Trevor Whittington, CEO WAFarmers

Estimates is meant to be the opposition’s one decent swing at the government’s budget—the rare chance to force ministers to justify the billions in taxpayer cash they merrily shovel around like chook feed. Instead, it’s turned into the legislative equivalent of asking a sulky teenager to explain where last week’s allowance went ... when ministers start throwing up emotional smokescreens instead of facts, it’s usually a sign they’ve got something to hide.

Come 2025, after a couple of wars, a new US president, a cost of living crisis, power blackouts and the hard economics finally catching up to lofty promises, the world seems to have quietly lost interest in the net zero game ... Just this week, the Red Meat Advisory Council formally dumped its 2030 carbon neutral target, swiftly followed by Meat & Livestock Australia.

The brutal truth? We’ve hit the wall on new mobile towers in the bush ... If the government wants to be taken seriously on regional development—and on spreading the half-million migrants arriving each year beyond our major cities—then it must stop treating mobile connectivity as a private-sector problem. It’s time to treat it like the essential service it is.

In a year when the eastern states have either been drowning under floods or gasping through drought, and here in the west half the state has been left staring at a dry horizon, it seemed timely to stop watching the skies and start digging into the past ... What I aim to do is cut through the rising noise between the climate catastrophists shouting Armageddon and the hardened sceptics waving it all away, versus the climate fatalists like me—convinced that, whatever humans do, nature already has the final say—and put some facts on the table.

Something’s shifted. You can feel it in the air — and no, I’m not talking about carbon dioxide, the superfood of plants. I’m talking about the political climate, the social mood, the economic headwinds, and, most importantly, the dawning realisation across much of the Western world that Net Zero isn’t the pathway to the promised land — it’s a mirage.

The Albanese government, fresh from electoral victory and emboldened by a tighter alliance with the Greens, has wasted no time signalling its intentions: the nation’s nest eggs are in its sights with their plans to tax unrealised gains on super accounts over $3m ... It’s a dangerous shift in the philosophy of taxation, and one that poses deep constitutional and legal questions.

"When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?" That famous line, attributed to John Maynard Keynes, ought to be stitched into the lapels of every politician wandering through Parliament House with a talking point in one hand and a Twitter poll in the other. For out here in the Wheatbelt, we know better than most that stubbornness is a vice when the wind shifts and the sheep are heading for the neighbour's crop.

Anthony Albanese and his hapless Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, are quietly laying the groundwork for an ideological legacy that could do more damage to rural Australia than a decade of drought ... A calculated redistribution of wealth from the asset-rich, income-poor class—i.e., Australia’s farmers—to fund the pet projects of inner-city progressives. The method? Tax reform, veiled under the soft language of “fairness” and “equity.”

Western Australia has once again recorded the fastest population growth in the country, adding 72,600 people in the year to September 2024. To put that into perspective: if every one of those new residents moved into the 200 towns across the Wheatbelt’s 42 shires, it would more than double the population of every town. Yet, on a recent drive across the Wheatbelt, cutting through multiple towns, I didn’t see a single new house being built.

I am the very model of a modern Minister for Agriculture. You know you’ve made it as a minister when the Premier grants you one of the prestigious 12th-floor offices in Dumas House – even better if it overlooks Kings Park, with sweeping views across the Swan River and out to Rottnest.