Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

If you want biodiversity, if you want the trees back—and I live in the area—it's really simple: just take the stock out and leave it alone, and the trees will come back. I remember a former Prime Minister saying: 'This is marvellous. Who planted these trees?' I said, 'They just grow back.' I'll tell you what else will come if you just shut up areas. You'll not only get trees but also get blackberries, briars, pigs, goats, dears, parkinsonia, prickly acacia, parthenium weed, rubber vine, camels, donkeys, Indian minor birds—you'll get the whole gamut. Basically, the evil arc of pests and vermin also come into the land. What we've seen in so many of these areas—and I live in the area, unlike the honourable member's smiling. I bet London to a brick they don't live in a regional area. But what they never do is actually look after the area after the person's handed it over.

National parks are a curse to live next door to, and I live next door to one, because what happens is there's just a removal of any responsibility to do with it. But, you get, in an urban environment, the virtue. They get the virtue. They feel good about it: 'I've saved New South Wales!' There's a new line on a map, a new National Park. Do you go there? Rarely or probably never. Do you understand that, now you've locked this land up, apart from a line on the map, it's not really managed? Do you realise that the rating base of that town, of that shire, now has to be massively reduced? Do you realise that the people who were formerly employed on those properties as fencers, contract musterers and shearers are no longer there, therefore their kids are no longer in the school, therefore they're no longer buying at the shop, therefore there is no longer the requirement for the medical facilities in the area? Do you realise the economic changes that you foist on an area when you start this sort of virtue chasing of shutting down areas?

With this bill, there was also substantive change in the whole nature of tenure, which is so important. What we believe in on this side of the chamber is the primacy of private ownership. If you lose that, you lose your security, because it means that you don't really own title.

Why that's important—and I take the interjection from the honourable member opposite—is this also has an intrusion into so many other titles, whether it's freehold, whether it's leasehold, whether it's grazing homestead perpetual lease. There is an undertaking when you sign these up that there becomes an intrusion into this title. Within the intrusion into this title, you also have to comb back other things like cultural agreement, which comes into where Indigenous rights, therefore, come onto the land. And we're seeing this right now in places like Fraser Island and what people are allowed to do and not allowed to. We've seen this on beaches that have been closed off. This is not the Australia we want. In Western Australia right now, if you dig a hole more than 50 centimetres down, you have to get cultural approval.

See this speech in context