Atlas of Australia

Of all the primary food producers on earth, grass is by far the most important – without all the native and domesticated grasses, most of mankind and all his farmed animals would starve. Grass is indeed the sacred plant on earth and those fools prepared to sacrifice our valuable grasslands for the still life dream of a protected forest, deserve to sit down to a breakfast of witchetty grubs and boiled ironbark.

Standing on the shoulders of these primary food producers (soil, microbes and plants) are the predators and parasites – insects, birds, herbivores, omnivores, carnivores and all mankind. And at the top of the food pyramid sit the bureaucrats and the tax collectors. (The pyramid is becoming top heavy.)

Atlas is Shrugging

All over Australia, droughts, taxes, prohibitions and confiscations of land and water rights are having an inevitable consequence – graziers are giving up – Atlas is Shrugging.

The most obvious evidence of this is the sudden takeover of grasslands by weeds, pests and trees.

The first grassland invasion started as bureaucrats seize and lock up land in national parks and other no-go areas – an expanding playground for bureaucrats, a haven for weeds and pests, a birth place for bush fires and a dangerous land magnet for the landless millions of Asia.

The second grassland invasion is coming from a plague of subsidised eucalypt plantations. This sterile monoculture of woody weeds is taking over whole farms as graziers are bribed to destroy grazing assets that their ancestors took two centuries to create (often sped along by subsidised or coerced state land clearing programs).

There is another sign of Atlas Shrugging – go to any farm meeting and look around – it looks like a seniors meeting - farmers are a dying species. "Homo plumbeus" is winning the battle for survival, and our next generation sees their future in the law, regional or industry planning, ecology, sociology, the welfare industry, the land rights industry or amongst the mandarins – few sons and daughters of the land are choosing to stay there.

Graziers, farmers and fishermen have supplied the food for all Australians for their whole history. The political classes are engaged in a war on their own primary producers that is unparalleled in history – as Napoleon once said "Only a foolish horse fights with his nosebag".