There’s a rule in politics as old as the wheatbelt: never sign anything you wouldn’t be willing to enforce yourself.
Unfortunately, the Australian agricultural sector didn’t get the memo. A decade ago, farm lobby groups, industry councils, commodity groups and agribusiness roundtables lined up like schoolkids at assembly to clap along to the great net-zero revival meeting. Many signed a pledge, waved the flag, posed for the photo and strutted back to the paddock believing they’d secured a “seat at the table.” What they actually did was nail themselves to the table.
Meanwhile, the Coalition—the very political outfit those same rural groups thought they were aligning with—has now walked away from the entire framework. Dumped it. Abandoned it. Scuttled net zero by 2050 and switched to vague short-term goals that, for once, actually resemble the real world rather than a glossy brochure. In other words, the Coalition has again been mugged by political reality, and in the process, so has the agricultural sector. The city commentators will scream “denialism,” but out here we call it something simpler: maths. You cannot cut emissions from livestock by 30 or 40 per cent by 2035 without cutting livestock. You cannot reduce fertiliser emissions without reducing yields. You cannot decarbonise diesel without replacing diesel. And you cannot run abattoirs, fruit processors, dairy plants, cold storage, irrigation systems and mineral refiners on electricity that costs more than the final product. These aren’t ideological critiques—they’re arithmetic proofs you can check with a pencil.
But for years the Coalition pretended otherwise because they were terrified of losing teal seats in wealthy suburbs. The ag sector pretended otherwise because consultants told them supermarkets, trading partners and Europe would “expect it.” And Labor pretended otherwise because the inner-city climate priesthood demands ever more ambitious offerings to the carbon gods. Now we’re all paying for the delusion. The Coalition can at least claim they’ve “reset the policy framework.” Agriculture doesn’t get such luxury. Agriculture is tied to formal public commitments, timelines and “pathways” that were written with more optimism than engineering. And until those commitments are unwound, the sector remains the easiest and softest target for emissions reductions.
The industry became the soft target the moment it volunteered itself. Agriculture was the biggest mug in the room. We signed up early—enthusiastically—to the net-zero religion. But this religion can’t operate on faith alone, it simply can’t be built on technology that does not exist. And it likely never will in a form that doesn’t destroy production.
Methane vaccines? Not commercial. Methane inhibitors? Not workable for extensive grazing, where animals roam thousands of hectares. Cheap soil carbon? A bureaucratic fantasy since day one, undone by measurement errors, soil biology, rainfall variation and the bizarre belief that millions of tonnes of carbon could be “stored” in land already fully occupied by roots. Hydrogen tractors? A press release dressed as a machine. Green ammonia and green urea? Little more than prototypes designed to impress policy advisors. Meanwhile, wind farms, solar precincts and massive transmission lines have marched across regional Australia like a slow invasion. Land carved up. Land values distorted. Communities fractured. Litigation exploding. And the cheap energy that was promised to rural industry? It never arrived. Instead, abattoirs, horticulture processors, dairy plants and mineral refiners—industries utterly dependent on reliable, affordable power—are shutting down or shifting offshore because the new “transition” grid is too expensive and too unstable to operate on.
Against this backdrop, Labor has signed Australia up to even more extreme 2035 targets that can only be met by cutting emissions somewhere. And the government can’t squeeze households in marginal seats. They can’t squeeze immigrants—they need the population growth to prop up GDP. They can’t squeeze heavy industry, which is already heading for the exits. They can’t squeeze the cities without electoral suicide. So who is left? Farmers. Livestock. Fertiliser. Diesel. Land. The one sector naïve enough to volunteer targets a decades before the technology exists to meet them.
It’s political genius, in a grim Canberra way. Agriculture walked into the trap and closed it behind itself. And now the Coalition has finally woken up and quietly slipped out the back door, leaving the farm sector standing in the middle of the room with a giant “kick me” sign taped to its back.
The government has already started floating trial balloons – “Agriculture must do more of the heavy lifting.” Bureaucrats whisper about farm-level carbon accounting. Think tanks propose methane caps. Transport departments eye off “emissions intensity” schemes for utes and farm vehicles. Safety agencies talk about lowering rural speed limits—purely for “road safety,” of course, and not to lower emissions. The fuel rebate pops up regularly in background briefings. Everything is being positioned around the same idea: someone must absorb the pain of deeper cuts, and many agricultural peak bodies have made it easy by already signing the paperwork.
This is the context in which the Coalition’s abandonment of net zero must be understood. For them, it’s an escape—politically neat, rhetorically simple, and electorally aligned with outer-suburban voters crushed by power bills. For agriculture, it is a warning flare over the homestead. The Coalition has freed itself, but the farm sector is still trapped under commitments offered by many who claim to understand and represent us – from swanky offices overlooking the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Unless those commitments are unwound, the government will use them as justification for further intervention. Once Canberra begins legislating herd sizes, fertiliser volumes or diesel restrictions, there is no going back. The sector is now in a race against the clock to extract itself from the mess created by a decade of wishful thinking by naïve conga-line zealots, glossy strategies and consultant-approved roadmaps.
Every peak body that pledged net zero now faces an existential choice: revise or perish. Revise the targets, accept the political embarrassment, admit the modelling was wrong, and fight for a realistic pathway centred around production—not ideology. Or cling to the fantasy and let government bureaucrats reshape the industry in pursuit of targets that were never achievable to begin with. Reality isn’t optional. It catches up eventually. Foresight and wisdom know that you can’t feed the nation on fantasy for long. Which is why WAFarmers never joined the Net Zero selfie-with-a-plant-based-burger craze and stands with a long and proud history of solid, sensible policy for the good of our critical agricultural communities.
Because here’s the truth: you cannot run a modern agricultural economy on expensive intermittent energy, steam-powered pest control and low-yield fertilizer while importing millions of additional consumers and demanding total emissions fall. That arithmetic doesn’t work. Yet this was the underlying assumption of every emissions pledge agriculture made from 2017 to 2021. The Coalition now admits as much by abandoning net zero.
Some commentators are calling this moment “the end of the climate wars.” It is not. It is simply the start of a new front. The first round was the ETS under Rudd. The second was the NEG under Turnbull. The third was Morrison’s reluctant net-zero pledge. And now we enter round four: agriculture vs Canberra. When the dust settles, the winners will be the sectors that refused to commit to fantasy timelines. The losers will be the ones who believed the Albanese Government’s press releases and the consultants they paid to advise them to follow the rest of the sheep.
Unless the rest of agriculture refuses to swallow the cool aid and leads moves fast—very fast—it will be cast as the villain of the next decade of climate politics, blamed for emissions that cannot be easily reduced, penalised for targets it never could meet, and regulated into a corner while the city continues business as usual. Farmers are not environmental villains. We’re not climate delinquents. We’re just the mugs who signed too many promises and now risk being too slow to read the writing on the wall.
