Dairy farmers knew deregulation was coming. Were they prepared for it?

I suspect our cows had a few opinions about the whole business too. Lots to think about on the hill at Clover Hill

I’ve spent the past few months researching the history of dairy co-operatives, particularly the Jamberoo Dairy Factory and the organisations that eventually became Australian Co-operative Foods.

Jan Todd’s Milk for the Metropolis, published in 1994, has been a fascinating resource. Towards the end of the book, Todd describes how Australian Co-operative Foods (ACF) was preparing for an increasingly competitive market. By 1993, its directors were examining the financial and organisational changes required to operate in a deregulated environment.

Reading about those preparations more than thirty years later has brought back memories of what happened on our own dairy farm.

Farmers knew deregulation was coming. The arguments had been going on for years, and many were determined to fight it. The partners on our farm certainly were. They had invested their lives and their money in a business that operated within a regulated system, and they saw little reason to welcome changes that threatened their livelihood.

Did change happen with farmers or around them?

Farmers are well know to err on the conservative, particularly when it comes to decisions that affect their financial security. Yet some of the most innovative and resourceful people I’ve known have been farmers. Give them an opportunity they understand, and they’ll find extraordinary ways to pursue it.

That contradiction interests me because it says something about how we approach change in agriculture.

For decades, governments regulated the marketing of milk. They established prices for drinking milk and determined which producers could supply particular markets. Farmers borrowed money, invested in infrastructure, built dairy herds and planned their businesses around those arrangements.

The prospect of deregulation challenged many of the assumptions on which those decisions had been made.

By the early 1990s, the industry’s major organisations were examining what deregulation would mean for their operations. There were consultants, feasibility studies, financial projections, merger discussions and proposals for new ownership arrangements.

Todd’s account shows how seriously Australian Co-operative Foods was examining its future. The directors understood that changes in regulation, competition and access to capital would have significant consequences for the business.

I’d love to know how those conversations translated into preparation on individual dairy farms.

The partners on our farm spent a great deal of energy opposing deregulation. Looking back, I wonder what might have happened if someone had helped us devote some of that energy to examining the possible outcomes and deciding how we wanted to respond.

What would our financial position look like without regulated milk prices? Could we reduce production costs? Would increasing herd size improve profitability, or expose us to greater financial risk? What other options were available? What information would help us make those decisions?

These were conversations that deserved time, independent advice and the opportunity to explore different scenarios with people who understood the realities of running a dairy farm.

A dairy farmer cannot change direction as quickly as a government can change policy. Milking sheds, machinery, farm improvements and livestock represent substantial investments. Loans have to be serviced. Families have to live. Decisions about breeding, infrastructure and production can have consequences for many years.

I wonder how much attention agricultural leaders gave to understanding the people they were asking to adapt.

When farmers resist change, it helps to understand what concerns them. Sometimes they have good reasons. Sometimes their assumptions deserve challenging. Sometimes they have spent so long defending the arrangements they know that they have had little opportunity to imagine an alternative.

That is where leadership and engagement become so important.

I have spent much of my professional life bringing people together to explore difficult questions, and I have seen what happens when they are given the opportunity to contribute rather than being presented with decisions that have already been made.

People bring knowledge that rarely appears in a consultant’s report. They understand their own circumstances, their communities and the practical consequences of decisions. They also bring fears, frustrations, prejudices and assumptions. All of those belong in the conversation.

The seven years between the planning Todd describes in 1993 and dairy deregulation on 1 July 2000 provide an interesting period to exam

Dear readers

When dairy deregulation arrived on 1 July 2000, NSW farmgate milk prices fell from around 37 cents a litre to approximately 28 cents (Note these figures are industry averages). A reduction of almost a quarter. Add a drought to that equation and you have a pretty powerful incentive to reconsider how you run a dairy farm.

And reconsider we did!

We went from milking 80 cows twice a day to 400, three times a day. We leased another farm, hired a consultant, conducted research trials with Sydney University, attended conferences and made some enormous changes to the way we operated.

For a farming family whose partners had fought deregulation, we certainly became enthusiastic students of change once it was upon us.

I suspect our cows had a few opinions about the whole business too. Particularly the three-times-a-day milking.

 

What we need is a milk war – me and the cows strongly đź’Şdisagree

In February 1985, Professor A. G. Lloyd contributed an article to the Sydney Morning Herald with the splendid headline, “What we need is a milk war”. I found it among the papers of the Nowra Dairy Co-operative. By then, the Australian dairy industry had been fighting itself for the best part of a century. Apparently, nobody thought it had quite finished the job.

