Farmer wants a life
8 September 2010
Sean Russo
IT WAS never the intention of this column to write about politics. It’s supposed to be about how market risks impact companies and developing a logical common sense approach to risk management. In the current environment it seems very difficult not to talk about politics because it seems in many ways that politics and the current political landscape in Australia is probably one of the most significant risks that business in Australia faces. Unfortunately it is also one of the most difficult to manage and impossible to hedge.
The first time I saw Bob Katter speak after election night I thought, oh dear! The first words I heard the big man say were (and I am paraphrasing slightly), “the Aussie dollar’s the problem, it’s too high; if it were lower our farmers and miners would earn more”. “Oh dear Bob, let’s start with something simple like lowering the exchange rate”, I muttered at the TV screen.
The problem is that governments (and Reserve Banks) often do think they can control exchange rates, and often claim to, usually when it suits their argument. Keating and Costello both claimed it reflected sound management when it was going up and blamed it on spotty youth in red braces and/or hedge funds when it was collapsing.
Of course we all know deep down the exchange rate is at the whim of the market – in many ways it is the nation’s share price. And like a share price it can reflect fundamentals from time to time, but often, just like share prices, it can simply reflect nothing more than current sentiment taken to the extreme, positive or negative. Sometime, that sentiment for a company or country is not even for them but based on a broader investment theme like being a commodity/China proxy. And it’s all relative anyway. Is the Aussie going up or is it that the Euro and/or USD are going down? So Bob, that’s the problem. Even if you can get the Aussie to go down – and that’s what every politician in the world wants today to improve their own patch – can you get it down faster than the next guy can get his own currency down?
It’s fair to say that Bob and I weren’t off to a good start but I have to say the more I listen the more I like him.
Q&A on the ABC this week could have been renamed the Bob Katter show. Usually the politicians on the show are bland, trotting out the freshly spun line of the week. Bob is quite clearly his own man with his own views. Do I agree with everything he says? No. Do I respect his right to hold his views? Absolutely. Do I rejoice in a politician that is not politically correct? You betcha!
Let’s get real: whether you are for or against gay marriage you have to admit it is unlikely to improve our economy, create jobs, bring our brave young diggers home from Afghanistan in one piece, or improve the debate around any of those things that most of us, straight, gay or indifferent, see as somehow helping in our quest to get our kids, straight, gay or indifferent, employed and out of the house before they turn 35.
Bob Katter is the kind of politician that I want. He’s real, he’s honest, and he wears his heart on his sleeve.
We wouldn’t want a parliament house full of his ilk but we should be happy he’s there taking on all the political correctness and the economic theory and dealing with the reality of our situation, even if slightly irrationally. After all, I would like someone to show me where rational thought really works for you in most fields of human endeavour when most participants regularly behave irrationally.
The big guy even tried humour on a couple of occasions last night, with mixed success. When he spoke about the price both the parties were willing to pay for a hospital in Tasmania, clearly most in the audience don’t know the old joke that ends, “madam we have established what kind of woman you are, now we are just negotiating over your price”. Or perhaps the audience was too politically correct to laugh.
One of his best lines of the night was describing the two major parties as Coles and Woolworths. I actually think that it’s a very powerful analogy because I think that most of us now realise we are to blame for allowing Coles and Woolworths to suck the very soul out of our food supply. As I have observed and written before, farmers markets have sprung up all over the country, and in fact right around the world. I believe they are becoming increasingly popular because people want to reconnect with the people that grow/raise the produce we put in our own mouths and the mouths of our children. We feel a deep affinity with those people who work the land and actually provide the food we eat. We realise that the highly processed food we put in our mouths is perhaps the cause of many of our ailments or illnesses of the modern world. The further away the farmer the less we trust them. Coles and Woolworths are very much a part of that process, scouring the world for cheaper inputs, often at great social cost in the lesser trod parts of this country. We have driven demand for lower prices and they have delivered it but at what long-term cost?
Slowly but surely we have realised that in the process of driving down shelf prices and supposedly achieving some convenience we have sold our souls.
In parallel, we have supported our Woolworths and Coles politicians to hollow out our country’s soul in the process. I might not intuitively like the ideas of price support and tariffs, but I don’t like the idea of this great country of ours importing inferior fruit and veg either. How is it that we let our Woollies and Coles politicians think we need to lead the world in free-trade while bigger countries actively and substantially support big sectors of their rural communities?
Bob’s voice on these issues should be heard.
Watching Bob Katter last night I believe he absolutely feels for the soul of this nation and not just the rural soul. He may not be perfect. He may not think there are any gays in his seat. He may have a slightly narrow view of the world. But he is willing to stand up for what he believes in. And to me what is even more important is he has real focus: focus on trying to get some real outcomes for his constituents and many other disenfranchised Australians all over this country. The only focus the major parties have is focus groups and I believe Bob Katter and others are voicing growing concerns that many of us have that significant long-term damage has been done to this country by always thinking about short-term needs or short-term gain.
I sense that in the years ahead Bob Katter is going to become someone who is taken to the bosom of this country. Even if we don’t agree with everything he says at least we can revel in the notion that he says what he thinks and not what a focus group told him to think or the party leader told him to think. My only advice Bob is fix the problems, forget the share price – you can’t control it and you mustn’t let it control you.