Editorial: PM’s quip shows contempt for farmers

Just how out of touch can a man get?

Anthony Albanese’s bad taste joke — made to a gathering of some of the agricultural industry’s brightest lights — about killing off Australia’s live export industry has to be one of the worst prime ministerial clangers in recent memory.

Yep. Playing off the shuttering of an entire industry employing thousands of people for laughs. In front of some of those very same people. There to celebrate their successes for an evening.

Needless to say, the Prime Minister’s “joke”, made at the AgriFutures Rural Women’s Awards at Parliament House, didn’t land well.

It’s up there with Malcolm Turnbull telling a Melbourne radio host in 2016 that he should simply “shell out” if the presenter was so worried that Australia’s unaffordable housing market would leave his kids forever unable to buy homes of their own.

Condemnation from farming groups of Mr Albanese’s remark was swift.

WA Livestock and Rural Transporters president Ben Sutherland said he was “disgusted to the core”.

“Labor throws rural communities into the wind and continually keeps laughing about it. It’s no joke, in my eyes it’s quite scary to have a government that doesn’t care about regional Australia,” he said.

“(The Prime Minister) is destroying industries and lives and livelihoods, with no real consequence or guilt of his own conscience.”

Mr Albanese’s comment reveals more than the fact that he is severely lacking in the comedy department.

It shows that it’s second nature to both the Prime Minister and those around him to appeal first and foremost to a metropolitan audience and it demonstrates the low regard in which they hold those hard-working Australians in our rural industries.

They don’t think they need to need the support of the bush to win a second term in government. So they simply don’t bother.

It’s little wonder that 80 per cent of Australian farmers surveyed by the National Farmers Federation disagreed with the statement that the Albanese Government understands and listens to them.

Close to three-quarters of respondents said Labor’s policies were harming the industry.

Agriculture is one of Australia’s oldest industries and it remains one of our most important — including to those in the cities who’d rather not think about where the milk in their lattes comes from.

Without it, we wouldn’t have the clothes we wear, the food we eat, or the beers on tap at Mr Albanese’s favourite Marrickville pub, the Henson Park Hotel.

Many Australians understand this. Even those who live in the left-leaning metropolitan electorates whose support Labor is counting on next year.

If Labor continues to treat our agricultural industry and rural communities with contempt, they might find that support isn’t as rock solid as they’d like.

Responsibility for the editorial comment is taken by WAN Editor Christopher Dore