We all know that the federal Labor government has set itself the impossible task of reducing carbon emissions by 43 per cent by 2030, plus setting itself a target of achieving 82 per cent renewables across the power grid.

In fact, they have gone as far as locking these targets into law through their Climate Change Bill 2022 which was passed last year allowing them to bask in the positive virtue from the global elite and the local teal voting Tesla voters.

Twelve months later and the hard men in the Labor Party are starting to question the wisdom of locking into an emissions position that leaves no wriggle room to address growing concerns of the battlers who are losing faith in the new climate change religion.

No doubt the recent research by global analytics firm Dynata shocked the woke out of the federal government. It finds that Australia has one of the largest proportions of people globally who report not being worried about global warming. More than half of Australian consumers (58 per cent) are also unwilling or slightly unwilling to adopt a more climate-friendly lifestyle if it costs more money.

Compared with 18 months ago, about the time of the election of the Albanese government, 41 per cent of those surveyed said they were less interested in buying a hybrid or electric car and 36 per cent were less interested in renewable energy. 

Add the revolt against the move to bulldoze native vegetation to build wind farms or the loss of visual amenity on our farms and coastal waters, and the government has a growing problem.

In fact, the government is starting to worry that, like the referendum, they are setting themselves up to fail unless they go out there and find a couple of sectors over and above coal mining and coal fired power stations to enforce emissions reductions upon.

Hence the recent announcement by federal anti-agriculture Minister, Murray Watt, offering up the livestock sector as one industry which could be made into an unwilling sacrificial lamb to the climate change gods by imposing rather than hoping for emissions cuts.

No doubt Minister Watt has been buoyed by the success of the Government’s anti live exports stance in driving farmers out of the sheep industry, so he now wants to hack into the rest of the national livestock herd as a cheap way to drive down emissions by 2030.

You can see the whiteboard in Minister Watt’s office now. Why target the 3.35 million battlers in marginal city seats by continuing to push up the price of power or tax them out of their cars when you can target the 33,500 livestock producers who the federal Labor government no doubt sees as the landed aristocracy and instead tax them out of their sheep and cattle?

Minister Watt hinted at what’s to come when he launched the consultation on the government’s agriculture and land plan which will guide cuts to emissions from agriculture in line with the national target to hit net zero by 2050.

He has stated that the livestock industry cannot rely solely on carbon offsets to achieve the targets the government is demanding and hence must change practices which no doubt includes reducing stock numbers, or is he warming us up for an emissions tax on livestock as part of the government 2025 re-election pitch?

No doubt the failure of his colleague, Chris Bowen, to build the promised 40 wind turbines every month and the 22,000 solar panels every day, not to mention the 10,000km of high voltage transmission lines, has left the government scrambling for a new sector from which to extract emissions.

Minister Watt is no fool. He would have worked out that if they can get away with killing off live exports then it should not be too hard to get rid of a third of the nation’s sheep and cattle, all in the name of saving the planet.

In fact, he would have taken inspiration from at least two other countries led by progressive left governments who have decided that their agricultural sector is the easy pathway to net zero.

First, there is New Zealand. You may recall that the mad woke Ardern New Zealand Labour government achieved global pin-up status in Davos by imposing a world first tax on farm methane emissions that was legislated to kick in from 2025.

The other country that Minister Watt has pinned up on his office wall is The Netherlands, which, like the New Zealand government, went looking for global accolades from the climate catastrophe elite during the height of the climate change madness and announced a plan back in 2020 to radically reduce the number of farmers and livestock.

The aim was to buy out smaller farmers to reduce their number by a third, leaving only the bigger, more compliant ones who would be forced to tow the governments line on emissions targets.

Unfortunately, the plan massively backfired as it led to the formation of a new farmers political party, BoerBurgerBeweging — BBB for short, or “Farmer-Citizen Movement” in English, which then proceeded to run against the government’s nitrogen strategy as it was only in the interests of the elite.

In the BBB’s first-ever election, they won a larger share of the vote than any other party in the Netherlands, gaining 16 out of 75 seats. Overnight, the BBB went from an insurgent outsider’s movement to the largest single party in the Dutch senate.

Badly beaten at the polls and facing a no-confidence vote in parliament, the Dutch government agreed to hit pause on the plans and signalled that they were open to pushing back the emissions reduction deadline from 2030 to 2035.

The same thing happened with the recent New Zealand election. Predictably, the Labour government got flogged, but they were already getting nervous of their farmers’ reaction and had walked back from their commitment of a 2025 start. 

It was not enough Labour lost and now the new right-wing coalition is looking to dump the tax on methane just as they have committed to reversing their ban on live exports.