Queensland’s protected areas

THIS IS ABOUT “LAND, MONEY AND RESOURCE CONTROL”, NOT ‘SAVING’ THE ENVIRONMENT

Queensland Environment Minister, Meaghan Scanlon, recently announced the government’s purchase of 35,300 hectares west of Townsville, to be added to Queensland’s ‘Protected Area’ estate.

‘Lakes Station’, is “a massive and stunningly beautiful grazing property” in North Queensland that was owned by the same family for generations.

Scanlon said she will be making a lot more purchases in the region this year, as part of the government’s efforts to ‘protect’ more than 17 percent of Queensland by 2030.

In 2020, the Government set aside $28 million to expand the State’s ‘protected areas’ and today, more than 14 million hectares across Queensland are protected in some way.

Last year, around 33,621 hectares of high value ‘conservation’ land was added to Queensland’s protected area network.

Altogether, the network currently ‘protects’ an area more than twice the size of Tasmania.

Most of this land was once fertile farming and agricultural land.

THESE LANDS HAVE NOW BEEN PUT OFF LIMITS TO ANY PRODUCTIVE USE, PERMANENTLY. 

How much the government paid for the property has not been disclosed, although it was revealed that $1.829 million came from the Wyss Foundation, set up by US billionaire Hansjorg Wyss.

Wyss is the former CEO of Synthes, a medical device manufacturer, specialising in medical implants and biomaterials.

In 2009, Synthes was charged with 52 felony for illegally experimenting on patients, three of whom died.

Wyss sold the company to Johnson & Johnson in 2012 for $20.2 billion and now focusses on his chain of billion dollar Foundations and Medical Institutes.

Interestingly, the Wyss Centre in Switzerland is developing a fully implantable brain-computer interface that directly detects brain signals and then wirelessly transmits them to a computer for decoding.

Wyss and fellow billionaires, Bezos and Bloomberg, have committed $5.5 billion to buying up ‘high value’ land worldwide.

Wyss alone has bought up 27 million acres of farming properties in the US and turned them into conservation areas.

In 2018 he bought 200,000 acres of farmland in Australia’s Murray Darling Basin to create a “protected zone”.

Clearly, the biggest threat the environment faces today, comes not from the people who live there, but from all these rich billionaires and their ‘dark money’ Foundations, looking to swoop in and buy up all the rights to it – financialising nature for profit and control.

As the head of Survival International said:

“Let’s not be fooled by the hype from the ‘conservation’ NGOs, UN and public-private funders.  This has nothing to do with climate change or protecting biodiversity – in fact it will only make them worse”.

“THIS IS ABOUT MONEY, LAND AND RESOURCE CONTROL AND AN ALL-OUT ASSAULT ON HUMAN DIVERSITY”.  

“THIS PLANNED DISPOSSESSION OF HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE RISKS ERADICATING HUMAN DIVERSITY AND SELF-SUFFICIENCY”.