The leadership of Australian farming is a club that has strict rules. Like the classic movie Fight Club, the first rule about farm club is you don’t talk about farm club.
But that doesn’t always work out well for farmers. There are clever people in the leadership club who are loath to speak out.
There are also ambitious people who know there are rich rewards for members who toe the line, via preselection for the Liberal and National parties.
Good behaviour can be rewarded with jobs for life in agriculture-adjacent industries and can boost otherwise ordinary business careers. Break the rules and you’re on your own.
The Victorian Farmers Federation president, Emma Germano, has called for a debate on the use of the herbicide paraquat, speaking out despite a directive from the National Farmers’ Federation to stay silent.
The NFF had sent an email to its members advising them to “avoid prolonging the story” after the ABC reported the fears of a Victorian rural community where a cluster of farmers have developed Parkinson’s disease.
Germano told the ABC there were questions to be asked. “Where farmers have concerns, it’s our job to represent those concerns,” she said.
Coming after this month’s rally outside federal parliament, Germano’s comment has made the club restless. In a broader sense, farm advocacy is struggling and the business model is failing due to lack of funds. It feels as though a war is brewing in agricultural leadership. And it could have implications for rural communities.
The rally was a high-stakes game. It was organised by the Western Australian group Keep the Sheep to protest against the phasing out of live sheep exports but was then endorsed by the NFF – the first such rally in 45 years. On the same day Farmers for Climate Action held a meeting in the Queensland parliament with members of the state government and the opposition in an attempt to win support for sustainable agriculture and deep pollution reduction.
The NFF has claimed that more than 2,000 people attended the Canberra rally; photos and witnesses suggest far fewer. The Weekly Times reported that the numbers were in the hundreds. But Canberra is a long way from a lot of farms so the numbers are not so much the issue.
After the lacklustre showing, some high-profile agricultural types have been pushed – in public and private – to justify their non-attendance. Some have even been lectured by National party members.
As the Weekly Times reported: “It has been widely noted that not only did Labor politicians fail to show up, but so too did a number of major farming groups, including the Victorian Farmers Federation, the NFF’s Horticulture Council, Grain Growers and Sheep Producers Australia chief executive Bonnie Skinner.”
Skinner was on holiday. As her SPA chair, Andrew Spencer, noted, she was entitled to one. The decision to single out one woman in an industry legendary for its blokeyness is worth highlighting.
So why the recriminations? There were reasonable people who showed up from as far away as WA and Queensland, concerned for their farming future. It was a peaceful event, even for the lone protester who walked through the crowd with a sign saying “BAN LIVE EXPORT”.
A good many Coalition politicians posed for class photos shared by the NFF, even though its president, David Jochinke, said the rally was not about politics. Neither the prime minister nor the agriculture minister, Julie Collins, addressed the crowd.
A number of protesters highlighed other grievances: signs advocated anti-vaxxer causes and called for Australia’s withdrawal from the World Economic Forum, the UN and the World Health Organization.
The latter three are particularly confusing bedfellows given that the NFF regularly lectures other countries on free trade and supports a global rules-based system.
For political groups, the farmers’ cause is a seductive one. The rally’s details were shared via Telegram by far-right groups, including Stand Up Australia (formerly Reclaim Australia) and Australia for Freedom, which organised the anti-lockdown rallies at the height of the pandemic.
Protests have always attracted people with a range of agendas but it’s worth interrogating these connections. To the Senate inquiry into rightwing violent extremism, the home affairs department’s Nathan Smyth warned that ideologically motivated violent extremists exploit “popular grievances”.
“They push certain crisis narratives to undermine confidence in public institutions and radicalise individuals through creating a sense of urgency,” Smyth said.
No farmers, no food is a core message to encourage people to care about farming – I wrote a book about it.
But that concept has been used in a political campaign to push against governments seeking to reduce carbon emissions to combat global heating, which remains the biggest threat to farming.
On Monday the NFF’s chief executive, Tony Mahar, resigned to take on the role of Australia’s energy infrastructure commissioner, appointed by the minister for climate and energy, Chris Bowen. The impacts of energy and renewables developments was one of the key concerns at the rally, which Mahar attended.
He has been at the NFF for more than a decade, eight years as its CEO. In this global environment, Australian needs savvy farm leaders. As it happens, the NFF is this week meeting its member organisations to discuss its direction.
It’s a hard gig because farming, which only employs 240,000 people, encompasses the management of more than half Australia’s landmass through many different systems and climates and includes many political views – though it remains majority conservative.
It is a broad church, as John Howard might say.
The rally and its aftermath have created a sharp fork in the road for farm leaders. Will they acknowledge and plan for future challenges or will they shout about change, as if they can turn back the tide?
