe) decays as we attempt to “save the world”.
Nuclear power is the Coalition’s promised land, but that’s at least a decade away.
We’ve not been told what happens in the intervening years.
How easy it would be to join China, India and Indonesia and build a couple of state-of-the-art coal fired power stations or to utilise the massive gas field under Victoria.
Import substitution would be good for the national bottom line.
We would not want to – and cannot – replace all of our food and beverage imports. But it would be comforting to know that, if the world does go off the rails, we wouldn’t go hungry.PC
