To protect their farmers against the inherent vicissitudes of both the weather and world markets many countries have long standing government price controls, subsidies, marketing boards and restrictions against imported produce in the agricultural sector long after such schemes became unthinakble in the manufacturing centre. Can one imagine a State 'Car Marketing Board' for example? The shameful involvement of Australia's Wheat Board in giving bribes to Saddam Hussain's evil regime is just one aspect of the rampant corruption and inefficiency such government schemes create. The enormously expensive Common Agricultural Policy in the European Union is perhaps the largest money wasting scheme in history and its wine lakes, meat mountains and rich mafia bosses are ample evidence of the insanity of such authoritarian collectivist bureaucracies. It is time that Australian agriculture learned the lessons of its near neighbour, New Zealand and abolished the subsidies and government controls which only enfeeble and impoverish the agricultural sector and act as brakes on innovation.

New Zealand had an ever expanding government involvement in agriculture from the creation of its dairy board in 1922, the first many covering everything from meat and wool to apples and kiwifruit in the 1930s. Tariff barriers against free trade in food were established and the 1960s and 1970s saw ever increasing state meddling in the agricultural sector. This featherbedding of New Zealand's farmers cost the country's taxpayers enormous sums and served only to increase food prices for the families working hard to pay for it all by perhaps 5%. In the end sanity prevailed across the political spectrum and in 1985 a Labour Government announced reforms in a mini-budget in December 1985 affecting farm taxation and tariffs. Subsidies were gradually reduced, stabilisation funds were wound up, tax concessions abolished and realistic charges for farming services introduced. The marketing boards remained but farmers were required to pay commercial prices for their inputs and credit, and to accept market prices rather than administered prices. Such reforms might be called Thatcherite, except for the fact that even Mrs Thatcher felt unable to dismantle Britain's involvement in the ruinous CAP during her otherwise dauntlesss campaign to invigourate the British economy after decades of corporate state decline.

The reforms were, naturally, opposed by the usual mix of vested interests and leftist ideologues but they soon bore fruit. Some inefficient farmers turned their hands to other jobs or prospered when they changed their production to meet market demands. After a temporary decline farm incomes surpassed their once subsidised levels within five years and then continued to grow strongly. Not only were food prices reduced for everyone and the tax burden reduced but farmers themselves were better off as their capacity for innovation was at last set free. Sadly such reforms were not adopted in the European Union, whose largely unreformed CAP continues to be a bastion of waste, fraud, profligacy and ruinous protectionism, but New Zealand's experience remains the model for agricultural progression.

The particular problems facing Australian agriculture, notably the vast amounts of water wasted on attempting to impose european farming methods on arid land and the environmental destruction wrought by continuing large scale land clearing, remain a blot on Australia's national performance. Australians like to proclaim their environmental credentials but the carbon emissions produced per capital in Australia, thanks in no small part to rampant land clearing, dwarf those of the Americans so endlessly reviled by Sydney's latte liberals. An end to state subisidy of agriculture and widespread water provision would force farmers to adopt more environmentally friendly and sustainable methods. We need a lot more kangeroo burgers and a lot fewer sheep.

The recent adoption of subsidies for 'bio-fuels' have proved a disaster as forests have been destroyed and food production spurned to produce bio-diesel far more expensive in ecological and economic terms than can ever be justified. Famine became a rare event in recent years as the green revolution and liberalised markets filled the world's grain stores, thanks to government subsidies in the name of ecological purity, the spectre of famine stalks the world again. Stalin starved six million Ukranians to death in the name of collectivising agriculture in the early 30s while Mao murdered perhaps ten times than number in the insane 'Great Leap Forward' twenty years later and today Zimbabwe, once the bread basket of Africa, teters on the brink of starvation thanks to Robert Mugabe's calamitous destruction of the private farming industry. The contrast between the failure of communist collectivisation at its most extreme and the continuing scandal of the CAP with the success of New Zealand's liberated and therefore thriving agricultural economy is crystal clear. Two decades after a Labour government grasped the nettle in New Zealand, what is the chance that Kevin Rudd will show similar radicalism here?