Censoring the Australian Landscape

We have heard a lot about freedom of speech recently, with the ALP, Greens and much of the bureaucracy through their horrid Misinformation-Disinformation Bill wanting to give the ACCC the power to decide what can be said and posted online. But there is another form of censorship that is growing insidiously in our great nation.

Across the country, public access to our natural wonders is being closed off, the gates are being shut and we are being locked out. Access to our national parks is increasingly under threat. It’s an attack on our shared heritage forged out of our engagement and connection with the wonders of our beautiful landscape.

The public are being banned from mountains, beaches and parks because soft-headed governments believe a small minority of mixed-race Aboriginal activists deserve to have the right to decree who can go where in Australia.

It started with Ayers Rock in 2019, then came the closure of Mt Warning under cover of Covid in 2020 and, in 2021, Mt Gillen in Alice Springs. Bans now extend to various beaches and waterfalls in Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia. In Victoria, 70 per cent of the Grampians is now closed to climbers. Crags in the western Victoria mountain range once attracted thousands of international visitors each year — visitors who now go where they are not made to feel needlessly guilty about their Western heritage of climbing and exploring, of taking risks and pushing personal limits. The sign at right tells the story in a few repellant words There are plans, too, to close the summits to the Glass House Mountains in southeastern Queensland, and St Mary Peak in the Flinders Ranges is also under threat of a ban. In NSW the government plans to hand over control of all our National Parks to Aboriginal land councils over the course of the next 15 years.

This is a disgrace. These parks belong to all Australians regardless of race.

There are three by-elections coming up in NSW on October 19, in the seats of Epping, Pittwater and Hornsby. The Liberal member for Pittwater, Rory Amon, quit parliament hours after being charged with child sex offences and will face trial in the year ahead. Epping was former Premier Dominic Perrottet’s seat. Faced with an extended stint on the opposition benches he quit his electorate for a well-paid job with BHP in the US. I hope he enjoys the new administration should Trump win in November. Say what you like about Trump, but we can be sure he would never, ever approve any initiative that balkanises the US population according to race and skin colour. How very different from what the forces of division are doing to Australia.

The seat of Hornsby was Matt Kean’s. You know Matt Kean — believer in the Net Zero fantasy, supporter of the Yes campaign — who has become one of Chris Bowen’s carbonphobic minions. As NSW environment minister, Kean set the wheels in motion for the closure of Mount Warning, formerly one of NSWs most cherished attractions. He had a chance to keep it open, he was, after all, the minister, but instead left it in the hands of the highly paid, soft-headed and soft-bottomed National Parks bureaucracy. As a consequence, the mountain has been closed for nearly five years at the cost over $60 million in lost visitor revenue to local communities. Worse, the 500,00 Australians who would have hiked to the summit during those closed-off years have missed the awe and wonder of that extraordinary experience. What a legacy Kean leaves us: ever-escalating power prices, a divided nation and the theft from all Australians of the right to colour-blind equality

The new Liberal candidate for Hornsby is a Matt Kean clone. It seems after their recent loss in NSW the Liberals have not learned the lesson that if you don’t stand for something you will fall for anything. It’s the same story all over the country. Just look at the Liberals in Victoria, where the most corrupt and incompetent Labor government in a century triumphed at the last election solely because the alternative had neither the nous nor principles to push back. That’s what happens when, like beleagured opposition leader John Pesutto, you lack even the semblance of a spine.

I have been fighting for the reopening of Mt Warning for the past four years. It’s been a frustrating battle. At one point Parks bureaucrats simply banned me from writing to them for 18 months. It seems my request for simple answers to simple questions was too much for the Park’s luvvies to endure.

In August, just before leaving Sydney to attend a protest rally with Hon John Ruddick MLC, the same pen-pushers slapped me with a stiff fine to keep me away. It didn’t work. We climbed to the summit, we had our rally, the community’s voice was heard. National Parks staff were too scared to attend and talk to us. Instead, in a scenario out of  1984 they positioned a camera in the car park to spy on us.  Rather than fixing the track and maintaining the park they are now wasting our taxes poring over the footage in quest of more fellow Australians to fine and harass. They have already spent close to $200,000 on security guards to keep people out. This sum would have repaired the track and reinstated the climbing chain they tore down so they could claim with typical disregard for truth that the ascent was just too dangerous to allow. They won’t stop us though. We will not give up until the mountain is reopened to all Australians, and this policy of racial division is terminated.

Be aware that this new breed of bureaucratic seat-warmers and the governments that indulge them are not intent of limiting the words that come out of our mouths and looking over your shoulder at what you tap away on your keyboard. No, such theft of freedom and traditional liberties isn’t enough to satisfy their obscene lust for control. Beware, they also want to limit where you can go.

To all this we say NO! If you live in one those four NSW electorates send a message to the current NSW Labor and previous Liberal Governments about what you think of their rotten policy of banning the public from public lands.

Marc Hendrickx is running as a Libertarian Party candidate in the Hornsby By-election on October 19. His campaign page is here