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Labor switches reef weapon to fight farmers

AFTER a decade saying climate change was the greatest danger to the reef to justify killing coal, the Queensland Labor government now focuses on farm run-off to justify attacks on farmers.

I recently called on both the Premier and the Prime Minister to withdraw funds from the Reef 2050 Water Quality program and use the money to support the farmers trying to rebuild the Queensland economy. I was surprised to get a letter from the Premier saying run-off was one of the greatest threats to the reef when we have been told for years the biggest threats all came from climate change caused by coal mining, including warmer seas, higher sea levels, acidic oceans, and (first more and then fewer, but more intense) cyclones. They have changed the scientific “consensus” story because they need to pivot and start attacking a different part of the community.

Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, in her letter rejecting calls to redirect Reef 2050 funding, said the “Queensland Government accepts the established scientific consensus that land run-off is one of the greatest threats to the GBR”. But last week in Mackay, I met with leading reef scientist, Dr Peter Ridd, who not only rejected the notion of science by consensus but also refuted claims about run-off affecting the reef.

“My group took more measurements of sediment on the reef than any other group, put together, it does not get out to the reef, except for once or twice every decade or so,” Dr Ridd said. “They claim that the fertiliser causes Crown of Thorns starfish outbreaks, but a lot of this evidence is highly dubious. The most distant reefs, which are the Swains Reefs, which are a couple of hundred kilometres off here, that’s the area where there has been the most persistent Crown of Thorns starfish outbreak yet it’s the furthest away from the affected run-off. And in Western Australia, where there is no agriculture, there are Crown of Thorns outbreaks. So this idea that the run-off is killing the reef is just completely ridiculous and, actually, when you look at the data, the coral growth rates have not changed in the last 400 years. We know that because coral grows like tree rings and you can drill holes in them and you can go back with these really great big corals you can find out what they were doing many hundreds of years ago. There has been no change in growth rates since agriculture started on this coast. If farmers were putting all this poison into the water, the growth rate should reduce. They’re not reducing.”

By diverting money to fight an ideological war against a problem that doesn’t exist, the focus was shifted from the real environmental threats faced by farmers and the wider community. The major parties, at both levels of government, are spending taxpayer money on this ideological attack on farmers when they could be funding the fight against real environmental threats such as Giant Rat’s Tail Grass and lantana.

We have a wide variety of feral animals and noxious weeds having a direct impact on the environment, on farmers, production, and our economy, but it seems the socialist agenda of demonising farmers is the vote winner in the south-east corner. The majority of the population and votes is in the south-east corner where people are very insulated from the real world and the economies that drive the state. But if, heaven forbid, the socialist agenda was ultimately successful, there would be no mining royalties to build their tunnels, there would be no food on their tables, and there would be no clothes in their walk-in-robes.

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Recession raises urgency on new mines

Fast-tracking Central Queensland coal mines is the quickest and easiest way for Australia to fight its way out of the recession. The Federal Government conceded last week that Australia had entered its first recession in 29 years, on the back of a summer of bushfires and the pandemic shutdown.

There’s only one way to create large-scale employment in this recession, and that’s to open up big new coal mines at the double. We need development on steroids, and that means immediately approving those six stalled mine applications in the Galilee Basin.

It also means annihilating all those bogus bureaucratic barriers that have delayed approvals by as much as eight years.  Any left-wing activists who stand in the way of these thousands of jobs must be shown to be boulders in the road to economic progress.

Official Gross Domestic Product figures released last week show that Australia’s Economy shrank by 0.3 per cent in the March Quarter. GDP is the total value of all goods and services Australia produces. Queenslanders don’t need to hear the official figures to know that the country is in recession. We already have locally some of the highest employment in Australia. Bushfires, drought and COVID-19 were the main causes, other than mine layoffs over recent years. But some export mineral prices are right at the top of the cycle. Failure to act now to open up these mines would be economic betrayal.

There are two key parts to the economy: export and domestic. One Nation is already taking the State Government to the High Court, to open up borders with the rest of Australia. And that will take care of the domestic part of our economy – however late. Opening up mines will take care of exports. Pauline Hanson seems to be the only leader in Australia with a handle on what local developments mean to jobs.

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