Every farming family knows something about a long-running dispute. The cousin who borrowed the trailer in 1974 and never brought it back. The father whose succession plan left the farm to the son who gambled it away. The siblings who haven’t spoken for twenty years and can no longer remember what they were fighting about. The dairy industry had all of these characteristics, plus several thousand cows, a collection of governments and an astonishing capacity to hold a grudge.

Our story begins in 1908, when Sydney milk buyers cut the price paid to farmers from 10 pence a gallon to six, in the middle of a drought. Farmers went on strike. The young Dairy Farmers Co-operative offered seven and a half pence, helped Jamberoo clear its debts and financed a new factory. Everyone shook hands, or something approximating it. Peace lasted 23 years.

In 1931, with the Depression biting, a Sydney distributor offered Jamberoo a better price for its milk. Jamberoo had recently opened a new brick factory and owed ÂŁ17,000. Dairy Farmers considered this a betrayal. It expelled 100 members, many of them Jamberoo farmers, and cancelled their shares. Jamberoo remembered. In the dairy industry, a grudge had an exceptionally long shelf life.

The NSW Government created a Milk Board to restore order. Unfortunately, the Board could declare prices but couldn’t enforce them. Historian Jan Todd called it a “toothless tiger”. Farmers received less than half the declared price. The government tried again, gave the new Board some teeth, and regulated the fresh milk industry for the next half century. Everyone complained about regulation, but at least they had something in common.

Then came 1984. George Orwell had warned us about surveillance, propaganda and perpetual war. He had overlooked the NSW milk industry.

On 9 April, supermarket owner Jim Fleming put Victorian milk on the shelves of his Jewel stores in Sydney. It came in two-litre plastic bottles and cost nine cents less. The Victorian milk represented about one per cent of the NSW market. Bill Crothers of Midland Milk described it as “only a hatful of milk”. NSW reacted as though Victoria had crossed the Murray with tanks.

Milk vendors blocked Macquarie Street with their trucks. Premier Neville Wran came out to negotiate. More than 800 farmers launched Operation Padlock, picketing Jewel supermarkets and standing outside the Midland Milk factory in Shepparton. Ten days later, Fleming conceded defeat. “We are pretty good, but not that good,” he said.

By February 1985, Professor Lloyd was calling for another milk war, arguing that competition could expose inefficiencies and help Sydney consumers paying high milk prices. The farmers, processors, retailers and vendors had rather different ideas about who was inefficient and who should pay.

Federal Primary Industry Minister John Kerin tried to bring the states together under a national plan. In March 1986, he spent an entire day locked in a room with three farmer leaders. They emerged with the comfort clause, an arrangement allowing a state to withdraw from the national scheme if another state’s milk undercut its market. NSW used it twice within a year. I suppose we should be grateful they agreed on anything.

Back on the South Coast, two cousins who had grown up together in Jamberoo were taking a much less complicated approach. Russell Fredericks managed Nowra’s dairy factory. Geoff Boxsell managed Jamberoo. During a drive to Sydney in late 1982, they joked about putting “the cat among the pigeons” by proposing a merger. They eventually brought the two co-operatives together.

Dairy Farmers tried to persuade Nowra to join it instead. Nowra’s farmers rejected the offer. It had been more than fifty years since the Depression-era expulsions. Apparently that was too soon. Six years later, Shoalhaven, the co-operative formed by Jamberoo and Nowra, joined Dairy Farmers anyway.

Then came the Italians. In 1999, Parmalat offered Dairy Farmers members $4.02 a share for part of their holdings, under a proposal that would give the Italian company control. Farmers gathered at the Burrawang Hotel, passed motions of no confidence and eventually took the dispute to the Supreme Court.

Dairy Farmers responded with advertisements declaring, “Beautiful one day, foreign-owned the next.” Geoff Boxsell wrote a song to the tune of “I Am Australian”. He called it “We Ain’t Italian”.

The court found that material distributed by the board was misleading and deceptive, although the judge made no finding of dishonesty or bad faith. The directors were ordered to pay legal costs personally. In April 2000, around 3,000 farmers voted at a special meeting. The three directors facing removal retained their seats with overwhelming support. Managing director Alan Tooth offered a memorable observation. “Any jackass can knock down a barn but it takes a team of skilled carpenters to build one.”

While everyone was fighting, Victoria decided it no longer wanted the regulated system. As the country’s largest milk-producing state, its decision left the others with little room to move. On 1 July 2000, the regulated fresh milk markets disappeared.

