Environment Protection Reform Bill 2025, National Environmental Protection Agency Bill 2025, Environment Information Australia Bill 2025, Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (Customs Charges Imposition) Bill 2025, Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (Excise Charges Imposition) Bill 2025, Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (General Charges Imposition) Bill 2025, Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (Restoration Charge Imposition) Bill 2025

Mr JOYCE (New England) (17:37): I rise to say we have a dilemma in the Environment Protection Reform Bill 2025. I know the timber industry and other areas definitely want to have security. They know that, if we do not come to some form of agreement, so many jobs and a vital industry for our nation will be put at risk, because it forces the Labor Party to deal with the Greens, and what a dilemma that is!

What we see here and what I've been part of, as a person who lives in the country and lives on the property I was born on, is the continued encroachment into private property rights, which is a fundamental of a safe, secure, Western, free democracy. If you want something, we work on a very fair principle. If there is a community benefit that is desirous of a certain aspect that will be enforced by a caveat or exclusion, then you buy it.

You offer a price and buy it. You don't just implicitly, from a government position, steal it. This is how we see it.

If I were to say that I'm going to pass a piece of legislation that says that in your house you can only go into your kitchen on Tuesdays, that the third bedroom is not allowed to be used and that you can use your lounge room but you can only sleep on the right-hand side of your bed, you would say, 'That is a massive diminishment of the value of my house.' You would say, 'I expect to be paid for that, if that's what you really want.' But you're doing that to our farmland.

You're doing that to our farmers. The only reason we're meeting these targets, such as the Kyoto target—and I'll say at the start that the Liberal Party and the coalition were responsible for stitching us up in that, because they got the states to do the dirty work—is that people on the land have had to pay for them with the exclusion of their rights, the exclusion of their capacity to manage vegetation, manage regrowth and manage grasses.

At my place, which is owned by me and my wife, we woke up one day, and our whole place was coded yellow or orange. That means that I can't even chop up a dead tree. I'm not allowed to.

I have to get permission. I don't think you will see that in an urban environment. I don't think you could comprehend what a massive intrusion into our lives that is and how we feel that we've had it stolen.

After working very hard to pay something off—and we did pay it off; we bought it and paid it off—it's been taken back off us. And it's not just for the trees; it's for the grasses and for the shrubs. It is insanity.

The only part on the map that I'm allowed to touch is my lawn. That is it—the lawn. It is a fact.

An honourable member interjecting— Mr JOYCE: Well, it shows how ignorant you are. That's the problem we've got. You're completely ignorant of the facts, and that's why you stand so boldly behind this legislation.

You really don't understand the effect of it. On this side, we can't just stop this ratcheting to the left and then say, 'Well, it won't go any further to the left under us.' No. It's got to go back.

You've got to reinstall property rights. Who ultimately becomes the beneficiary of this? It's the bureaucracy that polices it.

In the past, my father worked for the department of agriculture. He worked for the government. His job was to assist people to get a better outcome from their land, to get a better outcome from their animal husbandry, to deal with viruses and to deal with pathogens.

He was a clever man, dealing with microdoses and strain 19s. Bodies like that one have gone from assisting farmers to policing farmers. The only time they turn up—and it is a major fine—is for criminal convictions for doing what we've always done for generations on our property.

I shouldn't have to say this. From the aerial maps, you can see there are vastly more trees on our place than there were in 1969. We've got no problems with that, but we don't like being looked at by satellites and by AI.

There's a fear all the time: 'Maybe I've done something wrong to my own land—my own property.' What we see with this is a dilemma in this legislation. I've been speaking to workers from the timber industry in electorate of Lyne, and they've been saying: 'You've got to cut a deal, because this affects our area. Please do not force them to the Greens.' I said, 'But hang on—then we've got to comply with this form of socialism that's coming in.' Socialism, ultimately, is the primacy of the state over the rights of the individual.

Every time we do this, we reinvest in the primacy of the state over the rights of the individual. On our side, we believe in the primacy of the individual over the state. The state is there for very important requirements—for health, for education and for defence—but it's not supposed to have excessive stewardship or ownership of my private asset, and that is what has been happening with this.

All these incremental caveats that are placed on our assets always come with some apparently quasi-benevolent form. It's climate change. It's biodiversity.

It's this. It's that. It's salinity.

They're all plausible in their first iteration, but the solution is always a loss of property rights, another caveat on what we can do. I know little about lots, but I know lots about politics, and I sense in the public a dynamic pushback against this. I see it even in issues which identify a catalyst of where issues are.

In the Rockhampton Morning Bulletin this morning, there was a poll on coal fired power. It found 9,300 people in support and 142 against. I think that's reflective of an overall cynicism that people have about the whole process, and it's being expressed in that issue.

People are saying: I think I'm going to call rubbish on a lot of this stuff because all I can see is the government getting bigger, the nation getting broker, industry leaving, farmers being dispossessed of their assets, people becoming poor and pensioners becoming poorer. And for the benefit of whom? Cui bono?

