I supported a motion from Senators Colbeck and Cadell that called for an inquiry into property rights. In particular, I speak here about the compulsory acquisition of land for the short-sighted and unsustainable failed wind and solar experiment across vast tracts of our countryside.
Although our Commonwealth Constitution recognises and enshrines secure property ownership, this is worthless because the States have become adept at stealing land from landowners, mostly in an ongoing attack on farmers. Worse still, State Governments are not paying “just compensation” that Australia’s Commonwealth Constitution demands (Section 51, clause 31), because the States each have their own constitutions that do not provide for just compensation.
The Labor Government is hell bent on vandalising vast tracts of prime environmental habitat and productive food-producing land for banks of expensive, unreliable wind turbines and toxic solar arrays, each with access roads and a spiderweb of high-voltage power lines that leave permanent scars across national parks and private land.
City dwellers will eventually recognise that demonising farmers and hijacking their land for massive energy white elephants is contributing to the rising cost of living.
Remember the words of Thomas Jefferson – you can have farms without cities, but you cannot have cities without the farms.
Transcript
As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, I remind people of what Thomas Jefferson said: ‘we can have farming without cities yet cannot have cities without farming’. No farmers, no Australia! Why does this Labor government use the states to steal property from hardworking landowners and rip off farmers left, right and centre? Why? Because it can. And it builds on actions of past Liberal-National governments.
Before explaining that, Madam Acting Deputy President, let me say that I have a list of eight keys to ongoing, sustained human progress—just ones that I’ve developed over the years. The first is freedom. The second is the rule of law. The third is constitutional continuance and competitive federalism. The fourth is secure private property rights. That’s fundamental. It enables freedom. The fifth is strong families. The sixth is affordable, reliable energy. Then there’s fair and honest taxation and honest money.
Secure property rights are fourth on my list. Why? Because secure property rights are fundamental to reward for genuine effort and creativity and for investing and taking risk. People won’t do that if they can’t keep what they earn. Secondly, secure property rights are necessary for people to exercise initiative. Thirdly, secure property rights are necessary for people to exercise responsibility and accountability, because if you can just steal it then why would you have any accountability? The fourth fundamental about secure property rights is freedom. It enables freedom. This has been well known for centuries. One of the reasons communism and socialism always fail is that they steal property rights. And it’s the reason, always, that personal free enterprise succeeds until the government—and this has happened repeatedly throughout history—gets too big and infringes on civil liberties. It destroys property rights and infringes on civil liberties.
So it’s very important, and our founding fathers agreed, because our Commonwealth Constitution recognises and enshrines the importance of secure property rights. Under Section 51, Clause 31 of the Commonwealth Constitution, our Constitution, the Commonwealth may acquire property from a state or person providing it is on just terms. So reading that in context, Section 51 of the Constitution says:
The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws for the peace, order, and good government of the Commonwealth with respect to:
then one of them is listed, one of the many listed is – the acquisition of property on just terms from any State or person for any purpose in respect of which the Parliament has power to make laws;
That is clear—’just terms’. This means that the Commonwealth, the federal government, must pay the person being dispossessed of rights to use their land reasonable and just compensation for the property the Commonwealth acquires. If the Commonwealth interferes with rights to use land, it must pay just-terms compensation.
Generally, the states lack such property protections. Should a state acquire—or even steal, as has happened—land for a state, it does not need to provide compensation. Under state constitutions, no compensation is required. Even if a state acquires land for a Commonwealth purpose, the state is not bound under the Commonwealth Constitution to acquire it under just terms. This would then enable working around the constitutional protection for landowners, as I’m going to tell you with a story that is actually factual.
This is a story about the worst theft of property rights in our country’s history. It happened during the lifetime of everyone in this chamber. In 2007, after John Howard was booted from office, I wrote a personal letter of thanks to him. I thought highly of John Howard. I thanked him and acknowledged him for his 30 years of work and for being at the forefront of the governance and policies introduced by the Keating and Hawke governments as well as has his own government afterward. Yet I didn’t know at the time something that I’m going to share with you. It was the former Liberal-National coalition government under Prime Minister John Howard who came up with the disgraceful mechanism of using the states to do the federal government’s dirty work for it. This is not new. This goes back to 1996-97.
The story starts with the United Nations Kyoto protocol on climate variation and John Howard’s admitted desire to comply with it. He said he wouldn’t sign the 1997 Kyoto protocol but we would comply with it as a country. He or his government realised that people were not ready at that time to shut down industry, power stations, agriculture, travel and transport that produce carbon dioxide, so they came up with a different idea—a worse idea: stop the farmers clearing their land. Stop the farmers using their land as they were free to do. The Constitution, though, requires compensation. That would have been worth hundreds of billions of dollars. The federal government could not afford that, so the Howard government went around the Constitution, using the states to do the federal government’s dirty work of stealing farmers’ land to comply with the UN Kyoto Protocol, because John Howard’s government realised that they could cut the production of carbon dioxide or they could stop the clearing of land, which would be getting credit for giving more absorption of carbon dioxide. It was the same net effect. He did it without any scientific basis, as I’ll explain in a minute.
One of the Howard government’s early responses was to do a deal with Rob Borbidge’s National Party government in Queensland. We had a National Party government in Queensland and three signatures from the senior National Party people, doing a deal with the Liberal-National federal government. They did a similar deal with Bob Carr, of the Labor Party in New South Wales, and then entrenched the deal with Peter Beattie in Queensland. Despite the denials under the Morrison government, this is still something the federal government relies upon for climate compliance. The irony is that John Howard betrayed himself as a champion of the Constitution and a champion of property rights that are fundamental to free enterprise societies. If you don’t believe me on this story, ask Peter Spencer, who nearly died protesting. Ask Dan McDonald and many farmers who are awake to this in Queensland and New South Wales.
