>> Is farmers' lobby very strong in Australian politics?
>
> In some ways, with the liberal/national party coalition government anyhow.
> Hard to explain why. But probably influential enough to demand that the US
> genuinely permits access to agricultural products if there is to be a free
> trade deal. Now, rather than some pie in the sky arrangement. So the best
hope
> of killing it would be that US farm lobby is influential enough to sabotage
> that. The Australian cockies will kick up a hell of a stink if the government
> tries to cut them out in a FTA deal and since there isn't much else in it for
> Australia, that would likely kill the idea.
First of all, the NFF - National Farmer's Federation , the main Australian agribusiness lobby - carries a fair bit of cloud with the right wing of the Labor party, though they were seriously harmed by a major union-busting excercize they were involved in in 1998. Naturally, the NFF has much stronger support in the coalition government, but there are certain features of Australian culture which make it impossible to piss all over the farmers or to be seen as doing so. Australians romanticise and idolise their farmers and the outback generally, and the criticism that a politician only cares for the 'elites' in the city can be fatal for Labor and Liberal alike.
To give you an idea of just how strong this rhetoric is here, after last week's WTO protests, the right-wing tabloids screamed about the tremendous funds sunk into policing the protest, some A$5 million, saying that the cash could have been spent on our poor little farmers. Somewhat counter-intuitively, the protesters were to blame for this. Incredibly, this wacky nonsense struck a chord...
Secondly, despite this nationalist dreaming, the biggest landowners in Australia are people like Rupert Murdoch, an American citizen, and the Sultan of Brunei. (Leonel Brizola, the ostensibly leftwing former mayor of Rio de Janeiro, also has a gigantic holding.) The representatives of these guys are the major moving force behind the FTAs. Obviously this fact is not advertised too publicly.
Thirdly, small holding farmers in Australia are socially very conservative and tend to be also very racist, specially in the northern Queensland area. The more radical bunch oppose lowered tariffs, but they would rather much rather be crucified by Howard than helped by a bunch of greenies.
As a side note, here is a funny story (apologies if this has already done the rounds):
One of the main arguments proposed for the FTA with Singapore, and also for agreements with Japan, is that Australia could sell cheap rice to these places. It is a fairly bizarre contention. Australia, if you care to look at a hydrological map, isn't exactly the best place in the world to grow rice. Right now Australia is in the middle of its strongest drought in half a century. But there is a solution for this! Turn the rivers around!
Actually, this has in fact been proposed seriously (or so they say). It ammounts to a neat little bit of racketeering. It works like this - Australia's majority-public-owned telecom, Telstra is a ripe fruit for the picking, they say. Time to sell the rest of it. Trouble is, Australia is an enormous continent with a tiny population - low density, low return on building telephone infrastructure to serve the outback. The farmers - ie. the smaller ones which vote, not the Sultan of Brunei - are naturally very upset that privatisation will spell hell for their phone network, which is already not in very good shape. But the Coalition government desperately wants to flog off the rest of Telstra, so they need a big carrot to draw the farmers along. The solution? Well, a bunch of staunchly pro-Coalition businessmen, including talkback radio king Alan Jones and half the board of Telstra and several of its business allies, launched a campaign to 'help our drought ravaged farmers.' They staged a god-awful celebrity concert cum telethon and collected millions of dollars, for the purposes of helping farming families and 'drought proofing Australia.' The latter refers to the crackpot idea of, yes, turning rivers around. The link was left for Alan Jones to spell out: 'wouldn't it be great if we could sell Telstra, and use the money to solve this problem once and for all.'
Thiago
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