GrahamY – re the Europeans and farm subsidies – that was my point. I class myself as one those honest farmers and agree with that statement whole heartedly :) Australian farmers are not propped up by government subsidies and work damn hard to compete with cheap imports.

As for you other comment re $10000, don’t think I quite understand what you are trying to say.

Steve you seem to be so welfare literate. How many farmers on drought assistance are we talking? Compared to others on welfare of course.

PF

I just check facts before I post, see www.centrelink.gov.au

It is irrelevant how many people get what payment. I was commenting on the fairness of treating farmers as a special category of Australian.

$444 million in subsidies for the sugar industry. Is that not being propped up by Govt. subsidies?

Your arguement has to be more than I work damned hard, tell that to BHP workers who lost their livelyhood when BHP closed the mills in Newcastle.

I am just asking the question "why should farmers be treated as a special industry"?

Can you answer my question?

"why should farmers be treated as a special industry"?

That is just your opinion Steve, my answer is I dont agree with you. Iam a farmer and I certainly dont get any 'special' treatment.

Well, but they ARE getting special treatment - come the next recession, will you see the Government stepping in saying "exceptional circumstances" to the many small businesses crumbling?

Why does this government want most people to look after themselves (cf workchoices, mutual obligation), but farmers are exempt?

Could we perhaps look at a voluntary land buy back in marginal areas, setting the purchase price as perhaps SOMETHING LIKE market value plus half again? Straight market value is unfair when you are asking people to leave because of circumstances which lower the value of their property.

I must admit to being a little surprised at the general vehemence of the raw-in-tooth-and-claw capitalists that have turned up here to take a free whack at the farmers.

There are a some things in life that we can, if we put our mind to it, do without. A Toyota SUV, for example, or a Panasonic wide-screen HDTV (I'm guessing at the latter) could conceivably be classed as unnecessary to the general ebb and flow of our lives.

Food, on the other hand, is somewhat more basic.

As far as I am aware - and I am not just a townie, but an inner-city townie - farming is by nature cyclical. Some days you're swamped with product - and the price is correspondingly low - and some days you can't grow a thing (drought, flood, locusts). At that time the price is sky-high, but useless to you because you ain't got nothing to sell.

So if you live in a society that needs food, you learn to take the good with the bad, and pay the price for shortage as willingly as you pay the pittance for the surplus.

If you killed off the industry in its bad years, the market would be taken over by imports - not just for the duration of the shortage, but forever, because there will in future be no local competition.

By all means, allow importation of bananas while our own crops recover. But at the same time, give the local guys a hand in re-establishing themselves, so that we can retain just a measure of independence from being held economic hostage for our daily bread.

I don't particularly care if Lexus refuse to send us any more SUVs, but I'd hate to have to make political concessions to a foreign power just because I felt it necessary to kill off drought-affected, temporarily uneconomic farms.

But while I am here - who did get the benefit of $12 per kilo bananas? Can't they send some of their windfall (sorry) profits to the drought-stricken?

Good point Pericles. I was leaning towards the Stuff the Farmers argument but you've persuaded me in the other direction.

The only objection I have left is that we should save the farmers simply because they're some kind of national treasure. According to that logic convicts should also be considered cultural icons and similarly revered.

The price of imports may be lower right now but there's no guarantee they'll stay that way. In Pericles' picture we'd be insuring ourselves against reliance on an unpredictable international market. Maybe next year we'll get all the rain and our trading partners will have droughts.

Maybe part of the deal should be some kind of time limit - how long a drought can be considered a special circumstance before it has to be considered the new state of affairs.