The National Party has promised to slash farming regulations, double the number of Recognised Seasonal Employer (RSE) workers, and ban foreign buyers from converting farmland into carbon forests.
Party leader Christopher Luxon said farmers had been buried in a mountain of red tape which would be cut if a National government was elected in October.
He pitched the policy as a remedy to New Zealand’s widening current account deficit, which is forecast to become one of the worst in the developed world next year.
The current account measures the value of a country’s imports relative to its exports. A deficit means the value of imports is higher than the value of exports.
“Farming is the backbone of our economy. Last year agriculture exports totalled $41 billion or 63% of our goods exports. When farmers succeed, New Zealand succeeds,” Luxon said.
The Labour government had introduced or changed more than 20 laws and regulations which were adding extra costs for farmers.
National said it would “end the war on farmers” with its Getting Back to Farming package which contained 19 changes to various rules and regulations.
It includes more rigorous reviews of new regulations, doubling the RSE worker cap, banning foreign investors from turning rural land into carbon farms, limiting environment protections to specific areas, and improving stock exclusion rules.
The policy document said farmer confidence had reached an all-time low in various surveys of the agricultural sector. For example, the NZ Business Confidence Survey recently recorded every agricultural business reporting negative confidence.
A lack of confidence was hurting investment and production in farming businesses and it was becoming increasingly difficult for pastoral farmers to access financing with banks reluctant to lend.
Review group
The policy would require more rigorous assessment for regulations by establishing a Rural Regulation Review Panel to advise on every local and central government regulation.
Local and central governments would be required to assess the cost of any new rural rules and to publish the findings, and must remove two regulations for each one they introduce.
The policy would double the RSE worker cap over five years to 38,000 per year and possibly add more countries. It would create a pathway to residency and eliminate the median wage requirement for Accredited Employment Work Visas.
This part of the policy has the support of the Green Party, which welcomed the possibility of residency for imported workers and called on the Labour government to get involved.
Green Party immigration spokesperson Ricardo Menéndez March said the government needed to “act urgently” to provide a pathway to residency for RSE workers.
Other elements
National’s policy would ban foreign investors that intend to convert farms into forestry to collect carbon credits, something which has been incentivized by the emissions trading scheme.
Some environmental protections would be narrowed to only apply to “areas that are actually significant” while land use rules for highly productive land would be broadened.
Scott Simpson, National’s environment spokesperson, said well-targeted rules could project the environment while allowing farmers to get on with business.
National would also restart the live exports of cattle with “gold standard rules” to protect animal welfare and safety. This would require purpose-built ships and a certification regime to ensure destination countries kept animals in similar living conditions to NZ.
The policy document also promised further announcements on emissions pricing, research and development, and water rules.
62 Comments
Some very sensible policy, but as usual the devil is in the detail. However, I can promise one thing on this blog, you can never please everyone.
Mind you as many farmers wives do the paper work, they will vote National just to reduce their workload. That will reverse many labour seats.
I like your thinking..... I was thinking a decent waste water system for 10 sites with dripper line etc, Shared solar connection (most are greenies), could easily put 40kL water tanks above them and pump from existing tanks lower. 150 a week each for 1 acre, 70 for horse grazing plus use of arena... far enough away from the big house and with different road access, but in direct line of sight so I could keep my beady eye on things...... A rural trailer park.
Well I guess there goes the progress made in the last few years.
The good farmers, and there are a lot, will continue to improve their practices , spend money to be able to lower their impact, use new tech and techniques to improve farm and labour efficiency. They'll still be paying staff above median wage and provide decent accomodations.
The rest will blindly vote National , pay $22/hr for workers , slip the effluent pipe into the drain and open the gate to the riverbank. There's a few of them too.
Straight out of the Trump playbook: 'remove two regulations for every one new one'. Chris Liddell must be advising them - as it was a major policy platform he implemented for Trump; You can see him in the background - the pile of papers and the actual cutting of the red tape was all his staging;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuAg-RaZ4Is
Here's a partial list of transportation sector safety rules cut;
I won't even start on environmental protections cut.
It takes a whole lot of time for the environment to recover when disasters happen - let alone the lives lost and injuries/illnesses occurring.
I'm getting a really bad feeling - particularly when looking at what's happening in the US and what's coming out in terms of their candidate selections.
Ive just read Krugman (The Great Unravelling, 2003) - he lambasts the Bush Jr format, which is the Boris Johnson/Donald Trump in gestation form.
What they do is launch what they want (elite tax cuts, i the Bush era), while covering with high-sounding words. "Money for the environment" "good for the environment" then fudges the numbers and it's handouts for the (corporate crony) boys.
That has been the case in NZ since 1984 - the removal of the Cant'y Regional Council by farming interests (via the Key Government) being a classic example.
It probably doesn't matter much; the whole global system is disintegrating; hegemony is going away from the US (and, by association, us); exponential reduction in energy-availability vs more demand by more people - It was inevitable that the incumbent leadership would be of the past, as the SHTF.
And would be looking like Luxon yesterday - out of future-appropriate ideas.
You may recall that the livestock ship that was lost a few years ago got into trouble because the one and only engine failed. A "gold standard" would include requiring ships to have multiple engines for redundancy.
