Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party, Shadow Minister for International Development and the Pacific) Share this | Hansard source

And that's important, and I certainly take that interjection from the member of the Gellibrand, the minister at the table opposite. Veterans are important, and I know we've introduced legislation today about veterans. Nobody knows this more than the member for Herbert here, a fine veteran himself. I'm a former veterans' affairs minister, so I certainly don't need to be lectured to about how important our veterans are. We need to look after them. But we also need to look after those people who feed the veterans. Let me tell you a little fact: some of those veterans go on to become farmers once their uniformed service is over. Once they're done serving in our Air Force, our Army or our Navy, they actually go and take up the land—just like they did more than 100 years ago in Griffith, in Leeton, in Narrandera and in the Mirrool Creek area. But what are we doing? We're putting more legislation in to stop them doing what they're doing.

Even in my own electorate, we've got Riverina landowners up in arms as destructive solar farms are taking valuable, vital, prime agricultural land. That land is being covered with solar panels, and they say it's good for the sheep! Go figure: it's good for the sheep! It might be good for their leasing arrangements so that these Pitt Street farmers don't have to worry about the land for the next 10, 20 or 30 years but, ultimately, those solar panels are going to have to be recycled, and at the moment we can't do that. They end up in landfill, and that's got to be bad for the environment. But, then again, we've got Greens political party Senator Mehreen Faruqi. The environment's all well and good until it comes to her own Port Macquarie property. She's planning to bulldoze dozens of trees to subdivide a Port Macquarie investment property into three luxury rentals.

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