COMMENT
During this past week, I took a 3000-kilometre road trip through Queensland and New South Wales.
Looking out of the car window, what I saw was incredible - just mile upon mile of awesome country, rich farming soils, thigh-high grasslands, shady creek lines, forests and beautifully maintained open woodlands.
I hope that every person in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne puts down their Twitter and heads out for a drive to have a look around right now.
The reality is that Australia has long led environmental stewardship. Travel anywhere in the world and you'll appreciate that.
The pile-on that is currently occurring against Australia and Australian farmers - painting us as environmental "slackers" - is nothing more than a propaganda war, likely aimed at further restricting trade.
The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) recently released a report naming Australia as the only developed country nominated as a deforestation hot spot.
It included a map showing two thirds of Tasmania, half of Cape York, the entire Snowy Mountains, the channel country and - in fact - most of the eastern seaboard as deforestation hot spots.
Anyone who has read a piece of our legislation, or in fact gone for a basic drive, will realise that this report is absolute rubbish - a blatant lie.
It named cattle, logging, fire and drought as major causes.
The report also shows the entire continents of North America and Europe as completely free of any deforestation.
How do Australian bushfires cause deforestation but not those in California?
Anyone with any knowledge about agricultural production in North America or Europe would understand that maintaining vegetation on agricultural land is a common practice across these continents.
Whether that be clearing juniper, oak or mesquite in the US, maintaining brush in the UK or managing understory among oaks in Spain, farmers around the world manage vegetation on agricultural land.
In the EU, if you incorporate some shade clumps, strips or a scattering of trees across your agricultural land, you are lauded by WWF as saving the planet by incorporating "Agro-forestry".
On Australian farmland, those same trees are regarded as evidence of destruction, and any Australian who dared to manage vegetation is immediately classed as a terrorist.
Why is there such a double standard?
There are a few things Australia needs to do to learn about how to play the propaganda game.
Firstly, get rid of the Australia clause.
There has been zero recognition, either domestically or internationally, for our Kyoto achievements. So, there is no point in progressing this same methodology going forward.
Then we need to update our forest definitions to be consistent with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), EU and the USA.
Agricultural land must be excluded to ensure we are on an equivalent footing.
As we seek to negotiate trade with other nations and de-leverage our risk to China; as we face accusation from existing customers - such as McDonalds; and as we desperately fight to maintain our reputation for clean and green produce, these actions must come swiftly.
I also urge our fellow Australians to take that drive, have a look, then get back on Twitter and staunchly defend our Australian farmers against the propaganda war being waged against them.
After all, we are all in this together.
- Josie Angus is a beef producer from central Queensland.