Within a year, average NSW dairy farm income had fallen from $82,000 to an estimated $37,000. Around 200 NSW dairy farms closed in the first six months. There were winners, there were losers, and there were families whose futures changed forever.

I’ve been looking back over these events while also reflecting on something I discovered preparing for a World Peace Day presentation to school students in Cowra. In studying the history of war, I was confronted by how persistently organised violence has appeared across human generations.

Of course, a milk war is a very different proposition from an armed conflict. Nobody should confuse a blockade of supermarket milk deliveries with the devastation of military warfare. But the language interests me. For a century, the dairy industry talked about wars, battles, invasions, threats, surrender and enemies.

Farmers fought processors. Farmers fought retailers. Processors fought retailers. States fought states. Co-operatives fought other co-operatives. Farmers fought farmer. Farmers fought their own co-operatives.

Governments regulated everybody, then deregulated everybody. And all of them believed they had something important to defend. Often they did.

A farmer fighting for a price that covers the cost of production has a legitimate grievance. So does a consumer struggling to afford food. A milk vendor protecting a family business and a processor trying to keep a factory operating both have reasons to be concerned about their future. Their interests sometimes conflict. Finding an arrangement that allows them to live alongside one another is the challenge.

Looking back, the most interesting moments in the dairy industry’s history may be the occasions when people stopped fighting long enough to negotiate. Kerin and the farmer leaders in that locked room. Russell Fredericks and Geoff Boxsell talking during their drive to Sydney. Farmers, vendors and processors sitting around George Davey’s pricing committee, part of the negotiations associated with the group the industry nicknamed the “milk mafia”.

Those conversations didn’t solve every problem. Some produced compromises that quickly unravelled. Others helped organisations and communities survive. I wonder how much of our energy, in agriculture and beyond, goes into proving that the other side is wrong. And how much we invest in understanding what they are trying to protect.

We teach children about the great wars of history, the victories, the defeats, the treaties and the terrible human cost. Perhaps we could spend a little more time teaching them how to negotiate before a disagreement becomes a conflict, and how to recognise when compromise is possible without abandoning what is fair.

As for the dairy industry, through every strike, blockade, court case, merger, price war and family grudge, the cows remained magnificently indifferent. Morning and afternoon, they turned up to be milked. They had no interest in who won.

And perhaps, after more than a century of dairy industry warfare, the question is whether the rest of us can learn to live with an outcome in which nobody has to lose.

Dear reader  FYI Dairy Farmers, with a capital D and F, refers to the Dairy Farmers Co-operative and the company that followed. Little bit of history – Dairy Farmers Milk Cooperative was formed on 15 January 1900. Sixty five stakeholders from the New South Wales Illawarra region, came together and agreed to run the organisation on true co-operative lines.

Dairy farmers, with a little d and f, are the people milking the cows. They were not always on the same side.

The reports list the costs and leave out the 4am alarm

I’ve spent this week reading 25 years of government reports on the NSW dairy industry. A Senate inquiry, two NSW parliamentary inquiries, three ACCC reports and the Department of Primary Industries’ latest industry overview.

I now know an extraordinary amount about structural adjustment, processing rationalisation, labour constraints and climate variability. I’ve also developed considerable sympathy for anyone whose job involves writing these reports.

The numbers are extraordinary. In 2000, NSW had 1,725 dairy farms. By 2025, that number had fallen to 443. Over the same period, the average herd more than doubled, from 155 to 343 cows, while annual milk production per cow increased by almost 50 per cent, from 4,827 to 7,013 litres.

The average herd has more than doubled, while each cow is producing nearly half as much milk again.

Apparently, the solution to having fewer farmers is to give the remaining ones twice as many cows and expect each cow to produce half as much milk again.

My family has been milking cows in this district since 1831, so I have some idea what happens behind those impressive statistics.

The reports list labour constraints. That’s the relief milker ringing at 3.30am to announce that his car has broken down. The cows, unfortunately, have not received the memo.

Input costs include the hay you bought in March for twice what you paid last year because the rain stopped in January. Land values are the neighbour selling to a developer, while your children calculate whether they could ever afford to come home and take over the farm.

Processing rationalisation is the letter announcing the closure of the dairy factory your grandfather helped build. Your milk will now travel another two hours to be processed somewhere else. The report calls this improved industry efficiency. Your grandfather might have had another description.

And then there’s the weather. The official terminology includes “climate variability, rainfall and irrigation reliability, heat and humidity, and natural disasters”. My friend Kate calls these things headwinds.

