Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

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 in your house that I'm going to pass a piece of legislation that says that 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.

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