Foreign investors always seem interested in buying into Australia's meat industry. There must be money in it for someone, probably the least going to the farmers. Meat is expensive in England, a friend who lived there said many are turning vegetarian (not all due to meat prices of course).

As a consumer I notice that lamb prices change regularly in the supermarkets. Last year, with people coming to dinner, I went in to buy a large leg of lamb and it was marked at $29 so I ended up buying two chickens instead.

As Yabby mentioned, there is a lot of middlemen to pay along the way before it hits the consumer. No wonder the real costs continue to spiral upwards.

You can understand why some are now selling at the farm gate (usually specialist organic enterprises). This is of course not a workable option for most producers and consumers.

For the people of Young I hope other opportunities come up to ensure the town does not fall to ruin as in many other smaller towns. Many smaller towns are now offering cheap land and housing to attract people but if there are no jobs or means for self-employment it won't keep many I would think.

>>Therefore, major industries should be planned, facilitated ( Fed state infrastructure etc) and strategically directed in the nations interest. Not allow towns, states etc to bid for industry. This leads to short term politics, undermining the public's best interests , inefficient fragmentation of resources and setting up inconsistencies at public expense.<<

There's a lot to be said for planning where it is done by one authority that oversees the entire process and whose efforts are directed towards serving society overall. Instead of developing in a piecemeal approach, it makes a lot more sense that the bits are built so they integrate efficiently into the whole. Take the roads in Sydney vs those in Adelaide or Melbourne. Sydney's road planning is (certainly looks) haphazard. Streets spear off at all angles, there are many junctions and the traffic is more frantic and congested as a result. OTOH, Melbourne and Adelaide's CBDs were planned around a simple grid and consequently traffic is more orderly (the trams do stuff up the flow in Melbourne though).

Sounds to me like the Young abattoir is part of the restructure
of agriculture, that has been going on for a while, as a spin off
of the decline of the wool industry.

With sheep numbers having dropped from 170 million to 70 million,
due to lack of profitability, farmers have moved to other
enterprises such as more cropping. That means a lot less livestock
going down those chains. So somebody has to shut down. Govt
regulation would not help here, for if a company wanted to dismiss
a third of its workers to adjust, redundancy payments etc would
likely send them over the edge.

We have a similar situation unfolding in WA. For years processors
paid as little as possible for mutton and lamb. With wool unviable
anyhow, mutton and lamb are not just spin offs of the wool industry
anymore, they stand and fall on prices paid.

Thousands of smaller farmers closed down, unable to deal with low
prices, whilst the meat industry raked it in. Now its come back
to haunt them, because thousands of farmers also sold their flocks
and bought bigger cropping gear.

So its finally dawning on the meat industry, that right now its
about survival of the fittest. Those who have been good at
marketing, innovation, etc and run efficient and modern plants,
they will survive, others will just not have the stock.

For years the price of mutton in WA was around 70c-1$ a kg,
which was unsustainable for a farmer. Right now its more like
3$ a kg, which is unsustainble for meatworks. If they had paid
us 2$ a kg all along, there would highly likely be alot more sheep
around now.

At it again examinator. Talking through your lefty hat.

Business 101, that would be some course run by academics, who have never run a business wouldn't it.

A towns only function is to service the business in an area with dormitiries for the workers. No business, no town. Check out the old railway towns, in their death throws.

So we want a planned economy do we. Like the USSR, or East Germany perhaps. Or may be like china untill it freed up business.

That business 101 perhaps missed the death of manufacturing in the UK after the war. That's when the lefty government forsed/encouraged companies to build factories where unemplotment was high. That was good central planning, if you wanted to kill business.

I once owned a Morgan +4. In 1962 they were a bit player in the UK car industry, building 11 cars a week. Guess what? They are now the largest UK owned car maker today, still building 11 cars a week. Great stuff this central planning, by bureaucrats, & academics.

Yes, lets Group our abattiors, rather than have them near the source of the stock. We can then ship live stock hundreds of Km to them, rather than ship cartons of meat from them. That's a good start on efficient industry, & waste reduction.

Do you have more of this bureaucratic type wisdom for us, perhaps you would like the Irish bureaucrats hole diggers system. He ordered hundreds of holes be dug in a beach, where it was easy to dig. The idea was to then transfer the holes to where they were needed, as required. Typical central planning, at it's best.

*why do we balk at the idea of Australia (the Australian people) owning a project like Gorgon.*

Pelican, to answer your question on that one, Gorgon did not just
happen overnight. For a start, somebody had to invest hundreds of
millions of $, to even find that there is gas out there.

Gas/oil drilling is not for the faint hearted. Companies can blow
25 million$ on a hole and find nothing at all.

Are you suggesting that taxpayers take those kinds of risks?

Fact is that at present, the Govt are the only ones who wear no
risk, but can claim huge benefits, when somebody finds something.

From selling exploration rights to levies on production to payroll
tax, Govts have their hand out, without risk, all along the way.

When Costello denied Shell the right to take over Woodside, he
showed that things can be set up, so that Australian investors have
a hand in these developments as well. I thought that that was
a great move and a wise move on his behalf.

But I really don't think that it is the job of Govt, to risk your
tax dollars on oil drilling.

Pelican; Foreign investors always seem interested in buying into Australia's meat industry.

Occasionanally farmers buy butcher shops as they simply do the math between what they get paid and what we sell for and very few succeed.

This is often due to lack of knowledge and, many investors also suffer a similar fait, Killarney abb as an example.

Recently purchased by a rich gold miner, now closed due to lack of experience. He sacked most of the people who had the skills to run the place thinking he knew better.

As I often say, if you wish to make a small fortune out of something you have no skills for, then the best way to achieve this is to start out with a big one.