Dairy farmers have been dealing with them for generations. In a 1976 paper I found among the Nowra Dairy Co-operative records, Bega farmers said it like it is

“Come fire, flood or drought the milk must be produced.”

I came across a submission from Jackie Norman to the NSW parliamentary dairy inquiry. Jackie started dairying at 19. Looking back on what she called the industry’s golden era, she recalled that the hours were so long and the demands so intense that there wasn’t even time to prepare proper meals.

The golden era! I’d hate to see what she put down for the difficult years.

Of course, you could replace the dairy farm with almost any small business. The government reports would list compliance costs, energy prices, wages and productivity.

The cafĂ© owner would tell you about doing the BAS at the kitchen table at 10pm. The plumber would mention the invoice that’s been overdue for 90 days, from a customer big enough to make chasing payment uncomfortable. The shopkeeper could describe the summer storm that flooded the premises the week before Christmas, after all the stock had been paid for.

And every small business owner knows the experience of covering for an employee whose family has had an emergency. Policy researchers have a term for this: lived experience.

I’ve been thinking about those 1,282 dairy farms that disappeared from NSW over 25 years. Some farmers retired. Some sold. Some changed direction. Others fought for years to keep going before finally deciding they’d had enough.

The government reports record the closures, the increase in herd size, the improvement in production per cow and the economic consequences of industry restructuring.

What I’d like to know is how many of those farmers remember the morning they milked their cows for the last time. And whether, after a lifetime of getting up at 4am, they managed to sleep in the following morning.

WTF is agency, and why does the community sector make it so hard to join in?

The Hon. Kate Washington Minister for Families and Communities with students from St Brigid’s Primary School.

Spend an hour in a community sector meeting and you’ll hear about agency, lived experience, co-design, holding space and building capacity. Everyone around the table nods. I’ve nodded along too. Many of the people the sector works for would reach for a dictionary.

The sector’s promise is nothing about us without us. Yet we often talk about people in words they wouldn’t use themselves.

What even is agency?

Agency means having a say in what happens to you, and being able to do something about it.

Some other words we use, in everyday language.

  • Lived experience: knowing it first-hand
  • Co-design: designing it with the people who’ll use it
  • Holding space: giving people room to speak safely
  • Building capacity: helping people do more themselves
  • Place-based: suited to this town
  • Theory of change: our plan for making a difference
  • Systems change: fixing the rules
  • Mutual aid: neighbours helping neighbours

What words would you add?

The skills behind the words

Leading a community organisation comes down to four skills: curiosity, creative thinking, collaboration and communication. In my eight decades I’ve met only a few people who have all four. I believe they can be taught.

Where could we start?

School seems the obvious place. Children are curious, and what they learn in the classroom grows the adults they become

Teachers would do the teaching, so training them comes first.

The resources and the training are already here. Action4Agriculture has resources that teach curiosity, creative thinking, collaboration and communication, the same skills I teach the kids I work with. They’re available on request. Josh Farr runs the training. Through Campus Consultancy he has delivered more than 1,600 leadership programs with over 40 universities, reaching more than 100,000 students and staff. He  trains teachers too.

I’ve seen Josh in action. In 2023 he led the student workshops for Action4Agriculture’s Young Environmental Champions program, working with students from ten schools across the Hunter and Hawkesbury. The share of students confident they could do something to improve their community rose from 57% to 80%.

And the kids delivered. St Brigid’s Primary School cut its landfill by three quarters.

You can read the full report here and the case study here

Our case study calls it an “Ecosystem of Expertise”. We wrote it for government in the langage government use. In everyday language, a lot of good people helped some kids do something great. Both versions are true. The skill is knowing your audience and speaking their language.

So when we’re talking with our communities, why aren’t we using language everyone understands

What do you think?

What would change if the people we work with chose the words we use?

A ten-year-old with these four skills could explain agency better than any strategy document.

 

 

The Envelope That Left Port Moresby the Week the War Began

Ivy Irvine and her four daughters, Valma, Olwyn, Molly and Nola were wonderful collectors and sharers of Jamberoo’s history, and I’m very grateful that some of that history was passed on to me.

I was tidying it up the other day, making sure it stays in pristine condition, and came across a couple of envelopes of stamps. Having written about the work the Lions Club does for children with cerebral palsy, I was excited to see whether these stamps could help the cause.

One is a registered airmail envelope posted in Port Moresby on 6 September 1939, the first day these Papua airmail stamps were issued, addressed to Mrs R. A. Irvine, “Clover Hill”, Jamberoo. On the back is the Sydney postmark of 11 September 1939. It made its way here in the very week Australia entered the Second World War.

