Darren Chester (Gippsland, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Roads and Regional Transport) Share this | Hansard source

It is also about respecting the role the cattlemen can play in the future of sustainable environmental management through grazing and prescribed burns and about respecting the heritage of regional communities on both sides of the Great Dividing Range in Victoria. Given the huge deficit of trust that exists between this government and the Australian people, now would be a very good time to start showing some respect in this place for these people.

The Victorian government took a clear policy to the state election in 2010 that it would reintroduce cattle grazing to the Alpine National Park. The only thing the Victorian government has been guilty of is honouring that promise—the promise they made to the Victorian people that they would reintroduce cattle grazing to the Alpine National Park. There was strong support given to coalition candidates on both sides of the Great Dividing Range on this issue. It was a significant issue in the seat of Gippsland East, where I was involved in campaigning because it interacts with my own seat of Gippsland. I am not going to overstate the importance of the issue but it was a significant issue. It was certainly one that was raised in community debates and in various forums during the campaign process. The mountain cattlemen themselves invested heavily in that election campaign. I understand they made donations to the Liberal Party and to the Nationals in that election campaign in the order of $20,000. I could be corrected on that. So the mountain cattlemen themselves thought this was important enough to support candidates in that campaign and to support the issue.

Mr Mitchell interjecting—

The member for McEwen cannot help himself on this issue. He is talking about cash for comment. What he does not understand is this has been a long-held belief in the coalition parties in Victoria. It is not about cash for comment, member for McEwen; it is all about making sure that people who want their voice heard in this place have the chance to have their voice heard, and that is why today is very important. It is a very good opportunity for the people of Gippsland East and other state seats to have their voice heard in this place.

You would think that the Australian Labor Party would learn some lessons from the past on the issue of cattle grazing in the Alpine National Park because this issue has a very dark and murky political background for the Australian Labor Party. It goes back to 2005 when the former Bracks government first banned the cattlemen from the high country. On that occasion we had the memorable scenes of mountain cattlemen and other supporters of their cause marching through the main streets of Melbourne. They were marching up Bourke Street on their horses, wearing their Driza-Bones, bringing the issue to the state parliament of Victoria. They brought attention on the steps of parliament in Spring Street to what they thought was a great injustice. That caused an immediate political backlash to the state Labor government at the 2006 state election. The Victorian Labor Party lost the seat of Morwell, which is in the Gippsland area, and lost the seat of Narracan, also in the Gippsland area. Again, I am not saying this was the only reason they lost those seats but it was a pivotal issue in the campaign. When you consider that the member for Narracan was the chairman of the committee which recommended that cattlemen get kicked out of the high country in the first place, you can understand the point that I am making.

The Australian Labor Party has already paid a political price for its attitude to the cattlemen in Victoria. I can tell you now, it will pay an even heavier political price in the future if it continues to go down this track of showing no respect for the mandate given to the Victorian government by the voters of Victoria. The people have spoken clearly on this issue and their voice needs to be heard in this place. I acknowledge it is not a unanimous view but there is a strong majority in the directly affected communities that have given the Victorian government a mandate for its policy, and I believe it should be respected.

I recognise that this is not an issue which is necessarily at the front of mind for all other members of parliament. There are 150 seats around Australia and there are probably only a handful of seats which are directly affected by this issue. But where this issue has been tested in the court of public opinion, where the contest of ideas has taken place on the ground, overwhelmingly the position adopted by the Australian Labor Party and the Greens has been rejected by the people in those communities. In those areas where people are most directly affected and have the most information about how this issue plays out in a community and a political sense, they have rejected the Australian Labor Party and the Greens. You only need to travel around regional Victoria on any given day to see vehicles with yellow and green stickers on the back of them that read 'Mountain cattlemen care for the high country'. That slogan has been around for more than 20 years. It is a strongly held view in the communities that are directly affected by this issue

The contention that I am putting to the House today is that the Victorian government has every right to commission a trial into the strategic use of cattle grazing to reduce the impact of bushfires. This is a region that has been devastated by bushfires in the past; there is no doubt it will be affected again in the future. We have an obligation as members of parliament, both in this place and in state jurisdictions, to do everything we can to reduce the impact of fires on lives, property and the natural environment. I consider this issue to be another example of the grand hypocrisy of the Greens on natural resource management issues. The Greens leader travels around Australia campaigning for territory rights because it might assist in his campaigns to install gay marriage and euthanasia, but he is happy to trample on state government rights on this natural resource management issue.

