General News

WAFarmers Christmas message

MERRY CHRISTMAS! As the sun sets on our 113th year, WAFarmers extends its best wishes to all our members, farming families, friends and broader regional communities this festive season. For many of us, Christmas is a time to reflect, reconnect, recharge and rejoice. It’s a moment to pause and celebrate the resilience, dedication, and innovation that has always defined WA’s incredible farming sector – and drives us to continue our work to ensure city-based governments

Darren Brown December 24, 2025

Opinion Articles

The last letter, the last coin, the last dial

If you want to measure the real speed of modern change, don’t look at the size and complexity of new headers or how Al is every student’s best friend. Look instead at the three oldest bits of civic infrastructure we all grew up with: the post office, the banknote and the landline. All three are being shut down in real time. And the countries doing it aren’t fringe outliers – they’re the sensible, efficient northern

Trevor Whittington December 24, 2025

Opinion Articles

Gun laws are not a substitute for courage

Every time Australia is struck by an act of mass violence, the political reflex is immediate and reassuringly familiar. Governments reach for gun law reform. It looks decisive. It sounds compassionate. It creates the impression that something concrete is being done. What it rarely does is confront the deeper causes of violence — the ones that require moral clarity, hard policing and political courage. Firearms reform is attractive politics because it is administratively complex but

Trevor Whittington December 22, 2025

Opinion Articles

Songlines, space stations and the slow decline of science

The Americans had Apollo. The Soviets had Soyuz. The Chinese have Tiangong. And Australia? We now have the world’s first taxpayer-funded attempt to guide space exploration using songlines. It’s as if the nation looked up at the stars, ignored four centuries of physics, and concluded that what satellite design really needs is a smoking ceremony and a cultural consultation workshop. According to the project brief, “learning from songlines, creation stories and deep cultural connections between people

Trevor Whittington December 18, 2025

Opinion Articles

When correlation becomes a business model

Another week, another glossy press release announcing that regenerative agriculture has once again rediscovered the secret to farming profitability. This time it arrives wrapped in the language of “Natural Capital Accounting,” pushed proudly by Perth NRM, RegenWA and their national partners, and backed by a study now published in the Agricultural Systems journal. According to the headline findings, mixed farms in WA with “more trees integrated into the landscape” earned an extra $100 per hectare

Trevor Whittington December 12, 2025

Opinion Articles

How the Housing Boom Broke the Lucky Country

Like every parent watching their adult kids edge toward the real estate market, I look at the numbers with growing alarm. In 25 years, Perth house prices have jumped from roughly $200,000 to close to $900,000 — a three-to-fivefold increase — while wages have barely doubled from $50,000 to $100,000. That’s not a generational squeeze; it’s a structural impossibility. Unless the next generation marries a doctor, a diesel mechanic, a FIFO worker, wins Lotto, or

Trevor Whittington December 11, 2025

Opinion Articles

The parallels between the Roaring 1920s and the Turbulent 2020s

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Mark Twain A century divides the Roaring Twenties from today’s so-called Turbulent Twenties, yet the distance feels strangely compressed. As we limp toward the midpoint of our own decade, the parallels grow sharper and harder to ignore — reminders that our present upheavals are rarely as unique as we like to believe. Historians are rightly suspicious of neat analogies, but here the similarities are too blunt to

Trevor Whittington December 4, 2025

Legal

Victorian Supreme Court dismisses “busybody” animal activist case

WAFarmers has welcomed the decision of Victorian Supreme Court Justice Andrew Keogh to dismiss the claims of an animal activist group that an abattoir in Benalla operated by CA Sinclair Pty Ltd (Sinclair) should be banned from using Carbon Dioxide (CO2) to stun pigs before termination. Justice Keogh remarked that Animals Australia took the civil action against Sinclair despite having “no relevant ties to the area or the community” and because it, “has demonstrated

Darren Brown December 3, 2025

Opinion Articles

How Science and Technology Are Helping Farmers Adapt to a Drying Climate

Agriculture has always been a battle between biology and the elements, but in Western Australia it has long been an exercise in outsmarting the climate itself. As the world warms and dries, much of the public conversation has focused on what farmers will lose. The real story — the one told in labs, field trials, machine sheds and paddocks — is what farmers have already gained. Science, not slogans, is the reason Western Australia remains

Trevor Whittington December 2, 2025

York farmer and PGA president Tony Seabrook in the yards with some of the cross-bred lambs which would normally be bound for live export. Pictured at Tony's property near York. 24 JUNE 2018 Picture: Danella Bevis The West Australian

News Clippings

The Countryman/ABC: York farmer Tony Seabrook steps down after 11 years as Pastoralists and Graziers Association of WA president

WAFarmers offers its sincere gratitude to Tony Seabrook for his enormous contribution to Western Australia’s agriculture sector as he steps down after 11 years as President of the Pastoral and Grazier’s Association of WA (PGA). We wish Tony and his family all the very best for the next chapter in his life – which, from what he says in the interviews below, looks likely to be anything but a traditional “retirement” – in true Seabrook

Darren Brown December 2, 2025