John Williams (NSW, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

In speaking on the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Amendment Bill 2013, I have to say what a lot of politics has been dragged into this whole debate. Yesterday I listened to Senator Waters talking about food security. The Greens do not care about growing food, and their history proves that. Go back to the Native Vegetation Conservation Act—of which Senator Heffernan would be well aware—which the then Premier of New South Wales, now Senator Bob Carr, brought into New South Wales to stop farmers ploughing even country that had not been farmed for 10 years. They could have grown some wheat crops on it. They could have grown more food. New South Wales could have yielded a lot more food to human consumption. But no—the Native Vegetation Conservation Act brought that to a complete stop, and it was driven by the Greens in the New South Wales parliament. Then Premier Bob Carr said his government would be the greenest New South Wales had ever seen. That he was. He cuddled up to the Greens and put all the environmental costs on to the farmers.

It is interesting that it was the then minister, one Kim Yeadon—John Laws used to call him by his full name, Kimberley Maxwell Yeadon—one of Premier Carr's senior staffers, who drove the SEPP 46 and then the Native Vegetation Conservation Act, with no compensation to farmers when they could not grow food, driven by the Greens. And who was one of the chief advisers? One Senator Penny Wong. That is where she came from, in her pre-Senate life. This was a Greens-Labor stooge of a policy to blame those terrible farmers, those 'environmental vandals', as they refer to the farmers—who actually feed everyone in Australia plus millions of other people around the world.

That is what has come into this whole debate, once again: politics. It is not about the environment; it is about politics. We have seen the Greens just recently up at Liverpool Plains, the fly-in fly-out visitors to regional Australia. None of them live out there.