We should be used to that level of hypocrisy, because the Greens have proposed a bill previously in this place targeted squarely at removing the rights of the Victorian government to take action to assess the strategic use of cattle grazing as a tool to reduce bushfire risk in Victoria's high country. The thing that most offends the people who live in these communities and that most offends me is that when the Greens put out these motions from the leafy suburbs of Melbourne they do not talk about the thousands of brumbies, the introduced wild species like deer, the wild dogs or the noxious weeds that are in the Alpine National Park and that should be targeted by any bills or motions the Greens would like to propose to assist the environment in the Alpine region. The Greens do not even seem to understand that the scorching bushfires in areas which have not been grazed and which have not benefited from prescribed burning are more devastating to wildlife than anything the mountain cattlemen have ever done in more than 150 years in the alpine regions.

To put it very simply, regional Australians have had a gutful of city based Greens telling them how to live their lives. Now we have a Sydney based minister for the environment who simply joins in the chorus and sings the same songs as the Australian Greens. The Greens have never created a job in regional Australia and they are a direct threat to a host of our traditional industries, including the cattlemen, the broader agricultural sector, commercial fishing, mining and power generation and recreational angling. The action taken by this minister to override the Victorian government on this issue demonstrates this government's complete lack of respect for regional Australians. I am sure that we will hear today all the usual lines from the Minister for Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities. He will say that a national park is not a farm and that only a select few graziers get to use the high country runs. We have heard all the lines before; I look forward to them being rolled out again today. To that I say in advance to the minister: a national park is not meant to be a weed infested wasteland either. It is not meant to be scorched every few years because we have failed to reduce the fuel load. A national park is not meant to be full of feral species in uncontrolled numbers. The minister failed to mention those issues when he first started attacking mountain cattlemen. I concede that in more recent times the minister has raised those issues. I think he has realised the folly of his ways from those early days when he first ran his campaign against the mountain cattlemen and now he does talk more about the weeds and other feral species. But I urge the minister to concentrate on those issues, because they are doing far more damage and are of much greater environmental significance to the alpine region than anything that mountain cattlemen have done in the past or will do in the future. If the minister wanted to do something that was actually important for the Alpine National Park, and the Victorian high country more generally, he could really focus his efforts in that area. I urge all members in this place not to vilify the mountain cattlemen and their families.

The minister and I get along quite well, and I do not mind if he attacks me. I do not mind if he criticises my party and me, if he gives me heaps. I just urge him to show a great deal of respect to the people that are represented in this debate today. I urge him to show some respect for the cattlemen, because every time a member in this place attacks the cattlemen it is very personal for these people and their families. When anyone in this place says to these people, 'You are wrong,' they are actually saying their fathers were wrong, their grandfathers were wrong and even, sometimes, their great-grandfathers were wrong. You are denying their whole cultural heritage. So by all means, Minister, give me your best shot, and I am sure you will—you need no encouragement; you have needed no encouragement in the past—but I urge you to respect the families and their culture and their heritage, because they are very proud of that heritage. They believe that they have done a great job in the alpine region, that they are part of the solution for the future and that they should not be thrown out like yesterday's newspaper.

