For decades I’ve been heading to Sheepvention at Hamilton in August, but I don’t recall such a high-profile keynote speaker. 

This year it is highly acclaimed political journalist Chris Uhlmann, who in recent years has become a leading critic of Australia’s climate change policies.

I used to work on the same floor of the ABC in Melbourne when Chris was the senior producer for now retired Jon Faine. 

I knew that Chris was an excellent producer and that his first career path had been to enter the seminary to become a catholic priest. 

That didn’t last and I think he found his vocation in more recent years as a leading political commentator. He’s the same age as me and was always a very friendly, intelligent man. 

He was a rather conservative dresser unlike some of the other characters working at the ABC, including one who was always bare foot, no matter the weather.

I assumed as he was working with Faine that he’d be more of the left of politics. How wrong was I? 

And now, he is an incredibly forthright critic of net-zero emissions policies, which he made patently clear in an interview on Country Today.  

“Well, what is net zero, Libby? I mean, have you had anyone ever give you a clear answer of what that looks like? It’s not actual zero, is it? Because the word ‘net’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. It’s a slogan without a policy to actually deliver it,” he said.

“There is nothing that we have in the Australian policy landscape at the moment which would deliver you a policy that looks anything like net zero, because all we’re talking about at the moment is changing the electricity system.” 

Rather well put I thought.

Certainly the mood has radically shifted away from  the net-zero target. 

One by one, agricultural commodity groups are quietly dumping the target. 

So, too, are many federal politicians. It’s not just the likes of Pauline Hanson. 

Days after taking over the Liberal leadership Angus Taylor announced he would dump the policy if elected as Prime Minister.

So where does this leave the race to renewables? 

It’s suddenly also shifting from, ‘well they have to go somewhere’ to farmers saying ‘not in my backyard’, to ‘why have them at all?’

Just ask Uhlmann: “What we’re seeing as we move to these dispersed sources of generation – solar and wind, which are off more often than they’re on – but in order to get the same kind of generation, you’ve got to build six times the amount of it, and you’ve got to connect it with vast networks of transmission lines. 

“Then you’ve got to back it up with this huge life-support system of batteries and all other manner of things.

“So, that requires an enormous amount of land, and the people who are on the front line of that, of course, are the people in the regions.”

It’s food for thought. 

He’s a very decent, polite man, and while we may agree to disagree agreeably as they say, there is certainly a lot of truth in his well-crafted words.

The entire July 29, 2026 edition of The Weekly Advertiser is available online. READ IT HERE!

The entire July 29, 2026 edition of AgLife is available online. READ IT HERE!