Mike's Minute: Another win for farmers and sensible moves

Another one of those sensible moves this week, with an amendment coming to the Climate Change Response Act.  It's to make sure agriculture doesn't enter the Emissions Trading Scheme.  On a side note, the report the previous Government commissioned to look at how we handle agriculture around climate change was called He Waka Eke Noa.  Tell me what that means. Anyone. Tell me the translation of He Waka Eke Noa to English.  And in that was part of the ongoing angst over the Maorification of New Zealand and how simply peppering a few touchy-feely phrases changed nothing when it came to language.  So, He Waka Eke Noa is in the bin. We will need to find a new way to work out where agriculture fits into climate change.  But here is the key point that the current Government, frequented by farmers like Andrew Hoggard, get that the previous Government didn’t, is that when it comes to farming, we globally are as good as it gets.  If we made farming needlessly hard here, we wouldn’t produce as much, which was always a stupid idea given we sell what we make and that’s called foreign income. And when we don’t sell it, we eat it.  If we made it too hard to farm we would still need to eat, and it would simply be grown by someone else who isn't as good as we are. What's the point in that?  Then we get to the science of it all. Punishing people for a problem that science is already, and will increasingly help, if not address, is pointless.  The obsession around the Paris Agreement and cutting omissions at the expense of all else has already played out disastrously in oil and gas and our ability to turn the lights on.  The last thing we needed was a drop in agriculture.  The Australian Opposition has already talked this week of bailing on the Paris deal because it's unobtainable.  We signed up to things we couldn’t do, and Labour didn’t appear to care who they wrecked while chasing the illusion.  Reality and common sense is back and not a moment too soon. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.