(Image: Tom Red/Private Media)

The Nationals are currently planning their next raid on the taxpayer purse and it could be the biggest ever.

After staking his return to the Nationals leadership on resisting the adoption of a net zero emissions target by 2050 (which, as the IPCC has shown this week, is ludicrously inadequate), Barnaby Joyce insists he can’t agree to such a target without a plan on how to get there and a knowledge of the costs.

This led to much mockery of Joyce and others like Bridget McKenzie yesterday, given they’re actually in government, a position that traditionally gives you the power to come up with plans and implement them. “It’s not up to us to come up with the plan,” said McKenzie.

Perhaps Joyce and McKenzie thought they were still on the backbench. Or perhaps they missed Scott Morrison’s notorious memo to the public service: it is governments that come up with policies and plans, and it is the public service that implements them. Public servants are to keep their mouths shut about policy in the Morrison government. Yet here was the deputy prime minister complaining that no one had bothered to do the policy work for him.

Perhaps Joyce and McKenzie regard policy in the same way that they regard taxpayer subsidies and handouts to farmers — things that just fall from the sky without you having to bother working for them.

Joyce and the Nationals’ fallback position is that their experience with the Howard government’s endorsement of land clearing restrictions under the Kyoto Protocol — which allowed Australia to count reductions in land clearing by farmers that should have never been permitted in the first place — shows that the cost of climate action will be borne by farmers. “We’ve been sucked into this one before,” says Joyce. “Where we’ve agreed with the outcome and later on came the price, and the price was the divestiture of all our vegetation rights.”

In fact Joyce devoted a whole rant in The Australian back in February to whingeing about the impact of Kyoto, and the resulting state land clearing restrictions — on farmers. The idea will be to pre-emptively secure a colossal handout package to the bush in exchange for declining to oppose the 2050 target. And the package of course will be “administered” by the Nationals.

Except, it’s another Nationals rort, based on another Nationals lie. Agricultural data from the Nationals-controlled agriculture portfolio show that the sector has enjoyed amazing growth since 1998, when the Kyoto Protocol was agreed.

For example, is it true, as Joyce claims, that Kyoto-derived clearing restrictions mean “this is not enough to keep our farming land at a constant amount, let alone develop new areas”?

According to the data, there was over 18.2 million hectares of winter crops and over 1.3 million hectares of summer crops in 1997-98. In 2018-19, there was 19.8 million hectares of winter crops and 1.1 million of summer crops. And that was mid-drought; in 2017 there were 23.1 million hectares of winter crops.

But what about production? Surely that’s been affected by all these land clearing restrictions? We produced a mighty 34.2 million tonnes of winter crops in 1998… but 56.7 million tonnes in 2017. Using volume indices, total crop production doubled between 1998 and 2017, before drought hit and took it back to 1998 levels in 2019.

Now, it is true that farm costs have risen during that time. They’ve gone from $27 billion in total in 1998 to $52 billion in 2019. But the gross value of farm production has also increased — from $29.4 billion to $60.9 billion in 2019. As a result, farm incomes have skyrocketed. Here’s real net farm cash income in 2019-20 dollars:

That is, even during a severe drought, farm incomes were significantly higher than in 1998.

And as Crikey has outlined previously, agriculture has been a huge export success story in recent decades: the dollar value of exports has risen from $23.4 billion in 1998 to over $48 billion in 2020 — despite the drought. And it’s done it on the back of an amazing rise in productivity: employment in agriculture has fallen from 413,000 in 1998 to 334,000 in 2020, yet it still produced a massive surge in exports and production.

It may be chance, but Kyoto land clearing restrictions have coincided with a remarkable rise in agricultural production, productivity and incomes. The entire Nationals story simply doesn’t stack up. But of course it doesn’t — the point is the scam, not proper policy.