Opinion

Since coming to power, the Federal Labor Government has presided over a sharp contraction in Western Australia’s sheep flock. Industry figures show numbers falling from roughly 12 million head in 2022 to around 8 million today — a drop of about one-third in just four years ... Just as the State Agriculture Minister was proudly announcing $20 million in grants to help farmers and processors adjust, Beaufort River Meats quietly announced it was moving into care and maintenance due to ongoing sheep shortages.

Australia’s largest accounting body, CPA Australia, says Australia’s productivity crisis is now serious enough to threaten economic growth, competitiveness and living standards unless governments act decisively ... Business and Investment Lead Gavan Ord said: “Australia is running out of time. If productivity continues to stagnate, living standards will go backwards and the economy will struggle to sustain growth.

Raising the matter in Parliament, Mrs McArthur said the significant public artwork, commissioned by the State of Victoria in 1977, had been rendered inaccessible to the public without justification ... Harold Freedman’s Geelong Regional History mosaic mural “is a heritage-listed public artwork depicting the changing lifestyle of the region’s people and key moments in Victoria’s early history.”

The rapid expansion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) across society in the past few years has both its benefits, and downfalls, which could change the way our communities are today. The Clarence Valley Independent spoke to a Northern River’s based tech expert, who is a husband, father, and computer programmer, about the explosion in society of AI.

This is yet another instalment in my running theme: the State rail debacle. A saga of privatisation, monopoly infrastructure, and governments that appear to have misplaced both the keys and the contract. Twenty-five years after Western Australia leased out its freight rail network, one basic question still has no straight answer: what does the Brookfield/Arc lease actually require?

For the purposes of Australia's GHG inventory, bushfires are treated as a event about which we can do nothing and the emissions they produce are not counted. However, perversely, emissions from prescribed or cultural burning and other land management done to minimise bushfire risk are counted and so count against Australia's Net Zero goal.

Without agriculture, hundreds of millions of people would go hungry every day. Yet modern agriculture is increasingly judged not just on how much food it produces — but on how well it stores carbon, protects biodiversity, and reduces emissions. Farmers are being asked to deliver food, climate solutions and conservation outcomes, while still running profitable businesses.

Michelle Freeman. Victorians are living through another black summer, with fires burning through more than 400,000 hectares of forest and farmland and leaving communities from Natimuk to Walwa confronting loss. The scale of the damage underscores the need to continue evolving how we manage our landscapes to better prepare for fire.

Jackie Jarvis was appointed Minister for Agriculture and Food in December 2022. She picked up responsibility for Fisheries in March 2025, giving her three budgets and one election to get her head around the DPIRD budget papers ... Once again, I’ve gone back to the state budget to point out a glaring problem: the rhetoric simply does not match the money.

“WAFarmers are reaping what they sow,” Ben Wyatt declared recently, reflecting on the looming Maddox case and claims by WAFarmers that the current laws are being selectively targeted by the department ... There is a curious habit among former ministers once they leave office: they rediscover principle. Mr Wyatt’s recent commentary on Aboriginal cultural heritage laws is a textbook example.

Kaali King. Few of us know that tin is one of the fastest growing rare-earth mineral commodities in 2025, outstripping lithium, cobalt, silver and graphite. Demand for electronics and EVs, all of which use tin solder (48 per cent of the global tin market) is fuelling the boom.

The NSW Government has called for community input on recreational opportunities in the proposed Great Koala National Park. Regular ARR.News commentator on koala issues, Vic Jurskis, responds and has some questions for the Environment Minister ... Where do koalas no longer exist in NSW? What is the evidence they existed there when Europeans arrived? What is the evidence they are no longer there? Do you intend to reintroduce them?

Colleen Krestensen. With the repeal of the Kosciuszko Wild Horse Heritage Act 2018 (NSW), the Australian Brumby Alliance and brumby rehoming organisations are deeply concerned that the NSW Government and NPWS will move to quickly slaughter the remaining brumbies by aerial culling or other lethal methods ... The ABA strongly believes that with the brumby population in Kosciuszko National Park now as low as 579 horses, and the perceived density problem addressed, there is time to review how the remaining horses are managed and to make animal welfare an imperative.

The State only aims to promptly suppress 80 per cent of bushfires, effectively allowing one in five fires to grow beyond initial attack. According to the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action (DEECA) Annual Report 2024–25, the government’s target for “fires contained at first attack and/or within five hectares” sits well below what frontline agencies have actually achieved in each of the past five years.

For most of the modern era, the story of food was scarcity. More people meant more demand, higher prices, and ever-expanding markets for farmers. That part of human history has now come to an end. For the first time, global population growth is slowing sharply at the same time as global food production continues to rise.

Rob Burgess. Australia is running an opportunity deficit in its biggest cities. Housing, congestion and service pressures are eroding the everyday “deal” in Sydney and Melbourne. The question is no longer whether people and investment will look elsewhere, but where that momentum will land. With remote work normalising, the energy and industrial transition accelerating, and many regional centres still offering a more achievable pathway to security and prosperity, the next shift in Australia’s economic geography is sitting in plain sight.

Keeping hens dates back many thousands of years since the eggs (and meat) of jungle fowl were first enjoyed by humans. Ever since then, the sound of chooks wandering around the yard or the paddock has been an enjoyable part of life for countless people in many civilisations. Today, keeping hens in the backyard or in small commercial flocks can still be rewarding.

We now have a bumper crop, a tax windfall for government, and broad agreement across agriculture, transport and local government that the system is stretched. The buy-back was presented as a serious response to a real capacity, efficiency and safety problem. The only question left is whether the government is prepared to act.

The debate about buffel needs to be broadened to take account of the weed's current and future commercial as well as social consequences. The pastoral industry, in love with the irresponsibly introduced plant, has leases over half of the NT, land that is owned by the people of the NT. From 31 December they will have just 43 days to comment on how the government should be dealing with the scourge, declared a weed in 2024, yet still expanding in the region's prime tourism areas.

This week, the comparison shifts to machinery and markets — how, in both decades a century apart, a revolution in farm equipment collided head-on with falling commodity prices and soaring machinery costs. The rhyme is almost eerie: technological leaps meeting financial cliffs.

Firearms reform is attractive politics because it is administratively complex but morally simple. It produces press conferences, committees, compliance regimes and the soothing language of “community safety”. What it does not reliably produce is protection against terrorism, extremism or ideologically driven murder ... Western Australia’s experience is instructive.

The Americans had Apollo. The Soviets had Soyuz. The Chinese have Tiangong. And Australia? We now have the world’s first taxpayer-funded attempt to guide space exploration using songlines ... The real culprit here is modern academia, which now treats all “knowledge systems” as equal. They are not. Knowledge that is testable, repeatable, measurable and falsifiable is superior to knowledge that is not.