Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

We've all attended those functions in our electorates, often on Australia Day—one of our most important national days—where we've gathered together and sung 'I am Australian', that 1987 Bruce Woodley from The Seekers and Dobe Newton from the Bushwackers hit which unites us all and makes us feel really patriotic. The second verse goes like this:

I came upon the prison ship bowed down by iron chains.

I cleared the land, endured the lash and waited for the rains.

I'm a settler.

I'm a farmer's wife on a dry and barren run

A convict then a free man I became Australian.

The way we're going, we're going to have to change a verse or add a verse, and it'll go something like this: 'I was elected on the back of a whole heap of Greens votes. I sip lattes, weave baskets and welcome illegal boats. I'm a protester. I'm a tree-hugger on land that was once farmed, a dissident who bludges off the taxes of hard-working Australians.' That's where we've got to.

We hear members opposite from the Australian Labor Party, the party that once represented those hard-working Australians, come in here and use words in the Environment Protection Reform Bill 2025. There will be consequences and strong enforcement—stronger enforcement. It's almost as if they want to take the big wack, the big stick, to those farmers, who we celebrate in that song, 'I am Australian'. Heaven help if my father, the late Lance McCormack, were still alive, because I know when he took over the farm in the 1960s he dynamited trees out. He was one of those people who cleared the land, and he did it so that he could grow wheat. He did it so that he could help feed a hungry nation. Our farmers not only feed Australians; they feed many others besides.

I love this book. It's called Water Into Gold. It's the seventh edition, from 1946. It was written by Ernestine Hill, and she was a great Australian—1899 to 1972. She was a journalist, a travel writer and a novelist. She was known for her various travels across Australia and her writings about diverse landscapes and cultures in the country. In this particular book, which, coincidentally, ironically perhaps, is water damaged, in chapter 4—I want to read this into Hansard, because it's so, so good—under the heading 'Apostles of Irrigation', she writes:

'In the early eighties'—that's the 1880s—'the fiery breath of a terrible drought seared the land. Western New South Wales and north-western Victoria became barren wastes. Even the meagre 10 inches of rain a year that are heaven's tender mercies in this part of the world were denied. Day after day, for five years, the sun was a copper gong in cloudless skies, earth cracked with thirst and pallid with heat. Green had faded to brown, and little enough of that. The puny wheat withered on the stalk, and the stock were famished. On the Murray and Darling stations, the sheep died in their tens of thousands, perishing out on the plains, lying in rotting heaps on the very riverbanks, bloated with water and too weak to climb again for the feed they could not find. Skeleton poverty had the pioneers in its grip, and settlers everywhere were leaving their farms—stark madness to send others to follow them.

And, as though drought were not enough, a pharaoh's plague of rabbits descended. The five fluffy, lovable little English rabbits that Captain Phillip had brought in a hutch to Port Jackson in 1788 had become 500 million. An army of occupation marching west to the conquest of a continent, eating it bare as a billiard ball, honeycombing it to nightmare and multiplying all the way along. At dawn and at twilight, the sheep pastures were a moving blur of rabbits. Every blade of hope went down before them. They demolished the leaves of the shrubs and the bark of the trees. They burrowed into the sandhills to devour the roots of the few cast-iron tussocks that held them together, leaving a trail of starvation and [inaudible] of blowing sand.'

That was the 1880s. And yet we've managed the rabbit infestation. It wasn't just Captain Phillip; I think he probably gets a bad name there. A fellow called Thomas Austin also brought a whole heap of rabbits in for sport later on, in the 19th century. But the point is this: we have politicians in this place, and in Macquarie Street in New South Wales, in particular, at the moment, who think that they can turn a land of droughts and flooding rains into something that resembles Europe all the time—of green hills and running rivers. We know that Australia has ephemeral streams. We can't turn Australia into something that it wasn't designed to be. Nature will always have its way—'her way', I should say; it's Mother Nature—and she will always beat any efforts of Australians. We could do a whole lot more. We can build a whole lot of more dams. I tried that. I built one in Tasmania with the good help of the then Liberal—and still Liberal, thankfully—Tasmanian government. Thank you to Michael Ferguson and others for helping me in that task. Trying to get other states, mainland states, to go with me on that journey was in fact, unfortunately, a lost cause. But the point is this: we've got a country where we now think it's wise and sensible to lock up and leave it to feral pests, rabbits and weeds, all in the name of nature.

We've also got this propensity, whenever we build something in this nation—and we used to be a nation of builders—to think we have to have these offsets which perhaps aren't just covering the piece of land that is being taken up by the actual infrastructure we're constructing but indeed a whole heap more. It is just a nonsense, because what we're actually doing with these offsets is punishing companies, developers and people who want to construct such things as, heaven help us, aged care homes by having offsets somewhere that's not even in proximity. In this piece of legislation, if they don't do that, well, as the Labor members say, there will be consequences! Stronger enforcement will follow. It's like the Labor Party don't want to build anything. They've got a housing minister who talks about the prospect of building a million homes. Good luck with that! At a state level, they're preventing every forestry company and developer from ever trying to succeed.

I resumed representing the Snowy Valleys Council in the Riverina electorate in May this year, having represented it previously between 2010 and 2016. Seventy per cent of the economy in the Snowy Valleys Council area—Tumut, Talbingo, Tumbarumba—is underpinned by forestry. But, if Labor have their way—they're totally against forestry. Why? I don't know. How are they going to build a million homes if we can't have our own successful, reliable, consistent and sustainable forestry industry providing the timber for those homes? Under Labor's policies, they'd have it all imported from overseas. To hell with the rainforest wherever it's coming from. To hell with Indonesia or whatever country that, quite frankly, is going to provide those imports to build those million homes. What a fantasy! What a fallacy! A million homes, really? Come on. Get real!

Then, of course, we've got this legislation before the House which talks about offsets, and then we've got green activists. Green activists! They are blocking every single project, whether it's gas, iron ore or forestry. No matter what project is proposed in this country, there are activists who want to stop it, activists who want to abolish it and activists who are just loving this sort of legislation, because it's right up their modus operandi.

And we see in the Daily Telegraph only today that almost $11 million of taxpayers' money—that's all our money that could otherwise be spent putting in more aged-care beds, beds in hospitals, potential desks in classrooms to be filled by students and all those sorts of things that once were important—has been ploughed into the activist Environmental Defenders Office, helping fund bids to scuttle multibillion dollar gas and gold projects. Labor, how do you feel about that waste of money? This legislation before the House tonight ain't going to stop that! It's not going to prevent that!

We're seeing professional protesters everywhere, and they're protesting about everything. The previous speaker was talking about these wonderful people who came outside his electorate office. He invited them in, and good on him—I've done the same with the protesters that used to be 'Climate for Fridays' and then became 'Peace for Sunday' or 'Sundays for Peace'. They stopped protesting about the climate when Labor took office in May 2022 because, apparently, the climate became a whole lot better when that occurred. Now the same people—they're just Greens—are protesting about Gaza. Now they think that, on Fitzmaurice Street in Wagga Wagga, we can solve a problem that has been going on for decades, if not centuries, in the Middle East. Some of their actions have been, quite frankly, despicable. But we move on. What I would say to the previous speaker is that he perhaps ought to tell those protesters who turn up every week outside his office, 'Here's a thought: why don't you spend a few hours volunteering your time at a soup kitchen, at a Carevan, at St Vinnies or doing something like that instead of wasting your time outside the—

Debate interrupted.

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