Jon Phipps and the late Hilton Bloomfield became known as Kiama’s stamp men, collecting used stamps and selling them to raise money for the Australian Lions Children’s Mobility Foundation. Jon carries on that work today. The Foundation provides walkers for children who can’t walk unaided. Each walker costs about $7,500, and every stamp helps. Thanks to Ivy, this little envelope may raise up to $100 toward one.

If you have stamps tucked away in a drawer, an old album or a box of family letters, please drop them at RMB Lawyers, Kiama Pharmacy or Blooms Pharmacy. Keep them on the original envelope where you can, because collectors value the postmarks as much as the stamps.

And if you’re a stamp collector, Jon would love to hear from you.

Ivy and her daughters kept Jamberoo’s history safe for all those years. Now a piece of it can help a child walk. And I wonder who Ivy knew in Port Moresby who knew she would love to add them to her stamp collection

What happens after the applause?

This post has been sitting in my drafts for four years. I knew there was something I wanted to say, but every time I returned to it, it sounded like a grievance. So back into drafts it went.

Now I know what I was trying to say.

When Bob Hawke died in 2019, the four of us who had received the Bob Hawke Landcare Award wanted to do something small and heartfelt. We wanted to make a joint statement about what the award had meant to us. Each of us had a story to tell about meeting Bob, the contribution that led to the award and what came afterwards.

Landcare Australia, which managed the award, chose another approach to its public tribute. I was disappointed. At the time, I saw it largely through the lens of that disappointment.

Four years of sitting in drafts, and some completely unrelated conversations, have helped me see the much bigger question.

What happens after we give people awards?

I was the inaugural recipient of the Bob Hawke Landcare Award in 2012. At that time it was an individual award carrying a $50,000 prize. The award has changed considerably since then. It is now worth $30,000 and can be awarded to an individual, community-led group or eligible not-for-profit organisation.

But something in the criteria remains fascinating to me.

Recipients are recognised for qualities that include inspiring others, mentoring people, encouraging action, sharing knowledge and supporting communities.

In other words, the award seeks people who build capacity in other people. But who creates the opportunities for them to build that capacity together?

Australia has hundreds of awards recognising people for their contribution, knowledge, leadership and experience. We find them. We assess them. We celebrate them. We put them on stages, take photographs and tell their stories. Then, quite often, we send them home. The following year, we may come back and ask them to promote the next round of awards.

This is a lost opportunity.

The Bob Hawke Landcare Award records its alumni, with recipients going back to the inaugural award in 2012. That recognition has value, but an alumni list is not an alumni network. If an active network exists that brings Bob Hawke Landcare Award recipients together to learn from each other, I have never been invited to be part of it.

Belltrees Public School showed me what is possible. The small rural school, with around 20 students, organised a regenerative agriculture day that brought former Bob Hawke Landcare Award recipients together. We heard from each other, asked questions and exchanged ideas. I attended, and it was brilliant. A little school had recognised the value of connecting people with different knowledge and experience and created the opportunity for us to learn from each other.

The Banksia Foundation also experimented with this idea. Award recipients were brought together to visit the businesses and organisations of category winners, see what they were doing and learn directly from them. I attended one of those visits and it was brilliant too.

Both experiences showed me the difference between recognising knowledge and connecting knowledge. You can put someone’s name on an alumni page, or you can create opportunities for people with different knowledge and experience to learn from each other.

For years I worked alongside people in agriculture who gave organisations their time, credibility, relationships, lived experience and knowledge. They spoke at events, sat on panels, joined committees, opened their farms, told their stories and helped organisations demonstrate what was possible.

Many of them gave enormously.

Too often, I watched the infrastructure around them benefit from all that human capacity without creating the same opportunities for those people to benefit from one another.

We are very good at identifying individual achievement. We are less good at asking what becomes possible when we connect the knowledge and experience of the people we have recognised.

Interestingly, this was part of what I was talking about when I received the Bob Hawke Landcare Award in 2012. I wanted to “find innovators, early adopters and people doing extraordinary things and help connect and amplify what they knew.”

Two years later, a Landcare publication described me as “a connector” and quoted me saying I was “obsessed with finding and nurturing talent, and supporting it”.

So apparently I have been banging on about this for quite some time.

What I did not have then was the question I have now.

Is the community serving the infrastructure around it, or is the infrastructure serving the community?

Over the past few months I have been conducting a completely different piece of research, interviewing people who have made significant commitments to their communities. Those conversations finally gave me the language for this four-year-old draft.

