Ain’t nobody out there who hates the country as much as tru blu Aussie farmers.
There’s no rule that says a wombat can’t play basketball
Farmers are executing wombats because wombats don't respect human legal documents. Laws against this are not enforced. ABC reports on the culture.
Submitted 3 weeks ago by naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com to news@aussie.zone
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-05/wombat-cuddlers-v-wombat-shooters-in-taralga/105387982
Comments
phonics@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
moody@lemmings.world 3 weeks ago
Wombats poop cubes. I think that justifies it.
madlian@lemmy.cafe 3 weeks ago
Clearly there needs to be an initiative to teach wombats how to read.
Gorgritch_umie_killa@aussie.zone 3 weeks ago
Thats the attitude that needs to be changed. A mentality so self centered its oppressive to think of others will always result in destruction and conflict.
It comes back to the problem of how to give people enough agency to live their lives successfully, without sacrificing the environment and context that success is built upon.
Or, to put another way, how to protect personal property which leads to personal agency, but limiting personal property that leads to oppressive ownership.
We probably have it more right in Australia than many other places, at least legally. No one really owns land, its all vested in ‘the crown’ in the end, (btw thats different to the King), and its actually closer to a reference to god.
Our problem is we aren’t acting how our laws are written, we act as if we have full and sole control on everything in our name. When it reaches the courts it thankfully doesn’t seem to always go that way. But culturally and politically we act in a more American way than our nation’s laws are designed.
naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
I would agree, which is why I tend to come down against private property/privatisation of land. It serves everyone to have agriculture, but only if that agriculture is done in a way which serves everyone. Of course a community controlling its land and allocating it to people who want to use it to benefit the community is no guarantee they use it responsibly, as we can see with this one.
Managing things like environmental impact requires a very large scale view and coordination, a river might be able to tolerate run off from the first farm, but by the 50th downstream it might be cooked. It’s difficult to expect the person at the first farm to really understand their impact and responsibility. Significant attitude changes are needed, almost everyone in Australia behaves in ways the earth cannot sustain and which violently exploit other animals including other humans (e.g. our diets, our trinkets). We really need to reframe what being a human in the world means and what responsibilities it entails, and set up institutions that make it easier instead of harder.
Gorgritch_umie_killa@aussie.zone 3 weeks ago
I’d definitely fall on the side of maintaining private control over land in many areas, farming is certainly one of those. Even the unending title we have, i think gives an assurance and stability for the primary user of that land.
Those kinds of enduring stability, i’ve come to believe, are a key source of Australian productivity and ingenuity. Where we identify it, i think we should protect it.
Community controlling land mightn’t work out any better either. Scale sometimes blurs issues the individual can see clear as day.
To demonstrate with your farms along a stream example, and i suspect i’m taking what you wrote too far, so bear with me,
where a community controls the land and parcels out responsibilities to work that land it necessarily removes the individual, farmer/owner, from their personal closeness to that place.
I could very easily imagine a scenario where that 50th farmer down stream doesn’t notice or even know about the toxic stream going by their farm because they simply aren’t that closely invested in the place they’re in. After all its often farmers themselves who call an alarm on environmental issues. Farmers were some of the first to link the toxic run off to Dupont in the US beacuse they saw it in the environment they knew best.
I think theres one idea rising in the European zeitgeist. That of Citizen’s Assemblies. The bringing of a representative/randommised sample of people face to face, to participate and make the democratic decisions, could help us here as well.
I think so, so many of our intractable problems come down to a lack of discursive clarity. Citizens Assemblies is at least a model that attempts to improve that.