The Farmers’ Nightmare

 When somebody sits on top of a pole for an extended period determined to starve himself to death, it usually attracts the attention of the media. However, it appears that sitting on the pole and starving is the story, while the reason behind such drastic behaviour receives little attention.

Peter Spencer did receive a lot of media attention and he has since come down from his pole. But the reasons for his behaviour and his efforts to draw attention to an appalling piece of legislation that is affecting thousands of farmers across the nation need some explanation.

The scene for this desperate action by an individual was set by Bob Carr’s New South Wales government and a piece of legislation in the 1990s called the SEPP46 provision, which has since evolved into the Native Vegetation Act (NVA). This piece of legislation is a shocker for landowners and in particular farmers. It now covers every state in the country, as they all have their versions of the NVA.

The legislation is based upon the premise that is now unarguable amongst the Left and Green movements that farmers are responsible for widespread destruction of our native flora and fauna and should be held responsible for their dastardly behaviour. For the Left this was a winner—a no-brainer, in fact.

All you had to do was enact draconian legislation to control the farmer, limit his activities and what he can produce, thus proving your wonderful green credentials to the voting public and prove that you were actually “doing something”! There was another up side. Given the fact that 95 per cent of the population lives on the coastline and numbers involved in agriculture are falling to single-digit percentage levels, you would not be voted out of office if the legislation was unpopular.

Then they really got a feel for the potential of this act. Why not tie it to our favourite subject—global warming and carbon dioxide emissions! It didn’t matter that the whole premise of global warming due to carbon dioxide emissions is a hotly contested science and may yet prove to be incorrect. So they did tie it together and, coupled with regulations that severely restrict the farmer, they produced a name for it which conjured up all that was good, warm and fuzzy to sell it to the Green movement.

In short the NVA restricts the farmer from clearing land to develop it for agricultural purposes. It is so restrictive that it can decide upon the removal of a single bush or tree, not to mention the clearing of 100 hectares of regrowth. It also has a provision regarding the cultivation of existing farmland or land that was used to grow crops in the past.

If the farmer does not cultivate a paddock three times in fifteen years, the land becomes locked up forever and cannot be cropped in the future. So if the price of wheat falls below the cost of production (which it has for millions of hectares over the past fifteen years) and the farmer turns to grazing for his income and he stops cultivating his land, it can then become locked up forever. 

It gets worse! If he uses modern and conservative cultivation practices based on rotation of his paddocks, and he has fifteen or twenty paddocks that he cultivated for a couple of years each in the past, he cannot do that without risking locking up a large section of his farm. He either farms to the limit without regard to good farming and conservation practices, or cops the penalty.

Then it gets much worse! Having land locked up then means that he must still pay his council rates, keep feral animals at bay and under control, as well as encourage native flora, all at his own expense, without any hope of income from the locked-up land. The effect upon land values in some farming areas has been catastrophic. The legislation is producing de facto national parks without any cost to the public purse.

In a recent review of the legislation by the Senate Finance and Public Administration References Committee some interesting people attended and some interesting facts surfaced. The first one is the remaining cover of native vegetation in this country. It is around 87 per cent—significantly more than the Green movement would have us believe. The second one is that around 60 per cent of land in this country is privately held, of which 70 per cent is managed by farmers, which clearly indicates that farmers have not been the wholesale destroyers that they are made out to be.

Among those attending the Senate inquiry were the usual suspects pushing their barrow against any change to the legislation, as well as the farmer representative groups. The Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists insisted the legislation was working well and did not need amendment. So did the New South Wales government, who pointed to 1.6 million hectares that they had exempted in 2006–07 from the draconian regulations after consultation with farmers. But all that means is that the farming land they exempted should never have been subject to the legislation in the first place, and the only winners are a new branch of the state public service employed to administer something that should never have needed administration anyway.

Applications by farmers to have any land excluded on any basis can take up to nine months, so the government’s record in “working with farmers” is appalling to say the least. Nine months for any application denies the farmer an income from that land for at least one year and at no stage are they compensated for this tardiness.

And so to carbon dioxide. It is relatively simple in the minds of those who drafted this legislation. If you lock land up, keep the trees you have and force farmers to grow more trees, then you have a ready-made carbon sink at someone else’s cost. This is despite the fact that the industry most responsible for major tree planting activities over the past 100 years has been the farming industry. 

I hear you ask: Aren’t the farmers compensated for providing this facility, and for the income they forgo? In the Senate Committee findings they identified a total of $1.1 billion of lost opportunity in the central districts of New South Wales alone. In return the New South Wales government has offered $36 million for restructuring! The farmers of Australia are the only group who have paid the full cost of meeting Australia’s emission targets.

So this legislation meets all the criteria of the Green-Left movement and is based upon pure ideology. They can prove their green credentials, propagate the myth that all farmers are destroyers of the environment, prove to the urban dwellers that they are doing something, and penalise a group that they have traditionally been ideologically opposed to, and exert control over them to a level totally unforeseen until recently. And all at the same time!

The inconvenient fact that farmers produce the food they eat can be at least overlooked in Australia as there is a massive oversupply which is sold on the export market. So there is no danger of an immediate shortage in that area.

It is almost enough to make anyone climb a pole in desperation at the mind-numbing disinterest at both government level (Kevin Rudd made it plain at the time) and at the social level, to a situation that has the potential to totally destroy the industry and the fabric of what once was the financial and cultural backbone of Australia.

Meanwhile, the lack of media interest in the real reasons for Peter Spencer’s actions ensures that most Australians have no idea why he was up on top of the pole in the first place.

Ranald Moore’s family has been on the land in Australia since 1818. He contributed the article “Surviving Germ Warfare in the Colonies” to the July-August 2006 issue.