Grass is also Green.
You may have heard of Peter Spencer, the desperate Australian farmer who went on a hunger strike to draw attention to the fact that government bans on clearing vegetation had stolen his assets and destroyed his business. Peter is just one of many Australian farm families reduced to desperation and even suicide by seizure or sterilisation of their land to satisfy the voracious green god.
The most massive injustice occurred a couple of years ago, when, as a sacrifice to the Kyoto god, the federal government conspired with state governments to ban vegetation clearing on all property, even freehold. This was done in an underhand way to allow the government to seize carbon credits from landowners without paying compensation.
Many well meaning people, while not happy with the tactics and the refusal to pay compensation for property seized or devalued, think that there will be some environmental or climate benefits to come from all this.
Generally there are none.
Even if extraction of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere was a good idea (and it isn’t), no tree can keep extracting it on a long term basis. Every living thing (including trees, grass, cows and humans) borrows carbon from the environment as it grows, stops extracting it at maturity, and hands the valuable carbon back to the environment when it dies and the body rots. Net life time extraction equals ZERO. It is absolute scientific nonsense to believe that trees can have a long term effect on so called greenhouse gases. Like everything politicians touch, short term appearances and secret agendas are preferred to long term reality.
Banning the clearing of scrub regrowth in our grasslands is also a backward step environmentally. Everyone can see and understand tree forests, but no one appreciates the grass forests beneath their feet. Natural fires created our grasslands long before humans occupied Australia. They are valuable environmental landscapes far more important to humans than the stupid carbon credit forests and eucalypt weeds now invading them. With closer settlement and excessive areas locked up by governments, fires no longer protect our grasslands and landowners must use machinery to maintain their grass. Preventing this is like telling a market gardener he is not allowed to chip weeds invading his vegetable patch. Every landowner tries to guard the long-term value of his land. No one has a monopoly on knowledge on how to do it. Some properties may need more trees, some less - if more trees are a benefit, landowners will grow them without coercion.
Does anyone seriously believe that a few green politicians and activists can devise one dictatorial land plan for every property from Longreach to Wagga and then use legal bludgeons, land confiscation and a desk bound bureaucracy to enforce the co-operation of landowners?
The Senate is currently carrying out an enquiry into some aspects of this massive land mismanagement. It is a bigger scandal than the home insulation scheme, and few politicians are free of blame. The Senate will be surprised at the injustices that will be revealed by this enquiry.
The Carbon Sense Coalition has (in some haste) made a Submission to this enquiry. We urge you to read it and print it out for friends. See it here.
Even if you don’t read it, open it and look at the pictures.
We must not let them sweep all this under the table again. We need your help to get this short note to every landowner, every media outlet and every politician. Pls help us spread it around.
And remember to tell everyone “Grass is also Green”.
Just when I think Australia, as per the new Heritage report on economic freedom, is a cool place to live, I hear stories like this. You guys now have better property rights than "we the people" of the United States. But then I read about property seizures to satisfy left-wing special interest agendas, and my hope for Aussies is flushed down the ubiquitous two gallon toilet.
ReplyDeleteIt's all about education. We need to gut the educational systems, otherwise we will become a mirror of Mao's China.
Generally the actual tenure is secure, that is to say, you are allowed to retain ownership unless the government wants it for a road, dam, and so on. The federal government is obligated under the constitution to pay fair compensation for land so taken.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately the state and local governments are not under such obligations, and worse still tend to use zoning town planning, and such things as vegetation management laws to restrict the usage of your land, and have no requirement to compensate affected landowners in any way for this.
We do not have 'eminent domain' laws at present although one state government (NSW) appears to be moving in this direction. Of course if you are denied the right to carry out normal usage of the land, you don't actually have any form of real ownership.
In the case of Peter Spencer, the actual laws were put in place by the state government at the behest of the Howard federal government which was used to mitigate emissions and allow the government to claim they were acting in accord with the Kyoto protocol. This was subsequently formalized by Rudd when he signed it. Peter has been trying to get compensation for loss of lively-hood for several years now but the government keeps arguing that as the restrictions were put in place by the states, he has no right to it.
Peter has by his actions brought the whole issue to the fore and has done a great service to the Australian public, and is something of a hero to those of us who value property rights and something of an anathema to the marxist greens and those who sell out to them each election cycle.
The major parties and most of the smaller ones over here are really Tweedledums and Tweedeldumses as far as lack of respect for rights is concerned. Unlike the US there is no strong concept of consensual government over here to keep them in check.
The site I linked to is well worth a look especially in the Groups section which gives a great coverage to the Peter Spencer story, Property rights Australia as well as climate skeptics.
The best way to flush down the communist thinking of Mao is to educate out people on what democracy really is and what it can do in the progress of the country. Perhaps the best way to describe this is a call for the upbringing of democracy in educational system. Ill put this on my list through schedule crystal report
ReplyDelete