I like the MP for Parkes Mark Coulton. I stood against him when he was first elected in 2007. He showed he has a fine sense of the hystorical in Parliament on Thursday when he warned farmers to stay away from the Carbon Farming Initiative because it could lead to the failure of Australian agriculture. He announced that farmers had to sign up for the CFI and submit themselves to being told what to do by the government. He's right, of course. Famous failed experiments of state-controlled agriculture led to famine and disaster in the Soviet Union and China and more recently North Korea and Zimbabwe. But Mark need not worry. The CFI is still voluntary. In fact, the CFI wants farmers to tell governments what to do by making their innovations available to other farmers by submitting them to the Positive List. (The Carbon Farming Initiative (CFI) includes an additionality test to ensure that carbon credits generated by CFI projects can genuinely offset the emissions produced. To pass the additionality test, a project must be on the Positive List.)