HAIRY-CHESTED, take-no-prisoner politics on the proposed ETS scheme may sound good to people who do not understand a very complex issue but it's not very good if the end result is broke farmers.
Federal politicians from the bush have remarkably short memories.
What sort of mind-altering drugs are being inhaled by the Canberra pollies currently negotiating agriculture's position with the carbon pollution reduction scheme (CPRS)?
I hear many of them demanding agriculture must be excluded but I can't help asking if the Coalition's idea of "excluded" is the same as when they were in power.
Most Australians, and the Rudd Government, support a CPRS and I think Opposition leader, Malcolm Turnbull, is focusing on the end game when he advocates better ways of making sure agriculture provides offsets for other industries - and doesn't just cop the cost.
But the take-no-prisoner pollies seem to have forgotten John Howard signed the Kyoto greenhouse gas reduction document (the framework for the CPRS) in 1995 and cost agriculture about $600 million a year when he agreed to stop broadscale land clearing.
The track record of those saying agricultural production must be excluded from the CPRS is already poor, and last week they agreed to a renewable energy target of 20 per cent which could load more costs on farmers than would the much-feared CPRS.
If the CPRS bill is voted down a second time, I'd bet London to a brick Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will be itching to call a double dissolution election.
On current polling, the Coalition would be annihilated.
My point is the Coalition parties, who are supposedly on agriculture's side, had no compunction for us in their planning back in 1995, so we would be deluding ourselves if we thought Mr Rudd would leave us out in 2009.
The pressure on the Government for our inclusion is intense from other industries trying to reduce the carbon tax impact on themselves.
This is the pointy end of negotiations and what really frightens me is farmers will be sent broke if we cannot get Mr Rudd to accept a scheme that gives us an opportunity to have more offsets than just planting trees.
There are opportunities, like greater use of no-till farming and reduced stubble burning, soil carbon storage and the development of biochar, which provide emissions reductions for our sector by moving outside the cap and trade method and using what is called a benchmark and credit scheme that will unlock these new offset possibilities.
The models are not definitive and we need a process now so those models are robust by the time Mr Rudd includes agricultural emissions in 2015.
Agriculture and regional Australia will not be well served by stonewalling.
That strategy, at the end of the day, will fail and result in sending farmers broke.
Perhaps the time has come to ask what really will happen to farmers if the Coalition votes the CPRS down a second time and subsequently loses Parliamentary numbers in an election, leaving the Government to stitch up a deal with the Greens which leaves farmers right out in the cold.
Solutions are available if we are smart enough to promote and negotiate them before it's too late.
* Mal Peters, farmer, and former president of the NSW Farmers' Association, writes a column for The Land, NSW, called 'From the Back Paddock'.
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