Anyone tracking the media will see the Albanese government is in trouble, from the failed referendum through to promises to reduce power bills by $275 by 2025, to get wages growing faster than inflation and not to raid peoples super, it has a growing list of failed and broken promises.
This leaves a government desperate not to be left being accused, just as it repeatedly attacked the last government as being ‘all promise and no delivery’.
The problem is the two remaining outstanding promises that the government has the power to achieve before the next election are to take water off the Murray Darling irrigators and ban the live sheep trade.
Both promises were made to appease the inner-city Greens and the Teals at the expense of primary producers.
The first one, pledges to deliver 450 gigalitres of water for South Australia through the Murray Darling Basin Plan by mid-2024, has just been kicked down the road for another two years along with promises to only buy back water from voluntary sellers.
In other words, the government has looked at the politics and the polls and decided it’s not a wise time to take on a bunch of irrigators who are producing food for people’s kitchen tables, so it has done what all governments do when under pressure, kicked the decision down the line until after the next election.
The other promise is of course the debacle on live exports. No doubt the government is wondering which political genius within their ranks decided it was a good idea to take on a bunch of Western Australian sheep farmers and sell them out for a few inner-city Sydney and Melbourne votes, votes that in the end went to the Teals and the Greens.
This problem stems from when the government, back in opposition days, befriended animal rights activists who appear keen to run around with their cheque books buying cash for cruelty stories.
It is all too easy until you get into government and the complexities of what you promised suddenly become all too clear. The win win the activists kept talking about for processors and sheep farmers starts to look like wishful thinking.
Worse, the activists smelling victory over sheep have moved on to talking about cattle next, something that is not going to go down too well with the 100 or so indigenous owned cattle stations, especially after all their referendum promises ended up in the never never.
You can see why the hard heads in government are quietly looking for a way to kick the issue down the road just as they have done with the Murray Darling promise.
When you have a majority of just three seats, what’s the point of picking a fight in the west, particularly when the latest redistribution will see WA add another seat due to its rapid population growth?
Worse, the new seat is likely to be based on the outer and not the inner Perth suburbs, which is not exactly where you will find the animal activists who will be waving banners about broken promises on banning live exports.
Farmers can therefore have the faint hope that the government will add live exports to its list of broken promises or at the very least they will do a Murray Darling and kick the promise down the line, a long, long way down the line into the never never.
In the meantime, all farmers should be supporting the relentless efforts of Liberal MPs Rick Wilson and Slade Brockman who have kept the rural media full of their investigations on who paid who for cash for cruelty stories and who sits around the table with the Minister advising him of animal welfare issues when not campaigning against live exports.
Maybe it’s time for the government to drop the environmental and animal activists when it comes to forming election policies and go out and meet the people they will be impacting before making grand sweeping policy commitments that play to the inner city at the expense of the rest of the community.