People bring enormous assets into organisations, programs, campaigns and movements. They bring knowledge, relationships, credibility, experience, energy and trust. Organisations are often very good at mobilising those assets.

The more interesting question is what they build around the people who provided them.

Do those people leave with stronger relationships? Do they have access to the knowledge of others who have travelled similar paths? Can they learn from each other? Are they introduced to people who could extend what they are already doing? Does the organisation ask them what would make the relationship valuable to them? Does the collective capacity become greater because those people were brought together?

That brings me back to awards.

Imagine if part of running an award program was asking recipients a year later: What would be valuable to you now?

Perhaps they want nothing further from it. That’s fine. But perhaps they would value meeting other recipients. Perhaps somebody who won ten years ago has knowledge that could transform what a new recipient is trying to achieve. Perhaps an experienced recipient could mentor somebody emerging in the same field. Perhaps two people working on opposite sides of the country are tackling versions of the same problem.

Perhaps the most valuable thing the organisation could provide is simply the introduction.

This does not require another glossy program. It requires seeing the award differently.

The award ceremony recognises what somebody has already contributed. The alumni community asks what might become possible next.

There is another question here too. We invest considerable resources in finding, judging and celebrating award recipients. Awards can involve substantial events, sponsors, communications, judging processes and hundreds of guests.

What proportion of that investment goes into connecting recipients after the event?

I do not know the economics of the Landcare Awards, and I am not suggesting what that answer should be. But it is a question worth asking across the awards sector, particularly when some of the most valuable connections may require little more than bringing people together.

Belltrees Public School managed it with around 20 students.

And I now understand why my original experience with the Bob Hawke Landcare Award bothered me enough for this post to sit unfinished for four years. It was never simply about a statement after Bob Hawke died. It was about the difference between recognising human capacity and building it.

Landcare itself grew from people connecting knowledge, experience and effort. Farmers, conservationists, neighbours and volunteers discovered they could achieve more together than they could separately.

It moved people from “I to We”.

An award bearing Bob Hawke’s name has an opportunity to continue that tradition. So do thousands of other awards.

We spend considerable time and resources identifying people whose experience and contribution we believe are worth recognising.

Perhaps the next question should be: What are we going to do with all that human capacity now that we have found it?

 

Social media gives us a choice between curiosity and cruelty

 

We do not have to solve world peace to start practising it

Yesterday, I put a post on our community Facebook page for a friend who had to find a new home for her little dog, Teddy.

She asked me to post it because she was petrified people would abuse her. That fear tells us something about social media before the comments even begin.

The truth was more complicated and it was also private. My friend had waited nine months to find accommodation. When they finally found somewhere to live, their circumstances meant she could not take Teddy with them. The landlord had not refused him. They were not looking for an excuse to give him away. They were making a painful decision after running out of other options.

We cannot ask children to practise peace if we do not model it

None of that was in the Facebook post because nobody should have to publish the details of their private life to avoid being abused by strangers. People could have asked a question before deciding they knew the story.

Some did. They wanted information that could help Teddy find the right family:

  • Is Teddy comfortable with children?
  • Does he get along with other animals?
  • Is he house trained?
  • Is he leash trained?
  • Is the yard fenced?
  • Can a prospective family meet Teddy and his owner?
  • Would a rescue organisation be able to help with the process?

One family said they were looking to adopt a dog and would like to meet him. Another person offered information about rescue organisations. Others tagged people who might be interested.

These comments moved the conversation forward. They gathered information, offered practical help and kept the focus on finding the right home for Teddy.

Then came the assumptions:

  • The landlord cannot refuse a pet.
  • The owner does not understand the rental laws.
  • This must be an excuse to get rid of the dog.
  • The owner should have found somewhere that accepted Teddy.
  • I could not legally rehome somebody else’s dog.

The landlord had not refused Teddy. My friend was not asking me to rehome him. I had posted on their behalf because I belonged to the Facebook group and I cared enough about them and Teddy to cop any abuse. It was also a chance to prove my community was compassionate.

People had created an entire story from information they did not have.

The cruellest comment suggested my friend was using her rental accommodation as an excuse to get rid of a beautiful dog. That person knew nothing about her circumstances, how long she had waited for accommodation or the decisions she had faced. She filled every gap with the worst possible explanation.

A few days earlier, I had spent 95 minutes with almost 100 young people at the Cowra World Peace Day Youth Forum. We practised curiosity, creativity, collaboration and communication.

I showed them a picture of a cat, a mouse and a flea. Each saw the same situation differently. The cat, the mouse and the flea had different information, different concerns and a different view of what was happening.

