Have the environmental scientists got it right this time?

Best practice

The Wentworth Group, like many technically deterministic groups and individuals before it, is apparently sufficiently confident in our understanding of the biophysical features of our landscapes to assert that there are best practices that should be applied universally within and across catchments. Land managers applying these best practices would be exempt from economic costs. Such approaches do not account for the heterogeneity that exists in our landscapes, they constrain creativity and cycles of continuous learning and they stifle innovation.

The Group proposes that farmers (and others?) ought to be paid for ecoservices and the example they list is the provision of clean water. Does that mean that farmers should be paid for not polluting water? Nice work if you can get it!

Tax policy

The quicksand foundation for the Wentworth blueprint is perhaps most evident (and unsurprisingly so) when they enter the field of tax policy. These leading environmental scientists are "not advocating another new tax" but rather merely that "a major investment of public capital is needed", that "we can't expect farmers to pay the full cost of repairing past mistakes", that we "might add a one cent levy onto income tax", that "taxpayers should not be expected to support bad land management policies" [sic], and that "we need to ensure that our tax systems support sustainability". Elsewhere they suggest that the needed capital investment might come from:

• consolidated revenue (tax!);
• the full sale of Telstra (direct transfer of public assets to private interests);
• an environmental levy (new tax); and/or
• incorporating environmental costs into the cost of producing food and fibre (so the higher the pollution cost the greater the price!).

The efficiency and equity implications of these various proposals are not detailed. Perhaps it might be better on both counts if we took stock of what responsibilities farmers should have. If individuals can't meet these responsibilities then they should be encouraged and helped into another occupation.

National Commission

The Group proposes the establishment of a National Commission to set priorities and national targets, accredit institutions and plans and to recommend the funding of investment priorities - a Commission to be managed by an independent board of experts in salinity, biodiversity and community capacity building.

We need to look closely at this proposition for it is the forerunners of these experts who have given us the agricultural practices we have today.

A way forward

The first step is to accept that water rights don't equate to environmental policy and water rights don't equate to an ecologically sustainable development policy.

The second step is to recognise that market-based mechanisms are only as effective as the regulation that governs the operation of the market - and this regulation needs to be based on sound ecological and equity foundations.

We need a broadly based consideration of what Australians want from their rural landscapes. We need to be informed, by independent analyses, of the role of agriculture in the Australian economy. How is it that the non-corporate agricultural farm sector pays no net income tax? How is it that there is no economic growth in the agricultural sector notwithstanding enormous increases in the volume of production (achieved at what environmental and social costs)? How is it that we do not have a public debate in Australia on the multiple functions of agriculture and of farming more broadly?

The answers are simple. It is not in the interests of captured agricultural support agencies and politicians to lead such a debate. And farm organisations mistakenly believe it is not in their interests to lead such a debate.

The problem is that we have outdated institutional arrangements. They lock us into our past, and they deny opportunities for change. We need more diverse, contestable and open innovation systems. We need policies that build on the responsibility of consumers and managers - including land managers - not to pollute.