Heather du Plessis-Allan: Scrapping agriculture from the ETS is the right correction

Here’s some good news for farmers on the eve of Fieldays - they will not have to pay for their emissions.

The Government's announced it’s taking agriculture back out of the ETS, which is where it’s always been until the last Labour Government put it in there.

And outside is where it should always be, because the idea of putting a climate tax on farmers who provide the food we need to survive is crazy.

The idea is so crazy that, as far as I can tell, no other country in the world has done it.

Now, Labour’s threat to farmers was - you’re in the ETS unless you find another way to pay for your emissions. So there will likely be an expectation that farmers will still have to find that other way.

And frankly, I hope they don’t have to. I hope we just give up on this, because making farmers pay to grow the food we need to survive is absolutely nuts.

I'm not having an argument about whether climate change is real or not, because of course it's real. And I'm also not having an argument about whether we should make an effort to reduce emissions. If we can, of course we should, within reason.

But I am prepared to argue about how far you take that idea. I think that idea was taken too far.

When Labour put farmers in the ETS, it had gone too far - because the natural end point of that was that it would add another cost to farming that would cause our farmers to farm fewer animals.

That would therefore produce less meat and milk, therefore feeding fewer humans and making our country poorer by selling less to the world. When you get to that endpoint - that's crazy.

For a moment there, we got absolutely carried away with the conviction that climate change was the most important thing we were dealing with.

Let's get this straight, it is not. It doesn't trump everything else that we are doing. I would argue feeding children is more important, educating children is more important and heating up homes in the winter is more important.

Thank goodness for this announcement, because it is absolutely correcting our priorities.

Heather du Plessis-Allan is a journalist and commentator who hosts Newstalk ZB's Drive show HERE - where this article was sourced.