Donald makes a pledge to American agriculture.

Sonny Perdue on left and Donald Trump on right.
President Trump signs the Executive Order Promoting Agriculture and Rural Prosperity in America as Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue looks on during a roundtable with farmers in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on April 25, 2017.
In his first one hundred days in office the President of the United States has done something which the governments of Australia have been too frightened to do in a thousand days. The big message from the White House is that agriculture is important to America — the big message from Canberra is that  agriculture isn’t important to Australia.
Sure, the Deputy Prime Minister of Australia is proud of agriculture’s contribution of $54 billion to the national economy. What he refuses to discuss in public is the lack of profitability for many of the producers who contribute to that $54 billion. He avoids discussing the ever increasing damage being caused by rural debt, low commodity prices, a poor and outdated infrastructure and a banking sector out of control.
President Trump, as one would expect coming from the dog eat dog construction and real estate industry in America, obviously knows the difference between strategy and tactics. Love him or hate him, respect him or despise him, he has achieved what many believed was impossible. The evidence is that both the Coalition and the Labor Party and all those strange individuals who nobody voted for, who spend their time scampering around the dark corners of Parliament House  ‘currying favour’ and ‘horse trading’ with the future of this country, are all providing irrefutable evidence that they are seriously deficient in the strategy department. What they all have is a grab bag, a lucky dip of tactics. We are now running the country with party games. God save the Queen because nothing can save Australian politics.
About 2,500 years ago, Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu wrote “The Art of War.” In it, he said, “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” Barnaby Joyce could do worse than take a page out of Donald’s book — we’ll overlook plagiarism just this once.  Look at what the President has asked the new Agriculture Secretary to do in the next 180 days. That is a business man speaking, bringing hard nosed business into politics. Will it work? Only time will tell.

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Has China got Australia by the short and curlies?

‘When you’ve got them by the balls their hearts and minds will follow.’

Image result for picture of theodore roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt 1858-1919
Theodore Roosevelt.
Australia and its sophisticated agricultural industry have to decide whether they want to be a feeder of others, or be fed by others. Don’t laugh at that. Of course the world can feed Australia— it’s already started as we increasingly become more reliant others for food. We have no more people in this country than there are in a couple of  big Chinese cities and we are an attractive proposition to feed, if only for access to our resources and for what food we can produce that others can’t. I read somewhere recently that China would only have to increase its horticultural production by about 3% and it could feed Australia. Think about that and the global fresh food trade. There are Egyptian oranges for sale in my town. So how important are we to China and how important is China to Australia? You may be surprised.

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Situation Vacant – A Leader for Australia.

For the first time in my life we don’t have a real leader either in the Lodge or in ‘waiting’. The Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition are a miserable pair, neither is fit for office. Hanging on to power and the thirst for power at any price, is devaluing what is the real Australia. We are losing our national character by allowing minorities, both within parliament and outside, to determine national policy. Our attitude to the generation of electricity, the life blood of society, is just one example. We have the best coal in the world and there are those who want us to stop using it ourselves and stop exporting it – in other words close the mines. We are close to having the biggest reserves of natural gas in the world and being the world’s biggest exporter of gas; demand is starting to exceed supply because the ‘miners’ have sold it all for a fraction of its worth, and because we have sold our birthright it is being forecast that gas prices will rise and there may not be sufficient for Australia this coming winter— is that possible?  And slowly and inexorably as we approach winter, we all wonder how big our power bills will be. No doubt there will again be a call for blankets for the aged and the poor, when, as you will see, it is all so unnecessary. (The link ‘forecast that gas prices will rise’ may not work. Put ‘winter gas shortage fears as prices soar’ into your search engine, the story is there, or put in ‘gas shortage in Australia 2017’ and the page will fill. RC)

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