Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

That is the problem, isn’t it? Senator Nash says the revised amendment ‘echoes’ the original amendment. We do not want an echo; we want substance. It is the National Party that is the echo—of yesterday. The substance has gone overnight. All we are left with is an echo. What are the farmers going to think about that? Let me just explain this to the committee. Farmers at Caroona—and these are not deep green activists; these are quality, long-term, committed farmers on the Breeza Plain—have gone out of their normal routine productive lives to blockade BHP Billiton coming onto their land to drill for what is obviously going to be a massive subterranean mining operation. Their last resort was to put themselves in the way.

Let me tell you that they did not do that lightly. They effectively may end up on the wrong side of the law because the natural law of protecting their farmlands comes first and because they are outmanoeuvred in Sydney when it comes to the legislature, which empowers the mining corporations to cut their fences and move in and do exploration. This process, by the way, is being echoed, to use the senator’s term, up on the plains near Dalby, where there is another mining exploration underway which farmers object to. And we are going to see more of it.

What the farmers sensibly want is a study of the impact on their farms of that mining if and when it comes. That is what the amendment that I brought forward, through the grace of an earlier amendment of Mr Windsor in the House of Representatives, will do. But it is being emasculated by the National Party and the Liberal Party here today. You have got to feel for those people sitting with their tent and their stalls and their display and what it means to them out in the bush south of Gunnedah today. They were not able to come here overnight and fight what they know is a manifest wrong. They are disempowered by this process. Who is going to argue that these are not quintessential Australians standing up for their patch of land, being overrun by—a minister objected to this term yesterday but I will use it again—the big end of town. It is unfair, and they deserve the numbers of representatives who stand up for the bush to be in here today. A big issue was made of that yesterday, that the coalition was giving them the numbers. I am not shy to say that I will make a big issue of the fact that those numbers evaporated overnight and we are left, in Senator Nash’s terms, with an echo of the defence of those people’s rights which we heard here yesterday.