When I got my latest email from the Australian Farm Institute this week advertising their upcoming conference I couldn’t take it anymore and hit the unsubscribe button
Our agri-politicans are a great example of how broken our political system is. Like our federal politicians they tend to follow the Allan Jones model and appeal to the prejudices of the masses
“The argumentum ad populum used in democratic political rhetoric can make political argumentation appear to be reason-based when it is not and subvert and undermine reason-based deliberation in democratic political argumentation.”(Douglas Walton, “Criteria of Rationality for Evaluating Democratic Public Rhetoric,” Talking Democracy, ed. by B. Fontana et al. Penn State, 2004)
Its the “them and us” model where farmers are pitched as victims, and our state farming organisations are our white knights.
As an example when Agforce deleted their data and lost their credibility in government they decided a roadshow with Peter Ridd was their advocacy model
Its too easy and so lazy to choose to pander to audiences by telling them what you think they want to hear.
This is not advocacy, this divide and conquer and it makes me cringe. Its time to rethink what advocacy looks like because Australian agriculture has some very serious human rights issues we should have addressed a long time ago.
We do have a choice
We can all work together and build a better world or we can focus on bettering our world
Who would you put on the podium if you wanted to hear from people who do advocacy well?
Beside the three very courageous women in the video above some names that come to mind for me
- Sally McManus
- Anna Rose
- Amanda Tattersall
- Anna Brown OAM
- Stephanie Coombes
I love this – “We can all work together and build a better world or we can focus on bettering our world”