Trevor Whittington, CEO WAFarmers

The debate between the gun lobby and the Minister for Police Paul Papalia has recently reignited following the announcement of the state government's firearms buyback program. Mind you, it's a pretty one-sided debate, with the gun lobby launching ads at the Minister and missing badly, while the opposition remains hunkered down in a safe house up on the hill, hoping not to get caught up in the firefight.

Remember the Toodyay Boygerring Brook case that fired up the Aboriginal Heritage debate in March 2023? Tony Maddox will see his day in court with the trial starting on 22 February ... The outcome of the case will be pivotal in how farmers approach Aboriginal cultural heritage going forward. Mr Maddox has engaged Christian Porter as his barrister ...

Do you know what it costs to fill up an EV with a fast charger - $30, $40, $50? Do you even know what it costs to run your house each night? ... If EVs are the future then we need to be frank about their pros and cons.

Did anyone notice the announcement dropped just before Christmas of the new emissions rules that will impact sales of most of the popular utes SUVs and 4WDs farmers and tradies rely on? ... For those who know their cars, the days are numbered for the number series 75s, 80s, 300s, 150s,  300s, not to mention the Raptors, Rams or even the bog standard Hilux, Triton and Nivara.

Yet again another strike on the wharfs ends in a cave in by the stevedores. Last week DP World, which is owned by the Dubai Royal Family, agreed to increase wages by 25 per cent over the next four years to end a rolling series of stoppages that has gone on for months. That works out about double the predicted inflation rate with almost no productivity trade offs ... Welcome back to the thinking of the 1970s.

Many will have heard of the popular memoir, A Fortunate Life, which follows the story of Albert B. Facey (1894 -1982), and his experiences growing up and farming in the Wheatbelt, a book that has sold over half a million copies ... As an Australian history buff, I’m always on the lookout for stories of our farming pioneers, unfortunately, they are few and far between.

In 1938, during the Munich Crisis, British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain expressed his distaste for making war preparations over "a quarrel in a faraway land between people of which we know nothing" ... Like Neville Chamberlain, our Prime Minister shows no interest in getting involved in a quarrel between people of whom he has no interest; yet anyone with the slightest awareness of international relations would know that there is no longer such a thing as a faraway land of which we can afford to have no interest ... Yemen is en route for the ships that take our grain and livestock to key markets such as Egypt and Israel.

For an organisation that invests a considerable portion of their half a billion dollar budget predicting what’s going to happen in 100 years’ time, the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) has fallen short on the all-important, short term forecasts ... Farmers want less climate change lecturing on the doomsday predictions of global warming, and more lectures on the complexity of the dynamic system that actually influences the day to day, week to week, and month to month rain and temperature that impacts their annual production.

When ministers drop media statements in the days leading up to Christmas, it’s usually a sign that they want to wash the decks of bad news. One such release was by WA Water Minister, Simone McGurk, who issued a carefully worded statement that ‘water priorities reset to focus on practical measures.’

The thing that should be worrying farmers is not just the fact that the government has claimed the credit (and credits) for itself of not allowing landholders to clear land to help make the 2030 target, but they are now banking on farmers burying the emissions of the rest of the nation in their soil to help reach the unachievable 2050 target ... don’t sign up to any soil carbon contract until you are sure you won’t need those credits yourself when the inevitable carbon taxes arrive.