Quotes of the Day

It's getting crowded in the kitchen, the locus of australian political sloganeering. For most of the year, Labor leader Kim Beazley has been claiming his party's slant and policies are informed by the concerns of middle Australia—not the fripperies of abc Radio National listeners or Sydney's droning talk shops. Beazley's relentless message is that Labor is focused on the "kitchen table" issues that preoccupy families. Such as? Interest rates, petrol prices, schools, job security and Iraq. And because McMansions have formal dining rooms, and maybe because wine is so cheap, our dinner-party talk now extends to North Korea's nukes, terrorism, values, global warming and water policy. Seemingly vulnerable on many of the signal issues, John Howard has brought together those last three talking points in his response to the country's long drought. In the argot of the political class, the Prime Minister is building a new narrative, an update to the national story, to win a fifth successive election.

The drought has tumbled back into the minds of city dwellers. All sorts of trip wires have been activated in a matter of days. Parched, cracked earth and blue sky stretch across the front pages of the nation's newspapers. Canberra is issuing a burst of agricultural terms—relief package, subsidies, exceptional circumstances and "our farmers." "It is part of the psyche of this country, it is part of the essence of Australia, to have a rural community," Howard said last week after announcing an extension of drought support to farmers. "We would lose something of our identification as Australians if we ever allow the number of farmers in our nation to fall below a critical mass."

The government has spent $A1.2 billion on drought assistance during the past five years; 53,000 rural families have been helped through interest-rate subsidies and welfare payments designed for those calamities that happen only once in 25 years. Howard told ABC-TV's Landline program that the point of the assistance is to help farmers "keep food on the table and to meet normal living expenses." Given the hardship in many parts of the bush, urban taxpayers can hardly be called heartless or stingy. In any case, it's a fat time for government revenue collection, so a helping hand is not causing general resentment. Not yet, anyway.

But there are questions that the government's free-market economic godfathers, always on the prowl for a rent-seeker or free-loader, could be asking. Where do you draw the line between a sustainable farm and an unsustainable one? It's a judgment that has been made on entire industries in the past, when governments removed or cut the tariffs that protected the manufacturing sector. Why prop up farmers who are bad managers or whose poor practices on unproductive land are hurting the environment? The signals drought policy sends to good farmers are certainly mixed. And how come a 50-year-old waterside worker or factory machinist is obliged to re-train or relocate to an area where there are jobs, while the yeoman farmer is a protected species?

A rural adviser from a major bank says that when a farmer has the bad luck to be stuck with marginal land, staying on it can often be a matter of choice, even a "lifestyle decision." Government handouts only "prolong the day of having to make a tough call," he says. "It's like if I set up a small shop on the outskirts of town and then Coles comes along. Would the government protect me?" Observers foresee a day of reckoning brought about by agricultural consolidation. Foreign investors, such as major hedge funds, are picking up prime farm land (and paying good prices), the banker says, because the returns from it are traditionally higher than from the share market.

In the emerging drought debate, some environmentalists and scientists are taking the place of the hard men of economics. Howard, once known for being dogmatic about his own causes, does not warm to their arguments. Professor Peter Cullen, of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, says Australians have been slow to realize that some places are permanently in drought. "The continuous drip feeding of drought relief just helps people with little hope of recovery to hang on a bit longer," he wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald. "It seems designed to maximize their misery and the land degradation they cause as they scratch out a living on farms that are too small to be viable." Water management expert Cullen and his colleagues expect the country to get hotter and drier. Climate scientists say the future's bleak unless farmers, consumers and governments adapt.

Pictures of drought-stricken land, higher temperatures, water restrictions and dying suburban gardens have become part of the voter's psyche. Even a global-warming skeptic like Howard can read the shift in the electorate's fears; he and his intimates have adjusted their thinking and public words. With an election expected next year, Howard's team are devising an environmental platform based on water policy, rural land care and alternative energy sources. Howard has traveled widely in the bush. Farmers are one of his touchstones, and more measures to help them are expected this week. But when Howard talks about "drought-proofing" the country, you wonder: Has the Prime Minister absorbed the lessons that farmers—at the harvester, in the shed or at the kitchen table—have finally mastered about a dry nation? Or is he just planning to rain down more money?

• Tom Dusevic
• Has drought relief become permanent?