If the supermarkets won’t help, we need the Government to implement a drought levy.
In modern society, we all suffer from information overload.
According to IBM, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are produced every day.
So we can forgive the average person for their seemingly short attention span.
It is hard for people living in the currently grey and rainy coastal regions of Queensland and NSW to believe that we are still in drought.
Meteorological drought is rarely broken in a single event or month; typically regular rainfall over a period of several months is required to remove rainfall deficiencies of the magnitude of those now in place.
It was eight weeks ago that QDO called for the supermarkets to raise the 10 cent/litre drought levy.
According to the National Farmers Federation, Australia has 85,681 farms.
While some farms are not in drought declared areas, I would guess that at a minimum 25 per cent of all farms are being affected by the drought due to the costs of feed and irrigation.
Taking that number and divvying up the Coles fund, each drought affected farm would receive $560 – an embarrassingly small amount and a token gesture.