Bundarrah Days

Latrobe University's Department of Agricultural Sciences is running an Alpine Ecology Course at Falls Creek.

For around $1000 you can have your ear bashed with bull by none other than green pop scientist and self appointed alpine guru, Dick Williams, and you get to stay in a ski lodge complete with en suite bathrooms.

You can study the alpine eco-system in comfort and you won't have to take the good with the bad, expose yourself to the vagaries of weather or place yourself in any situation that might provide a real experience that could lead to a greater understanding of what you're trying to learn.

But never mind, after a couple of comfortable with little bush walks armed with a butterfly net and a magnifying glass you'll be yet another green crusader with the expertise and knowledge to win a management position with Parks Victoria.

I keep getting asked why the Bracks Government decided to ban alpine grazing.

It wasn't because of any alleged cattle damage to the Alpine National Park and that's a fact.

So, why did they do it? Because, according to Labor MP, Joe Helper, who answered that very question at a publc meeting at Merrijig two weeks ago, "government's have a sovereign right to do what they want." I won't debate why Mr Helper's answer was wrong here, suffice it to say he wasn't terribly enlightning.

The real answer required some detective work but there was no shortage of clues.

There were 18,000 votes belonging to deer shooters up for grabs in a few marginal seats across the state and the Brack's government coveted them. So, it sought a deal. It would give the shooters access to national parks and strike a concordat which would "preserve and enhance the hunting experience" and even improve habitat for feral deer on public land.

"But hang on...whoa...let's not put the cart before the horse or we'll be shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted," they thought. "What if we upset the greens?"

So, off they went to the Victorian National Parks Association and the greens and said.... "This is what we want to do." The greens and the VNPA were horrified. "There's nothing in this for us," they said.

"Ah" said the government, "but there could be. We know how much you hate the cattlemen so how about we do them in, marry the shooters and stick the knife in their guts a bit down the track?"

"Aha, now you're talking," said the greens and the VNPA. "That's our language - we'll back you to the hilt and we'll shove the blade in up to the hilt too when the time comes."

That, in essence, is what happened. It may not have been quite so graphic but it was close enough.

It won't be long before the executive members of the Australian Deer Association discover that the relationship with Hymie Bracks and Twitter Thwaites isn't as cosy as they thought and that they've actually shot themselves in the foot.

I'd love to know what Ted Baillieu is up to.

He leads the party I wanted to vote for but with his support for almost every leftist social policy in existence I doubt The Liberals can be trusted to make good on their promise to restore alpine grazing if they win the November election.

Ted seems to think he can defeat Labor and The Greens by making a left turn but it seems to me that it's more a case of if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

I can just hear drill sergeant Ted shouting the order...."move to the left in threes - left turn!"

I thought Opposition's existed to give voters a choice come election time but the Opposition Leader is taking bipartisan politics to a ridiculous extreme.

The Victorian Liberal Party is a lost cause. It seems that the only thing that might wake them up is a savage electoral flogging and the loss of still more seats. That possibility is looking more and more likely.

Jeff Kennett, where are you?

This nation needs to engage in a debate about our environment and what it means to our national identity.

In the past few months what it means to be Australian has been a constant topic of discussion in newspapers, on television, on internet chats and bulletin boards.

The question is constantly asked: "What is an Australian? Is there any Australian culture or heritage? What the hell is it?" Many city people and newcomers to the country, who don't know any better, say there is none, unless it be football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars. But the reality is somewhat different. Our heritage and culture is one of history's most successful - the peaceful assimilation of people from all over the world to a land in which a "fair go" for everyone has been enshrined in the national ethos.

People at political websites du jour like Crikey would heap scorn on this and hang the proverbial on me but if the naysayers are correct then what is it about Australia that makes it such an appealing destination for people seeking a new life? Surely not a widespread belief that the nation is a cultural wilderness?

In its essence our heritage and culture is one of nation building - the creation of a nation with egalitarian ideals, a pioneer in justice for the working class, social welfare and women's emancipation.

All those who have contributed to the effort deserve to have their place in our national consciousness and identity. Tragically, however, the building blocks of our national character are being dismantled and the future is uncertain.

The very first element in our nation building effort was coming to terms with the unique Australian environment. We were all bush dwellers in those early days, from the coast to the never ending horizon of the outback, and it was in this environment that our national character was shaped. These days, however, we are largely a nation of urban dwellers and are rapidly losing touch with what made us uniquely Australian in the first place.

It is only the existence of "the bush", bush people, bush workers, farmers, outback drovers, mountain cattlemen and so on that keeps us in touch with our roots.

Environmentalist Tim Flannery says people are shaped by their environment and that is absolutely true of what we have come to know as the Australian character. But today, with the trend to locking up the bush in national parks, Australians are being denied the interaction with the environment that made them Australian. The bush today is a place to look at, not a place to to live in and co-exist with. Our green land managers want us to set ourselves apart from the environment and simply look on it and admire it whenever we feel in need of a break from the office, the factory or the building site.

Do we, as a nation, want to look back as the old bushman did in Banjo Paterson's "An Answer To Various Bards?"

Then his face was somewhat browner and his frame was firmer set—
And he feels his flabby muscles with a feeling of regret.
But the wool-team slowly passes, and his eyes go sadly back
To the dusty little table and the papers in the rack,
And his thoughts go to the terrace where his sickly children squall,
And he thinks there’s something healthy in the bush-life after all.
But we’ll go no more a-droving in the wind or in the sun,
For our fathers’ hearts have failed us and the droving days are done.

