Opinion

“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.

As news of the Bondi shootings travel the globe, I sit at in a beer garden in Munich where gigantic fake snowflakes hang from tall trees and the cold air bites into my cheeks. The news from Australia is even more chilling. Australia is a safe country I tell the two women who sit next to me. Things like the Bondi killings do not happen in my country.

Like every parent watching their adult kids edge toward the real estate market, I look at the numbers with growing alarm. In 25 years, Perth house prices have jumped from roughly $200,000 to close to $900,000 — a three-to-fivefold increase — while wages have barely doubled from $50,000 to $100,000. That’s not a generational squeeze; it’s a structural impossibility.

The Cook Government’s demersal “reform” package is not fisheries management. It’s fishing for votes at the expense of the two and a half million West Aussies who never step onto a sports-fishing boat loaded with the latest eco sounders. And, like most of this Government’s environmental crusades, the rhetoric is heroic, the delivery is sloppy, and the consequences fall squarely on the people who don’t have a big boat parked in their driveway.

A century divides the Roaring Twenties from today’s so-called Turbulent Twenties, yet the distance feels strangely compressed. As we limp toward the midpoint of our own decade, the parallels grow sharper and harder to ignore — reminders that our present upheavals are rarely as unique as we like to believe. Historians are rightly suspicious of neat analogies, but here the similarities are too blunt to dismiss.

Mine Free Glenaladale ... A spokesperson for Mine Free Glenaladale, Ms Robyn Grant, said she was surprised at Mr Harrington’s comments ... “He is simply parroting the same unscientific misinformation and spin that the community has been asked to swallow for the past 12 months, as the failed Kalbar project is rescoped."

Western Australians love two things: arguing about politics and arguing about fishing — and not necessarily in that order ...

Mick Harrington, East Gippsland Community and Stakeholder Lead, Gippsland Critical Minerals. The 2021 Fingerboards proposal did not receive approval, and that was the right decision for that project at that time. Now led by Gippsland Critical Minerals, new leadership has taken the time to learn from the past and rebuild the project from the ground up ... This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build good jobs, back local business and care for the land we share. Let’s grab it with both hands and make it ours.

After a decade of Labor “modernisation,” the federal wage system now comes with a hidden tripwire buried deep in the fine print — and it’s farmers who keep stepping on it. Under the Pastoral Award 2020, a harvester driver on a base machine operators’ rate of $32.90 an hour can suddenly cost you $48.50 once the 152-hour overtime cliff kicks in. That’s not rational economics; it’s central planning with double penalty rates.

Michael Balderstone, Legalise Cannabis Party President. Firstly, congratulations Albo and thank you for Labor preferences on the Senate tickets ... Fair to say we were disappointed by our result, even though we got more than half a million first preference votes. The Legalise Cannabis Party grew out of the Nimbin HEMP Embassy, which in truth grew out of the Nimbin community.