THE administration of a couple of agriculture-related programs has become an issue over the past month.
The one people are talking about this week is irrigator's exit grants.
About 30 farmers are understood to have received notice they were eligible for exit grants, only to later discover they would not receive them because the funding had run out.
Problem being that some people had sold their properties in the meantime, and they were counting on the $150,000 they were set to gain from the grant.
Whether the fault lies with the department administering the grants (Centrelink) or the Government is unclear, but what is clear is a bunch of honest people's lives have seriously suffered because of it.
Last month, The Weekly Times reported about $5 million of the $8 million of grants issued under the Building Farm Businesses part of the Government's WA Drought Pilot went on normal business expenses, not on building drought resilience as it had been intended.
The reality is most of it was spent on lime, which hardly drought-proofs farms. Add that to the live export issue and one might think the heat was on Agriculture Minister Joe Ludwig.
But it's not, at least not from within the party.
Kevin Rudd aside, most Labor figures are happy with Senator Ludwig's performance; in fact, many feel for him over the live export issue - they say the public screamed for action after the Four Corners expose and have since changed their minds.
Furthermore his shadow, Nationals MP John Cobb - who attacks Ludwig hard where he thinks it fair - refuses to engage in cheap short-term point scoring or criticism if he doesn't believe it's warranted.
And Cobb is willing to engage with the Minister's office to get action for agriculture, rather than grandstanding in the media.
His approach genuinely puts the greater good ahead of personal political aspiration - Liberal leader Tony Abbott might well take note.
Abbott and Cobb get along well - part of the reason being Cobb gets along with former Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull as well as my beagles do with foxes.
