Andrew Broad (Mallee, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have thought long and hard about what I am going to talk about tonight, and I thought I would update the House on a scenario, a situation, that has come through my office. Last year I had a guy come in to see me, and in conversation it became very clear that he was having a great deal of problems with bureaucracy. This was a farmer who did something that his father had done, that his grandfather had done—that is, plough the firebreaks around his farm, but putting it on the road. This is something that had been going on for a long time in his family, but he did not know that on 8 September 2012 those firebreaks had become listed grasslands under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.

We have a real problem in this country where our departments have not learnt how to communicate with our famers. He did something that he thought was the right thing. He thought he was protecting property; he thought, 'We are in a fire prone area'. Instead, he was threatened with an $800,000 fine and seven years imprisonment. He said to me, 'You know, I thought about it but I thought, "No, I'm not going to do it".' I have been head of the Victorian Farmers Federation, I know exactly what he was talking about. He thought the way to save his farm, the way to get away from the $800,000 fine and the seven years in prison was to do himself in, and that was because of the poor communication of our environment department. But he said, no, he is not going to do that.

I looked into the case for him. It was listed on 8 September 2012. In recommendations to the minister dated 28 August 2012 it said, 'You need to work with the local community and raise awareness of the listing'. Nothing was done. There was a fact sheet that came out in December 2012, and if you read through the fact sheet it makes it very clear that farming practices that do not require approval from the Australian government include the following, 'maintaining existing fences, roads, internal access and firebreaks'. So if you read the fact sheet, you can draw the conclusion that he had not done anything wrong.

He ploughed the firebreaks in March and April 2013, so it was five months after the listing. And when you read the very expensive investigation the department has done into him, which I will hazard a guess has cost the Australian taxpayer at least $40,000, the investigation even makes the point that you cannot tell whether those grasslands would be able to be identified as listed or not until spring, until winter, and he ploughed in autumn—and so it continued on.

I thought I would be very wise and I would bring the department down to my office, which I did. I brought down Mr Shane Gaddes, Assistant Secretary for Compliance Enforcement Branch, Department of the Environment, and Mr Drew McLean, acting director of the EPBC compliance section. We suggested that the department use this guy, Mr Trevor Trewin, to do some advertising so that we could talk about it—how he did not know there is this listing—but all they wanted to do was punish him. All they wanted to do was get some kind of fine, some sort of remittance against him. And while they sat there as public servants from Canberra probably on, I am guessing, $600 a day each, he sat there on his time. This is an area, Wycheproof, where they have not had any rain; there is a drought this year. We made sure we pushed the meeting back to February so that Mr Trewin could at least try to get some contract harvesting to get some dollars in.

There are many times that I am very proud to be an Australian, but when our government departments want to nail a guy to the wall for doing something that he did not know was wrong, when they want to threaten a guy to the point that he considers suicide, then we need to look at ourselves—we need to look at how we communicate.

One of the stories in my family history is about a great relative of mine from back in the 1800s. People were going to lynch a guy and my relative stepped in. He cut the rope and he said, 'I will not stand by and watch an innocent man hang'. I think the department needs to look at how it communicates, I think the department needs to look at how it educates landholders and I am very concerned about the heavy-handedness of the environment department in the way it has treated this person. It still has not resolved this case, and I hope it does resolve this. I will be working with the minister to resolve this very shortly.