Saturday, March 30, 2024

Money, power and guns

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Money

As part of the budget media coverage I was asked for comment on the impact of agriculture by the rural media, so I skimmed the mass of press releases put out by the governments army of media staff for the relevant bits and dived into the real information – the actual budget papers – which no journalist ever seems to do.

First things first. Credit to the WA Premier for yet another surplus, as I keep saying he is the best treasurer the Liberals never had.

Credit also to our WA Minister for Agriculture for prioritising biosecurity and getting additional money. It’s her number one responsibility and she clearly gets it.  If she and the Director General do nothing else but pour money and people into biosecurity they will get my support.

On that subject, absolutely no credit to her colleague the Federal Minister for Agriculture for hitting the industry with a 10 per cent fee linked to our GRDC, horticulture, dairy, MLA levies.

The hit on industry is an additional $50m a year to go into the Federal biosecurity pot. Why we are paying is beyond me; last time I looked the risks were on the import of products not the export of grain and meat, hence this new fee makes no sense, albeit the Federal Government’s additional charges on products and people coming through our ports of entry does.

But back to the State Government’s budget, of all the lines pumped out by their spin doctors this one says it all.

‘The Western Australian Government has handed down the 2023-24 State Budget, which includes $5.3 billion for regional road projects and $5.9 billion for METRONET projects.’

What the budget proves is that, if nothing else, the Premier/Treasurer is totally consistent year in year out in pouring money into a metro rail system that will be rolled gold and totally underutilised, when the focus should be on a vast uplift in our regional roads and rail which are both running at capacity.

It’s time to pull stumps on Metronet and accept we are not New York or London and urban rail won’t ever work when we are neither a high rise city nor do most of our workers actually work in the CBD.

Mind you, the one project that the Premier/Treasurer has pulled stumps on is Royalties for Regions. Only problem is, like the Monty Python sketch, he refuses to admit that this particular parrot is dead.

Why the Premier continues to maintain the fiction that Royalties for Regions is still delivering a billion dollars a year into the bush is beyond me.  Take the political pain and put it out of its misery.

At least the fading National Party can then claim credit to all the fading plaques on many regional buildings to prove that they actually did spend a billion dollars on real things, as they don’t seem to stand for much these days.

As for those poor long-suffering Department of Agriculture staff who are still with us and who made the effort to read through Budget Paper No 2 from page 208, in the vain hope of finding that the 30 year war of attrition imposed by Treasury has come to an end, it was yet another predictable outcome.

They can look forward to further 10 per cent culls of their numbers over the next four years as their department’s employee salary budget gets cut from its 2022/2023 allocation of $244m to $231m which, after inflation, means less not more people.

For those hoping that there might be some funding hidden away in special projects, they will have seen that total departmental spend by government is set to fall from $500m to $331m over the next four years.

So ignore the spin in the media release of a record spend in this year’s DPIRD allocation as a careful analysis of that number is it’s boosted by a couple of one-offs like EID tags, plus a catch up from last year’s underspend.  Bottom line is, it’s yet another terrible budget outcome for agriculture and regional development.

The upside for DPIRD staff looking to escape the endless cuts is, I hear, there are lots of jobs going on Metronet so maybe that’s a fallback option for them as certainly there are no more jobs in the regional road funding with only $100m being allocated a year to new country road projects.

The big winner in the regions, according to the government, is the $2.7 billion investment to transition Western Australia’s energy system for a low-carbon future, not that I hear too many people living outside of inner-city Perth think that should be a priority over regional roads and mobile communications. But the inner city soy latte drinkers will be appeased.

Power

In this section I’m going to quote from one of my favourite sources of critical economic and political thinking, a web site called Doomberg.  They recently published an article titled ‘Casual Effect’ which exploring the unforeseen consequences of over-investing in renewables.  The link to WA is the value for money for our $2.7 billion being sunk into decarbonising the State’s power grid and if it will actually produce reliable power.

I quote from the article: On Saturday, the world was treated to a most incredible article in The New York Times. Ominously titled “Backup Power: A Growing Need, if You Can Afford It”. This piece tells a sombre tale of those struggling with power outages, a phenomenon on the rise across the US. It goes on to describe how the affluent have taken rational but costly steps to insulate themselves from our newly unreliable power providers, remedies far out of reach for those struggling to make ends meet.

