My piece on page 4 is, among other things, a complaint that the whole election campaign seemed to be aimed at, and therefore pretty much decided on, the desires and fears of suburban bogans, cashed-up or otherwise. Now we’ve had a minority government formed based on the desires and fears of the voters in three country electorates. As an effete, intellectually-snobbish inner-city dilettante, this makes me feel rather left out, but there’s more to it than just my desires and fears being ignored.

The lists of specifically rural problems that were trotted out ad nauseam by the indies, Katter in particular, were taken as gospel, and seen as in need of instant rectification. So we have the idiot situation of Gillard announcing that it just shouldn’t cost more to make a phone-call to the Sydney CBD from a business in Tamworth than it does from, say, Bankstown. This, of course, implies that the city should, yet again, subsidise the country, but also ignores the fact that it’s rather cheaper for the business in Tamworth to rent office space, and wages are generally lower.

There’s a misapprehension in Australia that country folk, farmers in particular, are perpetual victims, and should be subject to special treatment – there weren’t any benefit concerts for typewriter companies when the PC came along, but every time there’s a drought or a flood we get fucking Lee Kernaghan and Ray Martin touring the provincials with their hands out, making us feel like greedy bastards for living in the city. I’m pretty sure it started with the Wall Street crash of ’87, when so many farmers allowed themselves to go into debt through currency options and got foreclosed on when the dollar crashed; they were victims of the banks’ predatory lending practices, but so were a whole lot of other businesses.

I lived and worked in the bush for two years, so I know what many farmers are like. When my posting started, it was harvest time, and nine out of ten growers I met were lamenting that prices were down this year. Bummer, I thought, until they started telling me how great prices had been last year and so they’d tripled production. Supply and demand just didn’t seem to enter their pointy little heads; I grow things, like my Dad did, and his Dad before him. I am owed a living because of that. No you’re not, fuckhead, you’re a businessman dealing in a volatile commodity, and if you refuse to understand that, you should go out of business.

In the short time I lived in that town, many did. Their badly-run, overgrown, single-crop farms were bought by guys like my friend and landlord, Barry. Barry grew several different crops, that harvested at different times of the year. Barry used science to utilise his water allocation the most effectively, Barry invested in his farm, not a new Land Cruiser, when he had a good year, and he cut expenses in the bad. Barry was a multi-millionaire, having inherited from his Dad a patch of dirt, a work ethic, and brains, not just a sense of entitlement.

Now, thanks to the vagaries of our voting system, our government is going to be focussed on (and therefore we are going to subsidise) the farmers who should be going out of business and selling their land to the guys like Barry. But that’s better than basing our body politic on the xenophobia of Westies, I guess.

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