Abandoning Net Zero Abandons Australia's Farmers

Riding my bike from Goondiwindi down to Narrabri via Moree, I had the Nandewar Range and Mount Kaputar sitting off to my left on the horizon. In front of me were paddocks of early summer crops on rich black soils, stretching as far as I could see. On numerous fence-lines, hand-painted signs from farmers warned about coal seam gas and fracking. Out here, people understand in their bones that their livelihoods depend on healthy Country. But the Liberal and National Parties seem particularly determined to pretend they don’t.

Australia has already warmed by around one and a half degrees. Rainfall has become more erratic, with longer dry spells, more intense downpours when the rain does come, and more time spent in severe drought. Farmers don’t need a scientific report to tell them that; they see it in the timing of the break, the shrinking of their planting windows, and the way heatwaves now burn off crops that used to hang on.

Economists have shown that the shift in climate since about 2000 has already taken a big bite out of farm incomes. Average broadacre profits are down, and really bad years have proliferated. What used to be a one-in-ten horror season is now closer to one in five. That’s not an abstract statistic. It’s whether the bank extends your overdraft, whether you can afford new machinery, whether the kids feel they’ve got a future on the farm or not.

Although grain growers have adapted, there are limits. Wheat, canola and pulse crops can’t be wished through 45-degree days or month after month of hot, dry winds. Livestock producers are seeing the same thing: more heat stress, reduced weight gain, fertility problems, animal welfare issues and, on top of that, more frequent and intense fires. Irrigators, meanwhile, are staring down a future of unreliable allocations as climate change bites into water flows.

Given all that, you'd expect political parties that claim to represent the Bush to treat net zero as non-negotiable. Australia’s peak farm bodies have endorsed net zero by 2050. And groups like Farmers for Climate Action are calling for faster cuts because they can see what’s happening on their own land.

But the Liberals and Nationals have walked away from net zero. They pretend to back farmers while standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the coal and gas lobby to sabotage the very transition that might keep farms viable. It is a dangerous con. If the world hits three degrees of warming, there'll be no adaptation package big enough to protect agriculture on this continent as we know it today.

As I pedalled south with Kaputar watching over the plains, I couldn’t shake the thought that by mid-century, if global emissions aren’t sharply reduced, fields like this will look and feel more like Saudi Arabia than north-west New South Wales. Crops will fail. Heatwaves will hammer stock, crops, people, towns and Country. Wind erosion and fire will take the place of green rows of sorghum and maize.

The Coalition loves to claim it’s the “farmers’ friend”. But abandoning net zero is not standing up for the Bush. It’s selling out Australian farmers - and the communities and cultures that depend on them - for one last fossil-fuel sugar hit. Out here between Goondiwindi, Moree and Narrabri, you can already see the climate changing on the horizon. The real question is whether our politics is willing to see it too.

Sorghum crops on the Liverpool Plains.