Then they met Pickles. The students could not discover Pickles’ story by guessing. They had to ask questions, listen to the answers and use each answer to decide what to ask next.

I also showed them someone pushing into a tuckshop line. At first, the person looked rude and entitled. Then the students learned she was collecting a first-aid kit for someone who had been injured.

The picture had not changed. The information had.

The Facebook discussion about Teddy became the same lesson played out among adults.

Some people saw a gap in the information and asked a question. Others saw the same gap and inserted an accusation.

The people who asked questions helped. They learned more about Teddy, offered advice, found possible families and identified safer ways to manage the adoption. The people who made assumptions added distress to someone already going through a painful time.

Every conversation is a chance to practise peace

Curiosity would not have required a long conversation. One question could have changed everything:

“Can you tell us more about the circumstances?”

That question leaves room for an answer. An accusation closes the door before the person has spoken.

I keep wondering what those young people in Cowra will do the next time they see something that looks wrong. Will they decide they already know the whole story? Or will they remember the cat, the mouse and the flea, Pickles and the person pushing into the tuckshop line?

Will they ask another question before they judge?

After reading the comments about Teddy, I hope they do.

The lessons Pauline Hanson wants cut are the ones children ask for

Pauline Hanson called Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples “the most primitive race on Earth”. She said they had achieved nothing in 60,000 years and described teaching Indigenous history as a “complete waste of time”.

She made the comments on a podcast in September 2025. They surfaced this month. Her target was the school curriculum. She complained that children were learning about Aboriginal culture and language and asked what Aboriginal people had contributed.

I have spent 20 years in those classrooms. I founded Kreative Koalas, a program that ran across New South Wales. Primary school students studied the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, chose a challenge facing their community, designed an action project and painted their solution on giant koalas.

Those koalas remain in school foyers and gardens across the state. Many carry Aboriginal designs and stories chosen by the students.

Before that, I founded Young Farming Champions and sent young people working in agriculture into schools to talk about the country that feeds us.

I have watched what happens when young people take a big idea and act on it.

Hanson is right about one thing. The curriculum is crowded. Teachers have spent years dealing with trying to cover more content than a school year can hold. Every new demand consumes time that must come from somewhere else.

Cutting Aboriginal history, sustainability and Australia’s engagement with Asia will not solve that problem. It will remove the content that helps children understand where they live and the world they will enter.

The Australian Curriculum contains three cross-curriculum priorities: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures, Sustainability, and Asia and Australia’s Engagement with Asia. They are taught through existing learning areas rather than as three extra subjects.

Under the earlier curriculum, teachers often found these priorities through curriculum tags and optional elaborations. The teachers I worked with wanted to teach all three and ran out of hours.

Version 9 strengthened their connection to specific content descriptions and made the links clearer. Teachers had greater authority to teach what many had been trying to fit in for years.

That is the change Hanson objects to.

A Year 4 class learning how Aboriginal people used fire to manage this continent leaves knowing more about the ground beneath its school.

A Year 8 class tracing trade routes through Asia leaves understanding Australia’s neighbourhood. We share a maritime border with Indonesia. Our students will trade with Asia, work with Asia and travel through Asia.

Sustainability is the century they will inherit. They will spend their adult lives dealing with its consequences.

These priorities exist because Australian children require more than a collection of dates and facts. They require the knowledge to understand their country, their region and their future.

I watched classes across New South Wales debate which Global Goal their community should tackle, then develop projects and act. They asked direct questions about Country, culture, food, water, waste and climate because those subjects connected the classroom to the world outside it.

Within a day of the comments resurfacing, Hanson said she would apologise “if people were offended”. She claimed she had been describing Aboriginal people at the time of European settlement.

Hanson blamed the offence on those who heard her rather than the words she chose.

I have watched nine-year-olds paint 60,000 years of care for Country onto a giant koala, then stand before their school and explain it.

The children showed the curiosity, knowledge and respect missing from her argument.

Something terrible happened here on the 5th August 1944

Going home to Cowra reminded me how completely I had lived inside a bubble.

I grew up at Pack’s Grant, a 572-acre farm beside the Cowra prisoner-of-war camp. I knew the camp was there. I knew about the breakout. I also knew about the holes in the weatherboards at the back of our house and in the shearing shed, which we understood to be bullet holes.

The woolshed at Pack’s Grant – had bullet holes from the Cowra PoW breakout

What I had never fully appreciated was that the history of the Cowra breakout had run directly past our back verandah. That changed when I sat down for lunch with Tom Rowston at the Happy Days cafe.