According to the authors, the introduction of intermittent sources of energy, like wind and solar, and new demand from the green electrification agenda, has seen the US grid increasingly fail and with it more and more people resorting to buying gen sets as home and work back up for when the sun does not shine and the wind stops blowing and the mega batteries run down.

So, for you out there in Western Power land, if you think your power is unreliable now, wait until Collie is shut down and you are reliant on the wind and the sun and hundred million dollar batteries that can power Perth for less than an hour. 

Mind you, those farmers lucky enough to be chopped off the grid and given a $300,000 stand-alone power unit won’t have that problem.

They can be comfortably assured that, as in the good old days pre-SEC poles and wires reaching their farm, they will be back reliving memories of the old generator shed with its bank of batteries and the old lister diesel banging away, soothing them to sleep after a long day on the seeder. As for the rest of us, it will be plug in the camping gen set or bring out the candles and feel pleased they are sitting in darkness to save the environment.

But back to Substack.  I quote some more: “To aspiring central planners and their enablers in the media, empirical evidence that their policies are backfiring(and destabilising the grid)  is merely proof of the need to double down (and demand more renewables). From this, a horde of otherwise intelligent people earnestly believes that proactively destabilizing the grid is not the cause of grid instability. Nowhere is this more pointed than in Germany, a country several years ahead of the US in its journey toward national energy suicide.

Having invested untold billions in solar and wind energy, Germany is now aggressively electrifying its transportation and residential heating sectors. (Note Metronet is apparently a big step in our carbon free future – only problem is no-one  in WA wants to give up their cars and sit on a train.)

Germany’s electricity production: despite hundreds of billions of euros invested, or rather wasted, Germany’s annual production of electricity from all sources is essentially unchanged since 2000. That money was spent on shifting sources, not expanding them.

We in WA are doing the same thing; shifting resources, not expanding them, which raises questions where we will find the power for the 60,000 people expected to make WA their home over the next 18 months.

I find the fact that a Labor government is more interested in the Green agenda than its impact on cost of living for the battlers fascinating. Mind you, they don’t seem to care about the battlers who like their firearms either, something I address in my next section.

I won’t go into the rest of the Substack article on the implication of this mad rush to renewables other than to say that, by forcing up the price of fossil fuels and forcing people onto renewables, costs go up, incomes go down and governments panic and step in to subsidise the difference to hide their predictable mistakes.

Funny enough, a centrepiece of both the State and Federal Governments’ budget is more subsidies for the cost of living including rapidly increasing energy prices. I rest my case that renewables come at a cost, only no one wants to talk costs when it comes to climate change.

Guns

The debate goes on around the WA Government’s rewrite of the old 1970s firearms legislation.

To date, we have been informed that there will be bans on high calibre firearms, compulsory mental health checks, new licensing categories including a Primary Producer’s Licence, and restrictions on the number of firearms linked to each category. 

In addition, the Minister has told us he has extracted from Treasury enough funds to build a new digital licensing system which hopefully will fix the clunky delays in getting transfers and new firearms registered, something that has been long overdue.  No doubt there will be other changes but we are dealing with what’s currently on the table.

Ideally, the Minister would have worked out the full package of what he wants to include in the new legislation and produced a discussion paper.  It’s certainly how I would have gone about the process as I suspect, with some careful push-polling, the government could have built the community case for more restrictions.

Despite this misstep our Minister for Police, ex-navy, SAS military man and all round nice guy Paul Papalia, who, unusual for Ministers, has the ability to listen rather than lecture, has made it very clear upfront he is wanting to cut the number of firearms in the community as no doubt he has seen the end result of what weapons can do to people.

He is particularly interested in cutting the number of recreational shooters and their access to large numbers of firearms, using media drops of all the suburbs with lots of guns to scare the non-gun-owning punter.  There is the predictable media line of links between the number of fatalities and too many guns in the community, but no detail of evidence of how capping the numbers will make any difference.

I could make the argument of the very real correlation between extensive violence in remote indigenous communities and the lack of police, along with the need to impose outright bans on firearms in those communities, but that would be cheap politics on my behalf.

Far better to debate what is currently on the table. Under the new categories, shooters can still own multiple firearms, but it will come at a cost. What cost is yet to be revealed but my guess is it won’t be cheap, as I bet the Minister will be using cost to squeeze guns out of the reach of the community, read battlers.  

Funny how Labor governments slog their blue collar supporters with high fuel, alcohol and tobacco taxes, cut camping access to recreational parks and fishing grounds and now look to take away their guns.  My guess is the Shooters Fishers and Farmers Party will make a roaring comeback at the next election if they play this for all its worth, but I digress again, let me return to the firearms debate.

