Article by Tony Seabrook
Courtesy of NT News
10.07.2026
Our national debt is projected by Treasury to exceed $1 trillion this year. We are all responsible for the interest on that debt and the Treasurer admits there will be deficits and increasing debt well into the future. Is this a legacy we wish to leave our children? Most of the states are on a similar dangerous trajectory.
The only way out of this appalling situation is to massively increase productivity, but the opposite is happening. Productivity is falling along with our standard of living, while inflation continues to increase.
Our government doesn’t understand wealth creation and is desperately trying to raise more income by devising more punitive taxes.
No government has ever taxed and regulated a country into prosperity.A third of the workforce is now in a taxpayer-funded role.
They are drawing up legislation that turns into regulation, compliance and tape – all inflicted at great cost to the private sector but at no cost to themselves.
In WA we have seen productive industries like live sheep exports shut down by unproductive people. This is madness. WA’s sheep flock in the 1990s was more than 40 million. It’s now around nine million, so southern WA industry is primarily about grain.
We are surviving on a run of above-average seasons however the price of wheat is the same today as it was as it was 15 years ago.
Agriculture has become very good at cost-cutting and has exercised a relentless drive to increase efficiency. This has resulted in survival, which is finite. We lose far too many good rural families because regional health and education are sub-standard, as well as poor roads and telecommunications.
Policy needs to foster and promote a vibrant, competitive and profitable private sector, not punish it.
Agriculture regenerates, but it has the capacity to be so much more. There is potential to create wealth for all Australians. It feeds 28 million of us and another 50 million overseas and yet it is continually confronted by bureaucracy and tape.
We have a misguided obsession with “green” power, and billions of taxpayer dollars are being wasted in the pursuit of ideology while the rest of the world regards “green” as unreliable because it is not delivering the cheap baseload power industry requires.
The world knows prosperity comes from cheap energy. We have the fuels to provide the cheapest energy on the globe, so government needs to step out of this field and let industry drill for gas, mine and burn coal when profitable and necessary, and follow the world into nuclear. If agriculture is to prosper, this cheap energy is crucial.
The last and most destructive failure of Government is monetary policy. Inflation is a cancer that eats into the profitability of all industries but especially agriculture.
Agriculture exporters are unlike other businesses who can increase prices with inflation as they are price takers. Government cause inflation and the wage increases that flow from this are doing irreversible damage to Australia’s last surviving manufacturing industry.
If our nation is to find its way out of this financial mess we need leaders with vision, courage and an understanding of wealth creation, not more bureaucrats.