Tom Rowston had some pieces of gold information for me over lunch at the Happy Days cafe 

Tom was 93 and approaching his 94th birthday. His family had been in business in Cowra since 1924, owning car yards and other enterprises around the town. He remained fiercely proud of Cowra, its council, hospital, water supply, businesses and people.

When we met, Tom looked at me and knew exactly where I belonged. “You come from Pack’s Grant. You’re tall and skinny like your father.”

It was an extraordinary welcome home. Tom went to school with Harold Read, whose family owned Pack’s Grant before mine. They were mates, and Tom had stayed at the Read family home when he was a schoolboy.

Then he began talking about the night of the Cowra breakout.
“When the Japanese broke out, they came down and they ran past that house all night.”

The breakout began in the early hours of 5 August 1944, when more than 1,000 Japanese prisoners attempted to escape from the camp. Many headed east, apparently believing the ocean lay beyond the hills. My home Pack’s Grant stood in their path.

“Must have been pretty frightening living there,” I said. “Didn’t worry him at all,” Tom replied. Harold had told him that the men “made a lot of noise and kept us awake”.

That was how Harold Read apparently remembered a night which became one of the most recognised events in Cowra’s history. Men were running past the family home in darkness, yet the detail passed down to Tom was the noise they made and the sleep they interrupted.

Fourteen years after the breakout, Pack’s Grant changed hands. My grandparents purchased the farm for their two sons, my father, John Lindsay, and my uncle, David Lindsay. The plan was for the brothers to farm it together, although the partnership did not last long.

The letter confirming the purchase was addressed to my father. Dated 15 July 1958, it came from Cowra stock and station agents Norman C. Bellamy Pty Limited. It recorded the agreement to buy the 572-acre property from Mr Read for £45 an acre, with a 10 per cent deposit. My father moved our family to Pack’s Grant. David Lindsay built an academic career in agriculture and became Dean of Agriculture at the University of Western Australia. He is now Emeritus Professor David Lindsay.

The sale included the floor coverings, an electric stove, two hot-water systems, electric light fittings, three electric motors, an air compressor, two windmills and the shearing plant. The livestock were negotiated separately. The family bought 717 sheep, including 20 Dorset Horn stud ewes, along with 17 cattle.

Our family photographs from 1958 record what came next. They show the woolshed and yards, sheep, pigs, horses, haymaking and the broad hills surrounding Cowra.

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Note the black-and-white Holstein dairy cows. They had travelled with us from the dairy farm in Dapto to become the house cow at Pack’s Grant. Against a landscape of sheep and beef cattle, she looks like a small declaration of where our family had come from.

For me, Pack’s Grant was home. The woolshed was a woolshed. The holes were holes. The former prisoner-of-war camp was nearby, but its history belonged to another time. Returning to Cowra closed the distance between those things.

A conversation over lunch connected me to Harold Read, the boy who grew up in our house and heard the Japanese prisoners passing it during the night. An old letter captured the moment one family handed the farm to another. The photographs recorded the landscape as my family found it in 1958. I went home to Cowra and discovered that the story I had travelled there to find had been waiting at home all along.

Every insult aimed at One Nation is an own goal

Bogan. Cooker. Racist. Woke. Lefty. Latte sipper.

We throw these words around as though they explain people. Mostly, they put people in a box and give us permission to stop listening.

The words change depending on who is speaking.

We may believe these words make our case. They usually do the opposite.

I saw that when I spent five days handing out how-to-vote cards for the Community Independent candidate in Farrer. For much of that time, I stood beside the One Nation volunteers.

We talked, shared pastries and took turns doing the coffee run. I learnt their names and heard about their families, farms and communities.

I asked what had led them to One Nation. They talked about water, hospitals, services disappearing and decisions being made in cities by people who would never live with the results. Many had voted for the Coalition for decades and felt the party had stopped listening.

One Nation gave that disappointment somewhere to go. These people were talking about water buybacks, hospital visits and children leaving town. They were neither stupid nor aggressive. They had reasons for voting as they did.

One Nation tells people that educated elites look down on them. Call its voters stupid, backward or racist and you have helped One Nation prove its point.

It works both ways. Question a One Nation policy and you may be called woke before you have finished the sentence. Apparently, even a seventy-year-old dairy farmer can become an inner-city latte sipper without leaving the farm.

Once we put someone in a box, we stop being curious. We stop asking what happened, what changed and what might change again.

Labels end conversations. Questions start them.

If we want people to reconsider what they believe, insulting them is a very strange place to begin.