Saturday, March 30, 2024

FROM THE RIDGE: Farmers won’t forget Jones’s outburst

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So now Shane Jones has decided to put the boot into farmers. I thought he was touting and self-styling himself as the champion of the regions.
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There’s his party doing everything it can over the last few years to portray itself as a reinvented country party and even getting grudging respect from the rural rump as the handbrake on the potential excesses of a centre-left government.

Then. in one manic outburst, he ensured not many farmers or rural folk will consider voting for him or his party next year.

It’s a moot point because if Winston Peters doesn’t stand one more time, they have no chance of getting over the 5% anyway and certainly not under Shane Jones’s leadership. He’s about as unpalatable to the voting public as Judith Collins.

He reckons that as a sector we are stunningly silent about the fact the National Party signed us up to the international agreement that is the Paris Accord in 2016 that has brought us to this Zero Carbon Bill.

Well, if anyone knows him, give him a copy of my column from last week, which makes that very point.

I doubt I’m the only one who has remembered or written that.

He’s accused farmers of exaggerating the impact of the Government’s climate change legislation and pouring bile on the plans.

He needs to take some deep breaths and see what those who work in the sector, understand the challenges and ramifications that all sorts of government policies have on what they do and listen to the arguments before exploding into invectives and diatribes.

Proposed legislation is put up for debate before being confirmed and that is exactly what everyone is doing. It is part of the process that has been going on long before Jones was an MP and will continue long after.

Yes, I find Federated Farmers can be overly critical and negative of all sorts of policy. I found that with its stance on capital gains and perhaps in some aspects of the issue at hand.

But we have a spectrum of views and with Greenpeace living way out in an idealist and romantic bubble then someone needs to be at the other end of the range to give some balance to its lobbying and in this case it’s Federated Farmers.

I warned 18 months ago when the Billion Trees policy was launched that it would have potentially devastating impacts on small rural sheep and beef communities but with zero feedback might have assumed that people weren’t worried or didn’t understand the implications. It is only now that is dawning on folk as they see farmland being bought to plant trees for forestry and carbon.

Some 8000ha of good sheep and beef land at Wairoa alone has just recently been bought to be planted in pine trees for carbon credits.

Jones is the self-proclaimed architect of this policy and will be the one remembered for the eventual closing down of schools and other rural community assets.

History has always told us that when you introduce a subsidy for one sector there will be unintended consequences elsewhere.

The previous week we had a serve from James and Suzy Cameron. They were speaking at the Just Transition event in Taranaki.

They described our environmental practices as a condition or a sickness.

It’s great being lectured by billionaires who constantly fly around the globe in jets pouring filthy carbon dioxide into the upper reaches of the atmosphere about how what we do to make a living and feed people is a very bad thing and needs to stop forthwith.

They, of course, bought land in Wairarapa and with their wealth have the luxury of doing what they want so have removed the animals (they are vegans) and grow flax, hemp and vegetables. And good for them.

But naively thinking those of us on poor-draining hill country have any other option than ruminants or trees are living in dreamland.

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