Damien O'Connor has added another industry this Government has destroyed to its growing list.

Live animal exports are done.

While telling us it wouldn't hurt our GDP, and despite admitting it's worth hundreds of millions of dollars - he did concede there had been a bit of a "gold rush" of late.

That’s spin for "the industry is growing". There is increasing demand for it, and in general I thought gold rushes were good.

His argument around GDP appeared to be based on the idea that although we'd lose hundreds of millions of dollars, we would more than make up for it with our shiny new reputation.

He didn’t of course have any figures around that, because 1) There aren't any 2) He made it up.

Stuart Nash, by the way, also made up his stat on the programme yesterday, saying we were the only country in the whole world exporting live animals. We are, in fact, one of many.

So the question is, how many industries does this lot want to lay waste to before enough New Zealanders vote them out?

The oil and gas business got done over, with no consultation and a promise that the end to exploration was years and years away. Which, of course, was not remotely true either.

The oil and gas industry is about the future. It's about intent. It's about the mood of the landscape.

The mood had decidedly changed under Labour so licences were handed back and people went home.

The jobs promised - the clean energy jobs promised -  have amounted to nothing. That is, apart from a clean energy think-tank in the Naki that had $25 million tossed at it.

The cold hard truth around cows on ships is this: This country has an agricultural base and animals is what we do. Food in general, is what we do.

Our biggest trading partner is China. China is one of the few countries in the world actually growing right now, and when times get better they’ll grow even more.

And that’s the advantage of this country. Through thick and thin, good times and bad, the world always has and always will need feeding. And the wealthier the world gets, the better the quality of the product they want - led by food.

This Government has already made life for farmers hard enough, but wrecking multi-hundred-million-dollar industries takes it next level.

National are smart to promise to reverse it.

Let's hope in the ensuing period that the Chinese, who we are now hopelessly beholden to, don't take umbrage and don't see us like Australia.

Australia has already lost $20 billion in income in their scrap.

This Government are wreckers. They're banners, they're cancellers. They stop, they rub out and nothing ever replaces it. It's hot air and ideology.

The SPCA might feel good about this, but the SPCA don’t pay the country's bills. The farmers do.