diver dan,

I believe my posts are well targeted.

If the bubble-wrap tree ceased to produce. If food stores disappeared. If Centrelink slipped beneath the earth.

It is unthinkable, right?

Similarly, if the people who tend to the every need of Singer and ors in the premium airport lounge and those who keep that plane aloft for them were to quit?

'Dissing' the plebs is a rather enjoyable game for the leftist academic elite and their 'enviro-conscious' useful idiots - who in their turn also need the 'bovine punters', the public and farmers too, to look down on.

But at the end of the day it will never be any of them who visit the forgotten elderly in their once proud but now poorly maintained homes, where they are humiliated by not even being able to offer some bun with their kind offer of tea for any meagre help that they get.

Leo...to my mind (and on the surface of it), your appear lost in the confusion of ethics.
I think animal cruelty is not a left and right issue. Nor is it only Greens interested in the ecology of our planet. That mind-set is causing harm.
Obviously we humans rely heavily on animals for high quality protein. And there must be strict regulations on how animal husbandry, which encompasses all aspects of the animal in the process, is viewed. Nothing to do with left and right Leo.
Singer? Who gives a rats arse about him and his ability to congregate apostles to his cause. It's not the point!

On the point of the fading farmer and his dying influence; that's representative of Australia generally, in the new age. That's what is viewed as a right wing cry for white supremacy: Which it's not to my mind...it's another confused ethic and excused as an ideological stand.
These two positions are the breaking point of reasonable debate.
To dismiss the importance of a critical situation in our society as left or right blather, is damaging our resolve as a country! It's divisional and weakening the fabric of our society!

diver dan,

The author seems to think that Singer et al are relevant to his position and I am prepared to take his word for that. I have attacked Singer's rhetoric and assumptions. He has plenty of both and rarely are they subjected to scrutiny. He is more accomplished in both than our legally trained politicians.

No-one disputes that the quest for production efficiency around the world and international competitiveness including the removal of trade barriers hasn't had some negative consequences that many farmers have recoiled from and they and the remainder have called for international cooperation. That is in the hands of politicians. Singer and others might move to a higher plane and argue with them.

Farm production and business generally are replete with regulations and inspectors of every possible description. Australian farmers and business are highly regulated and highly compliant. So regulated and unprofitable that some have moved off-shore. Others will follow, while Australian farms, businesses and property are becoming foreign owned. Some politicians have a soft spot for overseas buyers, even representing their interests (as was evident with a Labor politician who was annoyed to account for 'gifts').

I repeat the rather obvious, that it is not farmers and the public who can address and correct major influences, such as population growth. On the advice of the academic elite, Australians achieved zero population growth decades ago. We have been more than generous in taking migrants. Australia cannot solve the world's population problems.

Then there is the question of priorities and simply put, the lack of interest, even contempt of activists for the welfare of the aged and other disadvantaged in the community. So I put it to you too, what are you going to provide as a viable, wholesome and appetising substitute for the cheap, first class protein that socially disadvantaged can get in Australia through (say) eggs and chicken?

What should really concern health authorities are the resultant nutrition and health problems especially affecting easily influenced and vulnerable youth and girls, of dietary choices that disregard the recommendations of the Australian Dietary Guidelines,
https://www.eatforhealth.gov.au/sites/default/files/content/n55_australian_dietary_guidelines.pdf

To Diver Dan.

Oh, you want more "effort" from me? OK, here is the full 350 word broadside.

Scott McInnes is a fruitcake. He is just another person who possesses an "absolutist" mindset, and who takes good concepts to extremes. In this case, he takes the virtue of kindness to animals and takes it to insanity. People like Scott don't just not eat meat, they are so obsessed with animal rights that they refuse to even cull the feral animals that eat the crops that they think everybody should eat exclusively. They would not even try to eradicate foxes and cats that eat native animals alive. Or eradicate the goats, pigs, and rabbits which left unchecked, would turn the whole of the continent of Australia into a desert.

His extremism is illustrated by his linking meat eaters to Nazis and abattoir workers to Auschwitz guards. He lives in a fantasy world where he actually thinks that "the overwhelming majority" of people think just like he does. That is because he lives in a bubble where the only people he relates to are people who think like he does. He is just another out-of- touch academic living in a cloistered world on a government stipend where everybody around him is obsessed with thinking that they are better than the hoi polloi.

It is hardly surprising that he lives in Tasmania, a bankrupt beggar state relying on the rest of the country to balance the books and provide them with reliable electricity. If Scott wants to eat fried yak dung for dinner tonight then bon apatite. I am going to Hogs Breath for a steak.

The western world is getting fed up of these moralising, hand wringing moral puritans trying to shove their crazy morality down everybody else's throat. Fortunately, the younger generation is waking up. Young people are naturally inclined to sneer at finger waggers like Scott. The vegetarian/vegan multicultural LGBTIWDBMSXI brigade is now a victim of their own success. You can't be the dominant culture and the counter culture at the same time. Right wingers are the new punks.

Perhaps, considering the features of our biology, we have forgotten the means by which we as a species reached our current situation. The solution may lie in being more involved with animals, rather than completely removed as the author seems to suggest. A more close and personal path is available;

If the industrialised killing of animals is so abhorrent, take responsibility for it yourself. The value of the work performed in preparing the animal for the polystyrene tray will soon become apparent.

If management of animals by agricultural practices is abominable, take the ultimate organic option and choose only wild animals, never fenced in, never provided food or water, never treated for disease, illness or injury.

In other words, take up hunting and make full use of the animal killed.

Exactly as thousands of Australians already do, without the need to rest on the crutch of poetry, novels and a lifetime's very profitable advocacy of outlandish thought bubbles.

As a footnote, let me throw a few facts into the "discussion".

We humans along with other primates, pigs and bears are omnivores, who as opportunistic eaters, survived when others couldn't via our dietary habits and the use of fire to extract more goodness from cooked carrion or meat.

The fact that our primitive forebears ate meat and or bone marrow, the reason we have a big and inventive brain.

Meat is one of a few sources of vitamin b12, the lack or shortage of which can result in some brain abnormalities?

Poor memory, incoherent circular reasoning, lack of cognitive processing, flying off the handle with little or no substantive reason, emotive overload and reasoned logic replaced by this or that obsession? Like e.g., microwaved food results in memory loss?

Microwave ovens can be harmful when leaking, but like mobile phones, not when just sitting there powered down! Any resultant magnetic field, only observable in the presence of an electrical current, traversing a live electrical circuit!

Red meat is an excellent source of also essential dietary iron! To get sufficient from a vegan diet, one would need to eat a bucket of broccoli or spinach a day!

Herr hitler was a tree hugging vegan? Who apparently had an unusual predilection for being peed upon, by young ladies?

I guess one doesn't need to be a complete fruitcake to be a meat hating vegan, but it surely has to help?

These folk need to settle down, stop trying to rule the world and just let those with a still fully functioning cerebral cortex just get on providing food for the world!

And as we do that, seek the best possible outcomes, such as eliminating methane as a byproduct of humane animal husbandry. Doable!

They would also do well to understand that a tree stores carbon whether vertical or horizontal
Alan B.