April 2020

So far the Federal Government is doing the heavy lifting on carrying the community through the corona virus having announced over $200 billion in funding in the last four weeks. But notice how quiet the retired and then unretired state treasurer has been. No big cash splash from him, obviously he is desperately hanging onto his budgeted surplus no doubt hoping to keep the ALPs election strategy alive of being seen as the men in

If you ever wonder what happened to the billion dollar per year Royalties for Regions fund set up by Brendon Grylls and the state National Party, then you are not alone. The answer is; it has become the lead actor in a real-life version of a Monty Python skit – the one where they refuse to admit that the parrot (named R for R) is dead. While the money is real, with $829m allocated in

There is a great book called Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond which should be compulsory reading to all those who think about positive and negative feedback loops linked to our globalised world. Pandemics sit in the negative and should be part of every farm businesses risk planning. Here is why. The one thing history can teach us is that it’s only a matter of time before the next big one hits us. If you

Western Australians dislike two things: being told to go to bed early, and being told they can’t have a drink. In our 120 years as a state, we’ve had four referendums that tried to impose restrictions on the sale of alcohol, and all of them were resoundingly rejected. Many people might be surprised to hear that there were two serious referendum attempts to ban liquor outright in WA, in 1925 and again in 1950. Both

In 1997 Jared Diamond won the Pulitzer Prize for Guns, Germs and Steel a book that should be compulsory reading to all those who are interested in the potential power of a pandemic to change the world. The germs he was writing about includes the likes of today’s Covid-19 but covers the history of the Black Plague, Cholera and the 1919 Spanish, 1957 Asian and 1968 Hong Kong flu outbreaks. Diamond details how pandemics have

Mobile communications are critical for farmers, not just for running a business, but also for the health, education and safety of our families. WAFarmers has been advocating for better coverage for the state’s farmers since the launch of the old GSM network 27 years ago. Since then, over 300 towers have been built across the state’s farming belt, many of them subsidised through state and federal funding.Today we could not imagine operating without the mobile

The weekend advertisement criticising the Premier run by the Shooting Industry Foundation Australia (SIFA) was plain dumb, and one particularly stupid line (Premier, rein it in before we are all sorry!) copped a well-deserved rebuke from an unimpressed McGowan. With a thoughtless comment, a clueless peak body run out of Victoria managed, overnight, to neuter public debate around the merits of the gun store closures. Hopefully SIFA got the message to stay out of our