My position is there is no logic in capping firearm numbers for recreational shooters, sporting shooters or primary producers.  Logic tells me that anything more than zero guns means someone with a licence (or without) can shoot themselves or someone else if they have access to even just one firearm.

Limiting a recreational shooter to five firearms or sporting and primary producers to 10 will make no measurable difference to the number of shootings. If there was evidence to the contrary then the Minister would have rolled it out in a position paper.

What I don’t dispute is there is a strong correlation between no guns and less deaths, ie Japan vs the United States, but it only takes one gun in a household to be a weapon of destruction so limiting the number to 5 or 10 won’t pass the pub test. But it will pass the community polling test as the community at large hates guns, something the rec community doesn’t seem to understand.

If the Minister is focused on community deaths as a result of firearms, let him propose zero firearms and run the gauntlet of the 80,000 firearms holders and his party room colleagues to see if that policy will fly at the next election.  Now that would put him on the political map, just as the gun buy back put Howard on the political map.

What he is proposing is a half way measure which will seriously annoy the recreational shooters and cause minor inconvenience to primary producers as most can live with the cap of 10.

This is not to say WAFarmers and the PGA are happy. Both organisations have opposed the mandatory psychological tests, a topic on which I have written two articles. But, to the Ministers credit, we now have assurances of some concessions as to how often we need to front up to the shrink to prove we are sane.

But again no evidence of how effective they will be, and they are yet another costly imposition on the battler recreational shooter who just wants to go bush and shoot vermin.

The Minister to his credit has recognised that firearms are part of farm and station working tools and the new act will allow farm workers to use them and allow the movement between properties.

This is good policy which we will support. Mind you, some of the recreational shooting community have been highly critical of me, confusing my support for this new primary producers licence as weakening their argument against the changes that impact them.

They would prefer an all for one, and one for all, approach where we help lead the charge against any changes that impact the rec community.

My response is like Rec Fish West vs WAFIC; that is, the recreational vs commercial fishing peak bodies both, at times, will have differing positions on new rules around say marine parks hence we all reserve the right to do a deal with government.

When it comes to firearms, I am unapologetic when it comes to looking after farmers’ interests, and while I see no logic in limiting an avid recreational shooter to 5, 15, 50 or 500 firearms, the brutal reality is the government has the numbers and is willing to put farmers and pastoralists in a special category.

It is politics in its purest form; we have been invited to sit around the table with the PGA and the Minister without the recs to negotiate a package to suit primary producers and we have taken the opportunity.

I’ve been in this game too long not to get that we have been wedged and the government seeks to divide and conquer but that’s politics.

When the government has both the community and the parliamentary numbers on their side with a general consensus that tighter gun laws are a good thing, then we negotiate living in the real world.

So let me be clear, most farmers/pastoralists are recreational shooters, albeit less and less these days compared to the mad era when I was a teenager, out roaring around on the back of utes with too many guns, too much testosterone and too much beer for anyone to be safe.

Which takes me to the claim made by many in the recreational lobby that farmers need recreational shooters to control vermin on farm.  

Any farmer who is still having family and friends come up for a fun weekend blasting away at foxes and rabbits (I await the RSPCA campaign to protect the roos after they finish with live exports) on a weekend, needs to have a long hard look at the Industrial Manslaughter laws and what a fatal shooting accident on farm could mean in the courts.

It’s a work site never a recreational site, hence shooting on farm for fun is a thing of the past, at least on those farms that have a proper farm safety system and are wary of Work Safe..  

Hence a Primary Producers Licence with a 10 firearm limit is workable, even if having one or 20 as a limit is unlikely to make any difference to the Minister’s goal of less firearm deaths across the community.  But we will take a limit of 10 as it’s better than what was originally offered.

The recreational shooters need to make their own case as to why they need more than five firearms. They have my support to have as many as they like and it’s up to the Minister to explain why there should be restrictions.

Note how the Liberals and Nationals are silent on the issue.  Like bunnies in the spotlight, they don’t want to engage as they have looked at the community polling and know the debate will explode with demands for ever more restrictions when the next inevitable family shooting occurs. In the meantime, I see a big future for the Shooters Fishers and Farmers Party in Western Australia as no one seems to be standing up for the battlers who like their guns, their fishing or those who would like to see less money spent on Metronet and more on country roads.

Related story: What about the vermin? The WA firearms debate

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