Last week Chris Hartcher, with a straight face, announced that coal seam gas extraction (fracking) and food production can co-exist. Julia and Tony wrangled over how much of Australia’s farmland to sell to overseas interests and a NSW dairy farmer’s wife sent Coles into spin fever with a comment on their facebook page which garnered 75,000 ‘likes’. Forgive me for beating the same old drum, but where will Australian food come from when every farmer has left the land, we have mined and fracked the fertile food plains and sold the farm overseas?
It is becoming increasingly clear that both politicians and corporations are completely out of step not only with the farmers but with ordinary Australians who fully grasp the issue of food security and are glad to stand up and campaign about it.
No one who has watched the American amateur documentary ‘Gasland’ can believe that we are still having a discussion about fracking in this country. Australia is one of the driest continents on earth, we have almost constant water issues and the Great Artesian Basin below us provides the only reliable source of freshwater through much of inland Australia. In addition our network of rivers and creeks are our literal lifeblood. To even contemplate activities which we know from the US and Queensland experience poison groundwater is incomprehensible. Short term decisions will wreak havoc on our water, and therefore existence, for ever. Poison the well and the outcome is obvious. Water is too precious a resource for politicians funded by mining magnates to dice with. France has been the first country to ban coal seam gas extraction. We need to say no, too. Intelligent Australians don’t want cancer causing chemicals in their groundwater, and therefore food, when are the pollies going to catch up?
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Online Opinion.com
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