Good luck with that - the only ships these days with multiple engines are ships for transporting people. All existing livestock ships (and the majority of all other ships) will have only one engine/propeller train. Redundancy is sacrificed to keep the costs of building and maintaining ships low.
So of course a "gold standard" will not include this requirement and a similar accident will happen again. But hey, its only animals.
What are you saying "no" to? Did I say no human lives were lost? All hands (and hoofs) were lost.
My point is that a "gold standard" would put a value on all the suffering of the 5000 stock that drowned because of a single point of failure on the one and only engine.
Every so often a multi engine jet with two pilots crashes, but 300 people get onto the next plane 2 mins later...... we accept risk in life to lead better lives, tell me finite do you drive a car and how do you rationalise the risk that someone may cause an accident and hit you? should we stop driving?
Yes, but it's more than idiocy.
Farming, as monoculturally practiced in NZ, is the art of burning fossil energy to produce food energy - incredibly inefficiently (It takes many calories of fossil energy to produce one calorie of food, and the energy source is both finite, and in increasing contention.
Plus which, unsurprisingly, there are negative impacts from the burn.
All that is too effing obvious to argue about.
The question is: What next?
National are heading back to the 1950s; hardly 'next'. And that Green fellow wittering on about welcoming cheap labour - spare me.
But in terms of draw-down of finite resources, which our offspring and theirs, won't see - really, we are all committing intergenerational fraud.
Yes,yes and we need t ask how to soften the transition.
Heck, it's coming anyway, gradual s better than crash.
There are myriad outfits out there, which saw the need, this is a local one:
https://www.ourfoodnetwork.org.nz/
And this one I have some issues with - but not as much as I do with mono-agriculture. It's silly. Ignorant.
As to bankruptcy, the system will go there of its own accord - how about we organise something different?
So more importation of cheap labour, more state subsidy for the geriatric aristocrats who own all of NZ's farmland.
The ban on foreign owners converting land to forestry is both irrelevant and retarded. Firstly, they always form holding companies or trusts domiciled in NZ.
Second, most land isn't viable for forestry. The growth time, the maintenance costs (pruning, thinning etc) and return on forests is pretty bad. It is effectively a 25 or 30 year bond which pays out at the end of 30 years, with all the risks that go alongside that (fires destroying your forest, floods/weather causing the trees to be destroyed etc). The return might be 10x on certain marginal land relatively, but you would be lucky to get two consecutive harvests on the same land in your lifetime.
Thirdly, this marginal land is making very little on beef or wool at the moment. Lots of it is the byproduct of the veteran's farms all over the edges of land far from cities and towns.
Rather tone deaf of the nats.
Nats more or less moving in the right direction. Now all they have to do is obfuscate the net zero nonsense and push out by 10 years minimum carbon emission reductions. Plenty of legitimate reasons available. Other OECD countries not doing it. Poor local economy.
Hopefully Todd Muller has a grasp of what's going on but looking at his CV seems to have flown too high in the past.
He's not standing again - https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/486140/former-national-leader-todd-muller-to-step-down-at-election
And no, he never had a grasp of what's going on. He's just another ostrich.
Thank you National, every time I start to consider voting for you, you remind me why that’s a bad idea. I am pro farming and pro environment. Farmers can be profitable without polluting. Please don’t reduce environmental protection or animal welfare standards. If you do, our higher value overseas customers will probably go elsewhere.
My first thought was who are they trying to win votes off, act?, And maybe trying to put NZ first to rest ???. But it would certainly be at the expense of votes from those middle ground urban voters they need to win the election.
My second thought, is any party going to offer us something new, something that might actually change something? It's starting to look unlikely.
How about addressing something simple, like the low value asset threshold? Sure it moved up to $1,000 (finally) but with inflation that is quickly becoming too low again, to the point it's not worth depreciating assets around that figure. Index it to inflation, at least.
Back to 1950s
More poor people needing houses and services coming in by the 1000s - suppose start the house price spiral again and pump (and then dump one day) the economy.
Farmers struggling anyway when I can buy chilled lamb legs for $10.40 per KG + GST - is this going to save us??
Average age of sheep and beef farmers is around 60
Live animal exports - theres an urban vote winner - can see the ads coming now.
Burn more hydrocarbons and save the day it seems.
Situation normal until it gets washed away again - then import some more I suppose.
Mind you we aren't the only ones with a problem of getting old and bringing in more people to desparetely hold up the old system.
I just see it as the panic button pushed because we are up shit street. The ex airnz ceo understands how bad the situation is that we are in. We have to find stuff to export or our living standards will keep dropping.
I own my own wee business. I have been self employed for nearly 40 years. In the early days I discovered how quick the spiral down could occur. I had to pull out of that death plunge. It was 7 days a week 365 for a few years. NZ is in a bad place. We need to pull out all stops or your hospitals, teachers, police will not be there to serve you. They are barely there now. While everyone gets all high and mighty about ideals, getting cancer and waiting 3 months to see an oncologist is where we are now. Food production is our way out. I think we are better environmentally now so lets just get on with it.
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