Who benefits? Bureaucrats? I know it's some sort of Zeitgeist that I really don't know the numbers of.

Is it billionaires—people who are smart, who put themselves up as the white knights of the environmental movement, from their corporate jet? You'd probably find that their tax affairs were based in Singapore and they were resident in Monaco. The beneficiaries of the wealth of all of these caveats on things such as your electricity—your swindle factories—don't reside in Australia; a lot of them reside overseas.

So, in some of these things, I just wanted to show you how perverse some of these offsets are. You talk about a housing crisis—and the member for Parkes did a brilliant speech before, and I recommend it to those who want to see some of the examples of how ridiculous this is. At Denman, I'm trying to help with an aged-care facility.

They are going to extend it into a paddock. It is rubbish country, with a couple of dead trees—a rubbish country paddock. They had to spend— Mr Repacholi: They gave them $13 million or $11 million— Mr JOYCE: I'll take the interjection from the member for Hunter.

As he well knows, they had to put $3½ million to offsets to build aged-care units. So you know what they did? They didn't build as many units, which means that people didn't go out of their houses, which means that other people didn't have houses to go into.

In a very specific example, it shows you how obscene this policy is, in that you would say to people: 'No, we're not going to have aged-care units. We're going to send your money off to'—I don't know—'Ningaloo Reef for some environmental offset.' Right now we have tens of thousands of acres in the Upper Hunter where the cattle have been removed and they're just going to plant trees— Ms Penfold: Cooplacurripa.

Mr JOYCE: On Cooplacurripa, in the seat of Lyne, they used to have 8,000 head of cattle. Eight thousand head of cattle—they're gone. That means there's pressure coming on the jobs of the meat workers who used to cut up the 8,000 head of cattle.

That means the trucks that used to transport those 8,000 head of cattle are losing out. That means those shops that used to make money out of the people who had cattle on Cooplacurripa will lose out—the hairdresser; the tyre business. And for whom?

For the Zeitgeist. And do you offer anything back? No.

You give nothing. Unless we are going to evolve into a higher form of termite, this is not much use to us. And that is happening to place after place after place.

This is perverse! We are actually putting up a policy to reduce the production of food, so that, after we've absolutely butchered the electricity market, we're going to butcher the food market. Why would we do that?

Hand in glove with that, we're always seeing that they no longer believe in coal-fired power stations—they're evil—and they're always, with a wink and a nod, having a shot at the coalmining industry and coalminers. It's always the case that they're running down the blue-collar workers that the Labor Party was born to look after. That is who you were supposed to look after—blue-collar workers.

But you've given up on them. There's only a handful—two or three—blue-collar workers left in the Labor Party. Mostly they're bureaucrats or staffers or whatever, but they're not people who've worked with their hands; they're not people who've worked outside.

They just don't exist anymore. That's an item of history—that that section of the Labor Party was there. You say you got a lot of votes.

You got about 34 or 35 per cent of the primary. Mr Repacholi: More than you got! Mr JOYCE: More than us, I grant you that.

But I'll tell you what: I would be really careful of that vote! I'd be careful of standing behind that vote. Here's another example.

We were going to run out of water for the city of Tamworth. We had only 40,000 megs in the storage, and, when we applied to increase the storage—which I got—we had to break the offset laws, because of the Booroolong frog. I thought that frogs lived in water; I thought the frogs would be happy.

But apparently they weren't. And it was serious. People got terribly upset, because their investment in the Booroolong frog was more important than 70,000 people in the city of Tamworth having water to drink.

It is almost a sort of Kafkaesque and alternative universe that we have created—this mad type of philosophy which works at complete odds to not only the regional areas but to the rights of the farmer, to the prosperity of small regional towns and villages, to the strength of our nation and to the maintenance of what is fundamental. We talk about a housing crisis, and you shut down the timber industry.

We talk about the cost-of-living crisis, and you shut down the coal-fired power stations and say you've got to use the most expensive form of electricity in the world, as shown—which is intermittent power. We say we believe in pensioners—yet you make them pay multiple millions of dollars in the small country towns for environmental offsets. Then you go to some sort of branch members' meeting and everyone's bleeding all over the place about how important this is for the environment.

Go up to Denman and explain to the aged-care facility why you are taking $3.5 million dollars off them for a paddock. Why would we do this? Why do we do this?

This brings us to the question of where we go from here. Once more: the timber industry is very important. It's very important for the member of Lyne's seat.

It's not so important for mine, but it definitely has a role. We somehow have to get sane people to cut a deal that helps industries such as timber and allows more of a streamlining so that we are not completely tied up in red tape. But we also have to, in that process, start putting some ring-roads around the intrusion into our private property rights that you have dealt us.

The member for Hunter says it's the state governments; the state governments do it to us because they don't have to pay just and fair compensation. But the Commonwealth government is the source of the primary legislation and the primary targets, with all the international targets they want to meet. They're the beneficiaries.

The state governments are the implementers, and we are the poor bunnies who pay the price.