In 2013, six years after being booted from office, John Howard said, as the annual lecturer on climate at the London Global Warming Policy Foundation, which is a sceptic think tank opposed to the impacts of climate policy economically, that, after doing what he did to destroy our electricity sector and steal farmers’ property rights, on the topic of climate science he was agnostic. None of it was driven by climate science. Yet he led a government that stole farmers’ property rights and introduced a renewable energy target that is now gutting our electricity sector—shipping manufacturing overseas because of high electricity prices, driving families broke and causing inflation. His government concocted the National Electricity Market, which is really a racket. It’s not a market; it’s a bureaucracy that controls prices. Contrary to what people have been saying about Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd, John Howard was the first leader of a major party and of a government to put in place an emissions trading scheme as policy.
This set a pattern for Labor because, if you look at the history of climate policy and energy policy, the Liberal-National coalition introduces climate and energy initiatives and the Labor Party, when it comes in, then ramps them up. Have a look at the safeguard mechanism as a foundation for a global carbon dioxide tax. That was admitted when Greg Hunt, under Malcolm Turnbull’s prime ministership, introduced the safeguard mechanism in 2015. It wasn’t Chris Bowen—he just ramped it up. The UN’s net zero strategy was first introduced to Australia by Scott Morrison, and it was then ramped up by the Greens and the Labor Party. Carbon farming—or money farming—sterilises and steals and locks up the land, increasing the cost of feral animal management and noxious weed management for all the farmers in the area. Locking up land means it becomes full of weeds. For UN biodiversity policies, look at the Howard government again.
Back to the Howard government, the 2007 Water Act and the Murray-Darling Basin Authority separated water entitlements from the land. Now we see in the Murray-Darling Basin—with the loss of property rights and water entitlements—the land is now married back up with water in the hands of corporate farmers on corporate farms. One of the aims of the Water Act, which is repeatedly stated throughout the act, is compliance with international agreements. What the hell is that doing in our legislation?
Let’s have a look at the Labor state and federal governments. The Beattie Labor government in Queensland ramped up the stealing of farmers’ property rights by imposing more restrictions on farmers’ use of land, and so did Anna Bligh’s government. Campbell Newman’s government failed to restore property rights and just looked the other way. Annastacia Palaszczuk has since extended the stealing of property rights and entrenched it. The states have become adept at this method of stealing land from landowners, mostly as an attack on farmers, and not paying just terms compensation. Another way the states—Queensland in particular—do this is by using environmental reasons to justify placing restrictions on farmers’ use of land, reducing the worth of land, preventing it from alternative productive use and preventing the development of the land for agricultural or grazing purposes. For example, the Great Barrier Reef protection legislation—contrary to the evidence of farming having no impact on the Great Barrier Reef—is having a devastating impact on communities because of the unfounded and unscientific restrictions that the Labor government has placed on farming communities up and down the east coast of Queensland. This is destroying productive land—with woody weeds under native vegetation protection legislation—and turning productive land with a bright future into a monoculture of woody weeds and no grass, which increases erosion.
This Labor federal government has declared war on farmers and primary producers. It’s hijacking prime agricultural land to install banks of ugly wind turbines and poisonous and dangerous solar panels, vandalising literally acres of otherwise productive food-producing land. Any person should be able to see the stupidity, the hypocrisy and the economic devastation of such actions. In its desperate attempts to virtue signal to the world that it is a conservation and climate-saving giant, the Labor government is hell-bent on covering the landscape with expensive and inefficient wind turbines, ugly banks of solar panels—and damn the consequences. We see huge complexes of solar and wind farms built with no connection to the grid. We see it in Victoria and we see it in Queensland.
Now they are thinking, ‘We’d better build transmission lines.’ Transmission lines are going to chew up prime environmental habitat and farming. Now more than 100 square kilometres of koala habitat in Queensland is under threat from the developers of these destructive wind turbine projects, all in the name of so-called renewable energy and at the cost of the environment and the extinction of rare wildlife—another aspect of killing the environment to save it. Other damage to farming by the Labor government include stopping regional infrastructure spending to improve the productivity of the regions and stopping live cattle and live sheep exports.
Farmers are hard pressed to stop the states, acting for the Commonwealth, from stealing land and attacking the property rights of farmers. The Labor government, in bed with the Greens and the teals, is pushing inhuman and antihuman policies, antienvironment policies and anti-Australian policies. Labor, Greens and the LNP, the Liberals and Nationals, are hell-bent on promoting projects that are destroying the land, destroying the environment, increasing unemployment, destroying the economy and pushing up the cost of living in Australia and reducing our security by exporting our major manufacturing. When it becomes too expensive to sip a latte in the city, even the teals might wake up to the fact that their lefty policies are making it too hard to continue living in what was the lucky country.
If our farmers chuck it all in, this country is lost, and the Chinese can simply walk in and create a food bowl to feed Asia. I remind you that Thomas Jefferson said, ‘You can have farming without cities, but you cannot have cities without farming.’ No farmers, no Australia. I haven’t got time at the moment, but the stealing of property rights is not restricted to farmers. It is happening in urban environments, including Caboolture, near Brisbane. It is happening in Mosman, in Sydney. I fully support this motion from senators Colbeck and Cadell. It needs to go much further to encompass past theft of property and federal-state collusion enabling uncompensated theft of property rights with no just terms of compensation.
