Opinion Articles

Carbon Farming or Farming Fools

Sharing the farmhouse on weekends with a 21-year-old recent Ag Science graduate — who’s firmly convinced his old man knows nothing about politics, economics, or history — is hard enough. Especially when I’ve read more books on these subjects than he’s even walked past in the UWA library. It gets worse when we stray into soil science, when there is nothing he does not know despite him never having been seen with a text book

Trevor Whittington August 22, 2025

Opinion Articles

The Biological War of the Worlds

While politicians and activists agonise over the merits of the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, a far more insidious war rages on — not between nations, but between species. It’s the war we barely talk about, yet one we’re losing badly: the war against invasive pests. From farmland to forest, the frontlines are everywhere, and the casualties aren’t measured in headlines but in trees, crops, ecosystems — and billions of taxpayer dollars. It’s a war

Trevor Whittington August 22, 2025

Opinion Articles

Labor’s Proud Legacy of Science Collaboration — and how Captain JJ is blowing it apart

Here’s one for the political tragics: which party in Australia’s history has built and backed more of our science and public research institutions than any other? Answer — the Australian Labor Party. From Ben Chifley’s decision to turn the fledgling CSIR into the CSIRO in 1949, to Roger Cook’s recent push for a Future Health Research Hub, Labor has treated science like a favourite child — one it knows must be fed, funded, and defended

Trevor Whittington August 10, 2025

Opinion Articles

What Exactly is the State’s Policy on Drought?

Whether this season ends up in the grain record books or just fades as another patchy year, one thing is guaranteed: somewhere in the Wheatbelt, rainfall will slump into the bottom 10% of the long-term average. DPIRD’s own numbers show decile 1 years strike the Eastern Wheatbelt more often than many realise. Yilgarn is the poster child—bottom-decile rainfall in 2002, 2006, 2010, 2019, and again in 2023. A pattern like that gets the climate catastrophists

Trevor Whittington August 5, 2025