GRIEVANCE DEBATE

Mr JOYCE (New England) (12:33): The grievance I want noted today is the continual encroachment of socialism into the private assets of people on the land. It is done by caveat upon caveat and under the mask of things such as the EPBC Act, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. What we are seeing in the most recent iteration of this is that not only have we lost the value of our assets, without payment to the state, but now the EPBC Act puts on further regulations that diminish the value of our assets without any payment to ourselves.

To give you an example, we were of the belief that if you paid off a free title asset over generations that free title actually meant something. It meant that you had the minimum of encumbrances on that asset. You could do with it as you wished as long as it was not obviously blatantly obscene such as—I don't know—killing koalas or something like that.

Everybody abided by that. It wasn't an issue. If you go out to the country now, or get away from the city, you will overwhelmingly see forests.

You'll see wildlife. You'll see all the things of nature that were there close to settlement in 1770. But the government believes that that was not enough.

I believe that what sits behind this is not an issue about environmentalism. It's an issue about socialism—that, piece by piece, authority over your land is divested from you and vested into the state without payment. One of the peculiarities at the moment is that we were able to clear for fence lines.

If we put in a fence line—which we do all the time for better management of country, to actually exclude sometimes stock from areas that might be of greater natural worth—you could take the D6 dozer through, clear your line and put up your fence. You can't have fences under trees because, obviously, branches fall down and smash the fence. Unless you're there every day, it becomes a continual process.

It's just a very inefficient way and the wrong way to do it. But now they're saying that maybe that's not the case and that federal laws will come into place. Even though you're abiding by state laws, you mightn't be abiding by federal laws.

However, they gave us the guarantee at the start—Senator Watt did—that this would not be the case. Now we're seeing that the authority of the department, the officers of the department, are basically saying: 'The minister is not correct. We can come onto your place and fine you.' In some instances, it would be quite serious.

In some instances, you may go to jail. To show you how perverse this is, on a block that was owned by me and my wife, we were given colour codes. You could deal with blue without having to ask permission.

With yellow, you had to get permission before you could do it, but you could then continue on with what you were doing. With orange, it was highly unlikely that they'd ever give permission. With purple, it's like you go straight to jail.

The only part you could deal with without asking for permission was the blue section of your place. When I got the map of our property, the only section that was blue was my lawn. Outside my lawn, I would have to get permission for anything that I do.

The whole tenor of that asset had changed. No-one had paid us for it. No-one had offered any compensation for it.

No-one actually even gave a clear explanation about what it was about. This is perverse. We try to put it into a metaphorical form so that people in a town can understand it.

If I were to turn up to a house and say: 'Look, from this point forward, you're not allowed in the second bedroom. You can only go into the lounge room if you've got written permission, and the bathroom can only be used for two days in the week.' You'd say: 'Well, why don't you just buy my house? You've completely destroyed the value of my asset.' And they say, 'No, this is on an environmental basis.' You look at it and say, 'No, what you're actually doing is straight out socialism.' This creates the grievance.

So many people now in regional areas feel that the government is blind to their issues and that ownership is now beholden to a person in a faraway town called Canberra, who's never been a farmer and has no understanding about the sacrifice that's made over generations to pay for an asset. Yet they seem to have more power than the person who actually paid the asset off.

In fact, their power is backed up by law. In fact, if required, it's backed up by the police. In fact, if it has to, it can get you sent to jail.

This is one of the mechanisms that is stirring people up. They're so angry. We are seeing the EPBC Act come into place, divesting us of our assets, making us, basically, at risk of a criminal act on our own land that's been owned by our families.

One of the perversions of this is that a group of people who don't have to abide by this are the intermittent power precincts, the swindle factories. They don't have to abide by it. They do as they like: turn up, strip country, knock over all the trees.

It's changed now, but, at the start, for koalas—blunt force trauma if they were injured when the intermittent power precincts knocked over a tree. We would go to jail for that, but they don't. This is the hypocrisy of it.

There are two completely different standards. Apparently the intermittent power precincts are to help the environment. You will never get greater damage to the environment than what you see under the auspices of the creation of intermittent power precincts, and why is it done?

It's done so a select coterie can become exceptionally wealthy through capacity investment schemes. That's what underpins it. On the coast it's reef legislation, and for areas out west if you don't have a control of regrowth—with things such as butterbush and walga—you actually turn areas into an environmental desert because nothing exists under those trees.

In our areas we have a thing called invasive cypress pine. If you can't touch it and if it just grows up, nothing grows under it. There is no wildlife, there are no kangaroos, and there are no wallabies.

There's nothing. There are no koalas—nothing. It's a change to the whole dynamic of the ecosystem, which was never there before.

We're seeing that as part of the process as well. So what are we going to do in Australia to try and turn the ratchet—not keep it where it is—from the left back to the right to reinstall private ownership as a primary part of your freedoms in Australia so that, when you own a land freehold, it means you actually own it freehold. It is not a case of you being some sort of tenant on a bureaucrat from Canberra's property.

It is actually your place. When are we going to realise that the management of so much of this land over so many generations has left in a form where—if you're going to bring these regulations in now, why do you think the families never destroyed it beforehand? Because they didn't want to.

They didn't want to, but now they feel that they are compelled to comply rather than work with their better angels. These people were never, ever going to destroy what they take as so important as part of their lives. Every Monday morning, I go to the top of the hill behind my house to do Sunrise for Channel 7.

One of the reasons I do that is to show the Australian people that overwhelmingly the countryside is not desecrated. There's the bush, there are the fields, and there are the creeks. It is there.

We have managed it. We have looked after it. But what's happening to us now is not about environmentalism; it's about socialism.

There's disdain for a certain group of people, where a person can own a private asset and can, at a later stage of their life, from their endeavours, hand that private asset over to other members of their family for them to be the beneficiary of generations of work. I commend this grievance to the chamber.