Victorian dairy farmer Daryl Hoey has been keenly watching and waiting for details about Australia's newly inked net zero plan, but he has been left sorely disappointed.
"Climate change is affecting us now and has been for a number of years, and to leave it until this late in the day to finally get their act together and we still don't know what the policy is?" he said, exasperated.
After a months-long, cat-and-mouse game between vocal net zero opponents within the National Party and the Prime Minister, Scott Morrison has formally announced he will commit Australia to reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
But after all the bluster, details about how Australia will achieve that are scant.
In a nutshell, Mr Morrison is pledging to spend billions of dollars on "low emissions" technologies, including carbon capture and storage (CCS), soil carbon sequestration, and the production of low emissions steel — all of which are in their infancy.
Hydrogen is another buzz word, but in some instances the government is talking about "clean" as opposed to "green" hydrogen —which means Australia will blend non-renewable gas into its hydrogen fuel mix.
Mr Hoey, who farms at Wonthaggi, two hours southeast of Melbourne, moved there from the Goulburn Valley two years ago in pursuit of better rainfall and cooler temperatures.
Given what he has heard recently from some members of the National Party about their desire to protect jobs in the coal industry, he is starting to question who the party really represents.
"[Perhaps] they're more concerned about mining votes because they're obviously not concerned about agricultural votes when ABARES has said that the average farmer has lost $30,000 a year because of climate change," he said.
Coal community fears for jobs
Jane Komacha sits at the other end of the net zero spectrum to Daryl Hoey.
She's the director of DK Heavy Plant Services in Muswellbrook, in the heart of New South Wales coal country, and she is worried about what it will mean for her mining equipment maintenance company.
"If it [the coal industry] was to stop tomorrow our business would not exist … that's over 150 nearly direct employees that would not have a job," she said.
But like Mr Hoey, she does not think the government has filled in enough of the blanks around net zero.
"I don't believe there is a plan to sustain our community's future."
Net zero won't repeat Kyoto: Ag lobby
The chief executive of Queensland rural lobby group AgForce, Mike Guerin, said he was confident legislation would not be used as a lever to reduce Australia's emissions.
At Kyoto in 1997, talks known as COP3, Australia committed to end land clearing for agriculture to meet global emissions targets.
"I am confident that we got that message through, but I'm also confident that we are one of the very few countries in the world that can do all of these things concurrently — we can grow an industry, we can create regional jobs, we can provide better landscape outcomes, we can build biodiversity and we can sequester carbon."
Meanwhile, Queensland's peak horticulture lobby group, Growcom, said its members were already highly exposed to climate change.
"What's unique about agriculture is that while we might be putting out emissions, we're also the industry that's most impacted by the climate," Growcom's manager of policy and advocacy, Richard Shannon. said.
Mr Shannon said that what horticulture needed from government, was confidence to invest.
"We see the climate changing around us," he said.
"Some crops, particularly permanent tree crops, have long lifespans and so growers need to know in planting those crops today, there'll be enough confidence in the climate that those crops are going to be profitable in 10 to 20 years' time."
