How about a special session at the outlook conference on free trade for farmers? I mean free trade when the industry buys to go with the free trade that farmers have when they sell. it seems all agriculture products are priced at the world market price, where lower standards of production are in place and where labour costs and regulation costs are lower, yet Australian production cost have been artificially regulated up for the benefit of the non agriculture sector. This is a subsidy and started with the document “Australian settlement’ where the stated aim was in “enhance the urban living standards to attract immigrants, paid for by agriculture. How sustainable is this? A world market income yet is required to subsidise the non agriculture sector above the world market. Until these changes agriculture is doomed and the rush to leave will continue. This is the future skill base, talk about a skills shortage? Take the wheat industry, the price seems to raise at the farm gate about 1.5% a year, yet farmers I know, tell me costs are raising at the moment at 10%, and never go below 1.5%. How long can this go on? I say 3 to 5 years and the industry will be totally different

What does it matter what is discussed at the ABARE talkfest? Nothing will change while KRUDD holds the reins. Farmers will still be forced under the poverty line and increasingly constrained in what they can do by Peter Garrett & his Wong mate. It's all about getting rid of private ownership of land thereby diminshing democracy. ABARE will continue to make up its figures - there is no way the stats "released" by this bureaucratic enclave are accurate. For years its figures have foreshadowed falling markets & rising costs. ABARE sets the market prices by stating what it thinks the gross margins for agriculture should be. This sends a totally wrong message to international markets. Just watch what happens to the wheat prices after ABARE's report! And don't get me started on what they have consistently done to wool markets...

So you think the other lot will do better. In the end, we will have discriminatory regulation against agriculture, maybe a little more bland that’s all. This means the industry just dies a little slower, closer to 5 years then 3 years. It really is time for radical thinking and change.

When the blazes will sustainability be given the priority it deserves? If we are to feed 35million people in the years ahead in Australia, it needs to be done on a sound foundation of sensible resource management NOW and into the future. Civilisations have vanished in the past due to food supply catastrophies, and unless we manage soils in the frontier of microbiological sciences, we will disappear like those before us. (And denial that this might take place simply emphasises our arrogance.)