Being 'positive' is not what many imagine

“Let’s be positive, let’s focus on the future,” Victorian Agricultural Minister, Peter Walsh, told a Shepparton meeting on Wednesday night (September 10).

Victoria's Agriculture Minister,
Peter Walsh.

The Minister was being not only positive, but naïve when he claimed it was his aim to see food production doubled in the state by 2030.

Although Minister Walsh argued that would be achieved by “focussing on the future”, it appeared that in reality he, and his head-nodding cohort were looking in another direction – backwards, rather than to the future.

It seems that the future Mr Walsh can see and is so positive about, is not the one that all Victorians will be engaging with.

That future, despite his positivism and unbridled optimism, will be plagued by water shortages, energy depletion, and weather quite unlike anything farmers and the communities that are integral to their infrastructure have ever had to deal with in the past.

Beyond that there will be a collapse of the services that the production and growth the Minister so idolizes depends upon.

There were many questions at the “Vison for the Valley“ meeting organized by the Committee for Shepparton, but they were all about machinations of maintaining the status quo and none ventured at all into the vacuum that will suck the productive life out of Victoria as our climate changes.

Deputy Premier, Mr Peter Ryan was holding the same song book and although she was at the other end of the table, the Minister for Children and Early Childhood Development and the Minister for Housing, Wendy Lovell, appeared to reading from the same pages.

The National Party’s endorsed candidate for the November 20 State Election,

Greg Barr was the only person on the night to mention climate change, and that was only in passing.

There was considerable excitement at the meeting to have such an event at which people could openly and freely engage with senior politicians who either answered questions on the spot or promised to get back to the individual quickly with an answer.

Some said after the meeting that the process was democracy at work however, that was a rather hopeful exaggeration as fewer than 150 people at the meeting represents less than one per cent of Shepparton’s population. That appears to be democracy by the tyranny of the minority.