But the mining deceit is worse. As farmers witness first-hand the starving animals, bogged herds and bare paddocks of climate change, as rivers evaporate and town after town finds itself waterless at this glowing tip of history’s hottest summer, they confront two further inconvenient truths. One, the National Party doesn’t care. Two, the reason it doesn’t care is that it long ago switched allegiances to the very group that is frantically whipping climate change along, the mining industry. Loading Already, mining has destroyed some of our finest farmland. Newcastle is the world’s largest coal export port yet, while leading economies like California and Germany target 100 per cent renewables, NSW bone-headedly projects increased coal exports. Coal is a dwindling asset but, instead of diversifying, we flog it while we can. The Berejiklian government expects to increase our domestic use of coal for power by a million tonnes to 2036 and our export of coking coal a staggering 90 per cent, or 19 million tonnes, in the same period. Honestly? Are we mad? Quite apart from climate change, consider the effect on the ground. The Golden Highway runs inland through tiny towns like Jerrys Plains, Sandy Hollow and Giants Creek. Take the road at night and it’s like someone dropped a metropolis into the Upper Hunter and flicked the switch. For over 40 kilometres it’s floodlit like some sinister fairy town, bustling with day-for-night activity. Only afterwards do you understand what you’ve seen. Huge working mines, sometimes kilometres long. It was lush, pretty and fertile. Now it’s bruised and scarred, battered all over. Will it ever be rehabilitated? Not if experience is any guide, which sees companies lie, wither, transform or die rather than fulfil their obligations to restore the damage done.

Then there’s coal seam gas, sometimes still touted as “sustainable” but in fact every bit as destructive as coal. As a fossil fuel it exacerbates climate change but its extraction also destroys farmland, livelihoods and even more disastrously, water. In the country these days, water is everything. Nationals leader John Barilaro says CSG mining should expand in NSW and that “coal and CSG can co-exist with farming”. Increasingly, farmers doubt this. NSW Nationals leader John Barilaro says coal and CSG can co-exist with farming. Credit:AAP Rules exist to ensure farmers aren’t bullied into signing, their property is respected and baseline measurements are taken to monitor contamination. Yet few farmers believe the rules are being applied. Everywhere, from Coonamble to Narrabri, Tottenham to Tara, farmers tell of midnight hectoring, fences busted, land ravaged by trucks and drilling rigs, children with headaches and nausea, bores drying up or rivers igniting. And no MP who'll listen. Last month in Narrabri Sally* told me of growing up on an organic cattle farm near Roma. Her parents didn’t want to “sign” (give permission for CSG exploration and drilling) but many neighbours did. Her parents ended up pushed to breaking, forced out, divorcing, selling up, moving away. Now, as a mother of three on a property near Narrabri, she is facing the same threat herself from the Santos CSG operation.

In Tottenham (pop. 299), a town hanging onto existence by a thread, Kate* told how pipline builder APA want to run the large-diametre 450 kilometre-long gas line across a 2 kilometre wide stretch of the Castlereagh River on her property, 400mm deep through unstable vertosol soils that can open up and swallow horses or erode to 2 metres without warning. There’s no rock to keep the pipeline stable. She worries that it will break, ignite and pollute her land and water. David*, a beef producer controlled by stringent biosecurity regulations, says any contamination could cost him $186,000 to retrieve the meat, yet gas people can walk onto his property with unchecked boots and vehicles. Illustration: Dionne Gain Credit: These are not silly people. They’re used to doing it tough. But they’re not used to feeling dudded by their own party. Coal is a loser’s game. Coal, oil and gas companies may hijack the climate change issue but the world will soon not tolerate coal. Increasing automation, further, will shrink jobs and economic benefit for all but the corporate bosses. Why do our pollies think this is ok? Two reasons. Money and jobs. Not our money or jobs, although that’s the rhetoric. Theirs.

Like cotton farming on the Darling, this is about prioritising industry over the farming community and about where the floods of toxic mine run-off end up. And there are biosecurity concerns. All farmers are responsible for weeds, pests and contaminants, and producers must sign a declaration as to feed, chemical exposure drugs, diseases and possible contaminants before sale. Even if you’re not attempting to farm organically, the possibility of external contaminants been blown, tramped or driven onto your land is a serious worry. What to do? The electorate are way ahead of the pollies here. But in the state seat of Barwon, the only candidate explicitly to favour drilling 850 polluting wells in the most sensitive recharge area of the Great Artesian Basin is the LNP candidate. It’s water and food versus fuel. Vote CWA, if you can. But really, AnyoneButNats. Not their real names.