We are talking about a state government trial of cattle grazing involving just 400 cattle in a 26,000-hectare national park. The point that must be remembered throughout this whole debate is that the cattlemen have run cattle in that region for more than 150 years. It was only after the cattle had been there for more than 150 years that it was deemed to be in such pristine condition that it was worthy of becoming a national park in the first place. In the mid-1980s the wise heads of the day decided that this region was so pristine and so magnificent that, even after 150 years of mountain cattlemen using the territory, it was so good they could make it a national park. That to me is the core of the issue. There was not a level of environmental damage that warranted any other action being taken by the governments of the day. They believed on merit that the alpine region was in such good condition that it should become a national park. I contend that the minister himself did more damage to the region when he rushed up the hill on a wet day in his four-wheel-drive to get his photo taken in front of a deer wallow. I contend that he did more damage then than the mountain cattlemen would do under this trial of 400 cattle spread across 26,000 hectares of national park.

There is generations of knowledge about practical environmental management in the hands of the mountain cattlemen and their families. This is knowledge that you cannot learn in a book; it is knowledge that has been passed down from one generation to the next. I believe it deserves to be respected and passed on to future generations. I believe that grazing can actually help to reduce the fuel load in the alpine region, particularly if it is used in a strategic manner in conjunction with other fuel mitigation efforts.

In the past, the mountain cattlemen have not just relied on grazing as their approach to reducing the impact of bushfires; they have also been heavily involved in prescribed burning. I think we have lost our way in relation to prescribed burning in Victoria and in many other parts of Australia over the last several decades. We have seen in more recent times a government in Victoria that is more committed to reducing the fuel load. Part of the reason for the devastation of the Black Saturday bushfires is that we did not do the prescribed burning that we needed to do in the decades leading up to it. We had a massive amount of fuel build up in many parts of Victoria, and that led to the devastation. We need three things for a fire. We need hot and windy conditions, and we are always going to get that in Victoria because it is a fire prone area. We need a point of ignition, and we are always going to have that—whether it is a lightning strike or some idiot with a match, that is going to happen. We need a fuel load, and there is always going to be fuel. The only part of that fire matrix we can actually affect is the fuel load. We are always going to have hot, windy days and we are always going to have a point of ignition. But we can reduce the fuel load and reduce the intensity of those bushfires when they occur—and they will occur again.

This is all about using cattle in a strategic way to reduce the impact of future bushfires. Those opposite will say it does not work. But, as I have told the House previously, even the ACT Labor government agrees to the approach of using cattle in a strategic way to reduce the impact of bushfires. This year the ACT government intends to graze more than 7,000 hectares across 76 sites to protect ACT residents from bushfires. Let me say that again. The ACT government believes cattle grazing does play a worthwhile role in reducing the fuel load in the ACT to protect property and lives around the ACT, so they are going to use cattle across 7,000 hectares at 76 different sites to protect ACT residents. But we are not allowed to use cattle to protect lives and property in the natural environment of the high country because this minister and this government are directly overriding the Victorian state government and they are directly overriding the clear mandate that government received from the Victorian people.

I do not expect those opposite us in the chamber today to change their mind. It is no surprise to me at all that they will vote against this disallowance motion and do the bidding of the Australian Greens—and they will pay an electoral price for that in the future. The reason I do not expect them to change their mind is that more than 40 of the members opposite actually rely on Greens preferences for their political survival. They need Greens preferences to win their seats, so they will do whatever is necessary to protect their political careers. But I appeal to the crossbenchers to think very seriously about this issue and give due respect to the mountain cattlemen and their cause. I repeat that, for more than 150 years, the mountain cattlemen have been allowed to run their cattle in the high country and they have actively worked to protect and enhance the environment. They are not the problem; they are part of the solution. The heritage, the culture and the knowledge of the mountain cattlemen, which has been built up over more than 150 years, is an asset to our community and they should be respected, not vilified, by the Labor Party and the Greens in this place. I thank the House for the opportunity to raise this important issue and I again urge the crossbenchers to think very seriously about what we are talking about today in relation to the future of the alpine region and the practical land management skills that have been applied for more than 150 years.

See this speech in context