Cronus: I suspect other state Departments are in as bad a state as NSW. If this is to change there is an ideological issue that will need to be examined: do we believe that some measure of food self-sufficiency is a necessary component of our food security? At the moment the implicit answer to this question, at the level of policy, is "no". Hence there is no policy basis for treating agriculture any differently from other industries, all exposed to the cut and thrust of market logic. The decline in public investment in agriculture is a direct result of our ideological stance - a stance which differentiates Australia from most other nations who have national policy positions on food security and its relationship to domestic food production.

MultiMick, in some ways the NSW Department has fared better than other state Departments; but you are correct, all are in a parlous state.

Phillip Adams once allegorised the election of an atheist to being the Pope to the manner in which governments do not wish to govern. The NSW government is a prime example; they have abandoned their role to the market.

Agriculture is the primary industry for national security, as an example of the whims of markets London’s Heathrow (the busiest port in Europe) stayed closed recently due to snow as commercial decisions allowed shortages of capacity to deal with such events; the army had to be brought in to open the second runaway. Post secondary education has gone the same way.

You are correct, there needs to be a reappraisal of the ideological basis (or life beliefs) on which we approach such issues. What changed in terms of life beliefs between Higgins’ Harvester Judgement (established minimum wages) which established “pay his employees a wage that guaranteed them a standard of living which was reasonable for ‘a human being in a civilised community’, regardless of his capacity to pay” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvester_Judgment) and current beliefs that what a market dictates is the basis for deciding who gets what?

Unfortunately the process begins much earlier, and involves an emphasis of zero waste.

This has to be learnt in the home and at the schools, and I can remember putting this to a group of teachers (at a P& C meeting) that the school develops a policy of zero injuries / zero waste. They were all ears and highly enthusiastic, until I informed them that it would entail large amounts of risk management and also developing checklists to determine what should be purchased and bought into the school that could result in unnecessary waste.

Then their enthusiasm stopped.

However, with a looming fuel crisis, food shortages, water shortages and various other situations likely to develop in future years, reduction of waste is essential, and management skills in waste reduction are skills that school children will have to learn.

Like many other things, it is the teachers holding them back.

I haven’t heard of any that have such a policy, (or they don't advertise that they have this policy), but universities in this country should also be developing a policy of zero injuries / zero waste, to help prepare students for future years.

We can only imagine with horror a world in which the food supply is organised by
a) the United Nations
b) the NSW government, or
c) the opinions of boffins.

The problem of scarcity is that there are not enough resources to satisfy all possible wants. But this tells us no more than that there is a need to economise resources, that is, to allocate them to their most urgent and important uses.

The fatal flaw in the article is the jump involved in reasoning "because problem of scarcity, *therefore* policy is the solution".

The author happily recites the number, kind, variety and wonders of policy that he would like to see involved. It never occurs to him to question, let alone to prove, his assumption that bureaucracy is capable of making the situation better than worse. He makes the same assumptions of the beneficence of government that were made when governments starved over 100 million people to death in the twentieth century when they took over the food supply motivated by the same belief that the existence of profit shows a misallocation of resources.

The frightening thing about it is that the author does not begin to understand the astronomical gap that yawns between his knowledge, and the knowledge of all the persons in the world already engaged in ensuring the food supply. They have the benefit of a direct interest in their success, of negative consequences for failure, of local knowledge of resources, of knowing the value scale they are working to satisfy, and of economic calculation with the rest of the world’s population engaged in social co-operation through the division of labour.

The author has none of these, nor apparently even the understanding that they might be relevant to a successful outcome.

It is no more scientific to conjure a solution to the problem by assuming government can fix it than by assuming the Vatican can.

The religious liturgy is seen in Cronus lamenting the catalogue of chronic woeful governmental incompetence, and therefrom directly concluding that *more* government must be the solution! God 'elp us!

Peter Hume,
If a company does not operate economically, then it can go out of business. But governments do have a role to ensure that a company going out of business does not result in starvation of the population.

I have personally seen the situation where the shelves in the supermarkets in a town were almost bare within a week because the roads were cut, and the food supply in many towns is heavily dependant on being able to get road or rail transport to the town.

It would be interesting to know how much food is being kept in storage in Australia, and how long it would take for that food to run out, particular when so much food is now imported, (like nearly everthing else).

Bonmot:

Thanks for that link. Now add the following to the conundrum of the list of consequences of Coles and Woolworths market manipulation: “The farm subsidy”, this has become a necessary component of survival for Australian farmers as they struggle for economic survival against the odds of unfair pricing for farm commodities, (as well the negatives created by the normal front line war with the elements). Sure, the subsidies correctly prop up the farming industry, but guess who the winners are.

A subsidy is a taxpayer contribution not to farmers as it appears, but in-directly to conglomerates in the retail food industry, Coles and Woolworths in particular,(being by far the majority players in Australia). They, without a doubt, gain the greatest advantage from cheap commodity prices allowing them to exploit the advantage at the retail price end. One example amongst thousands is potatoes: The “farm gate” price to Coles and Woolworths is a paltry .30c per kilo; the retail price of potatoes never falls below $2.99, (.10c per potato for Coles and Woolworths, retailing @ $1.00 per potato, based on average weight, for the consumer) representing a ten-fold mark-up.

Without farm subsidies ridiculously low “farm gate” prices would be imposable. One can only conclude the tax payer subsidy ably assists the giants to hold down the super inflated prices to a tolerable level ensuring consumer resistance to cost causes minimal impact on volume sales.

It appears to me to be a very bad deal when “consumer as taxpayer” pays for profits at both ends of that deal.