The corporatisation of rural country and the effects it has on the Australian people’s connection to the land.


As much as Australia is the beach and the bush, it is also the family house and the family farm. Just like the family wants to make sure they can still go to the beach, we have to make sure that families own the majority of rural land if Australia is to maintain this connection to us.
Ownership of land may not necessarily reflect a basic principle of market theory, but it does reflect a basic principle of human psychology. I love something and care for it more when I own it. I love the house I own more than the house I rent. In the past communism tried to create a connection between you and something you did not directly own and this model was a complete economic and social failure.
As people lose their ability to be growers, or buyers and sellers of produce, at a profit, there develops a sense that the nation has let them down. I call this their exclusion from the merchant class. If you cannot earn money under your own direction then you have to earn it under the direction of someone else and that direction is a limitation of your freedom. We might be able to live with that but we want the opportunity to choose other than that.
In Australia, the ability to choose other than that has been taken away over time. Small businesses have disappeared and small farms have disappeared and opportunity has centralised because we have to "let the market run free."

This may seem wonderful in academia but it is humiliating away from the lofty spires of university and big business. The market only runs free in a cage designed to exclude entry to new participants. Laws on everything from the environment to occupational health and safety prevent new small business participants.
The market is tilted towards established or highly capitalised participants. If government wants all the protections of regulations it needs balance this up by tilting the opportunity back to small business with a strong Trade Practices Act enforced by a well resourced ACCC, both of which are lacking.
Instead, problems are intensified by such things as Managed Investment Schemes which deliver tax deductions for capital expenditure for big business, while contributing minimal benefit to the farm next door. Planting timber crops on prime agricultural land counteracts the community’s ability to support schools, agronomists, sugar mills and hardware stores. This stands as a direct reflection of big lobbying power in Canberra and has very little to do with the “free market”.
The repeal of the Single Desk for the Export of Wheat to “set the market free” takes away the capacity of many farmers to collectively bargain with monopoly operators of transport, storage, handling and ports. Now, only certain select traders have the capacity for total vertical integration; from receiving grain, to transferring to port and on to export with the aim of bringing the best return to the shareholders. This is supposed to be an advantage to wheat growers!
Other countries know the importance of keeping families on the farm. The USA has the Food Conservation and Energy Act 2008 consisting of US $307BN worth of subsidies. China has announced an increase in farm subsidies for 2008. The Ukrainian Government provides assistance by paying 50% of the interest on agricultural loans. In Japan, the government pays farmers four times the market price for rice with import tariffs which go as high as 700%. The EU provides 55BN euros of annual subsidies to farmers under its Common Agricultural Policies, representing 40% of the total EU budget.
In Australia it's a case of "there goes my boy; he's the only one in step." Australia believes, ultimately, everybody will be converted to our religion. By the time that happens there will be very few parishioners left. Our religion is slowly strangling our own independence and we are becoming more reliant, as a nation, on being offered a job in another nation's business.
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