YOU are having a nightmare. In this nightmare, your taxes help fund the transfer of ownership of unimaginable amounts of Australia's water and land from the people to corporate giants.
The farm land goes mostly to blue gums and reduces the nation's capacity to feed itself; the remainder to crops which are already well supplied.
This inflates the cost of land and water and some sectors go into massive overproduction.
Returns to farmers are slashed and irrigators go broke; helpless to compete with taxpayer-subsidised corporations in the water market during the worst drought in modern history.
Despite corporate, government and timber industry spin, the blue gum plantations employ far less people than the industries they replace.
The wine industry goes into crisis, countless growers go broke and thousands of hectares of vines are abandoned.
The corporations collapse, as was inevitable because they never aimed to grow viable crops.
The creators of these dubious company structures walk away with millions while mums and dads lose thousands.
Australia goes into gross oversupply for woodchips when tax-assisted plantations mature, but the local chips are exported while logging old-growth forest continues.
Imagine the governments in this nightmare created these market distortions despite having long refused to provide subsidies to farmers.
Now imagine the assets accumulated through this rort are sold to foreign interests for a song after being passed up by the Federal Government. And that these overseas companies could grow food here and send it direct to feed their own country.
This morbid fantasy would be laughable if it weren't so real. And the worst is yet to come.
More assets will go overseas and MIS tax breaks for forestry will continue as government bows to corporate interests and lobbyists.
And the transfer of food-producing land to blue gums will be spurred on further by MIS and an emissions trading scheme.
Consecutive governments have pillaged rural Australia, both economically and environmentally, to please big business. And they are about to do it again. Unless we wake up.