Green management policies are ultimately destructive in both environmental and social terms. By banning traditional practices which perpetuate our heritage and keep it alive more harm is being done to the nation that could be done to the environment by allowing them. In any case activities such as alpine grazing and logging are two practices that could be valuable management tools. And there are others.

This trend to lock up the bush is doing it no favours. Tim Flannery hearkens back to the "beautiful lie" of Terra Nullius - the belief that Australia was an unmanaged wilderness before European settlement, a wilderness that will look after itself if only it is left alone.

The truth, as every bushman knows, is different. The Australian landscape had been farmed and modified by the hand of man for 40,000 years by the use of fire before European settlement. It was no more an environmental wilderness than Australia is a cultural wilderness.

Tragically, our bureaucratic land managers still haven't caught on to that. They persist in thinking in terms of an unmanaged wilderness and their policies, as Flannery has pointed out, are harming biodiversity in our National Parks.

Thus we have a triple tragedy unfolding in Australia today. Firstly, the loss of a living bush heritage that helped keep us in touch with our national character which we are consequently in danger of losing; secondly a deterioration and loss of biodiversity on public land and thirdly the loss of renewable resources such as timber to mindless conservation policies and ultimately uncontrollable wildfire.

Meanwhile, in the cities the debate continues about what it means to be Australian. The Deputy Prime Minister warns people that the failure to have enough children is likely to change our national composition. Internet forums discuss the prospect of Australia becoming an islamic nation. Newcomers to the country are telling us there is no Australian culture.

Deny Australians access to their environment and in the end there will be no "Australians." Is that what we want?

It's about time we stood up and showed them that there is indeed an Australian character, an Australian heritage and culture and an Australian people and that we are prepared to fight for our survival.

Tim Flannery, scientist and environmentalist, has long been a reasonable and consistent advocate of true conservation in Australia.

Not for him the "lock-it-up in national parks and call it a wilderness" approach.

In his book, Beautiful Lies, Dr Flannery looks at the issue more deeply. He traces the decline in the Australian environment back to the traditional belief that Australia was never managed environmentally by Aborigines - the Terra Nullius approach which saw Australia simply as a wilderness left to its own devices.

That was the prevailing view of bureaucratic adminstrators and land managers (still is where public land is concerned) but it must also be recognised that many settlers, having become familiar with the bush, attempted to follow Aboriginal methods of management by fire but were prevented by conservation minded government land managers.

The fact is, Dr Flannery points out, that Australia was a managed environment. For 50,000 years Aborigines had used fire and hunting practices to modify the land - a primitive form of management to be sure but one which the continent had adapted to.

In a recent interview Dr Flannery was critical of the rush to proclaim new national parks because of lack of management.

"What really worries me is that these national parks are really marsupial ghost towns," he said." The native fauna and flora are dying off in these parks, again because they're just not being managed."

"So we've got to just have a radical rethink of the way we manage national parks, how we maintain the biodiversity in them. The oldest national parks have now lost a lot of their keystone species. Royal National Park, south of Sydney, has lost its koalas and its grey kangaroos and its platypus and its greater gliders in the last couple of decades, and you just can't have that kind of thing going on. We have to get better at managing them."

Asked whether the problems were because modern land managers hadn't learned anything about Aboriginal management Dr Flannery said that fire was a critical issue.

"You can't burn 97 per cent of a national park as has happened in Royal (NSW) recently, without big consequences. The whole concept, too, that you can create a little national park as a tiny fragment of what was once a much more widespread habitat and hope things will stay the same. It's again just another lie, and we have to actively manage these remnants, if you want, of Australian nature in a much more proactive way."

Funny, isn't it, that a leading environmental scientist and a mountain cattleman can reach similar conclusions independently?

Labor MP's Joe Helper and Ben Hardman claim they were outraged by state government advertisements which used faked photographs to prove cattle damage the Alpine National Park.

The pictures were part of an advertising campaign initiated by Environment Minister, Twitter Thwaites, last year to justify the eviction of Mountain Cattlemen.

Messrs Helper and Hardman told a public meeting at Merrijig last week that they demanded immediate withrawal of the photographs from circulation.

It's interesting though, that at the time neither MP made a public comment expressing their alleged outrage. The real outrage here is that these two Members Of Parliament chose to remain silent while a group of country Victorians were falsely vilified by a government of which they are representatives.

It's also interesting that Mr Helper claims there is no proof that the deliberately misleading advertisng campaign was instigated at a time when the government was still telling Mountain Cattlemen no decision had been made on their future.

Mr Helper knows that is a lie. The government was still assuring us no decision had been made up to two days before the announcement was made and by that time the photographs had already been doctored and advertisements laid out in the newspapers.

Thwaites is a silent assassin but it will be a revelation to hear him twitter when he falls victim to the same Machievellian methods he employs to knife his opposition.

If the lunatic Victorian Greens achieve the balance of power in Victoria's Upper House at the next elections stand by for a rebellion in country Victoria.

I can't seriously contemplate life in a state where animal rights are equated with human rights, and where animals have legal rights not extended to human children in their mother's wombs, even days before birth.

This is surely the most ridiculous political policy ever conceived in this country. Should we dignify it by offering any more comment than the ridicule it warrants?

And in addition to this bulldust $100,000 for every local government region in the state will be made available for services to gay and lesbian youth.

Meanwhile, heterosexual youth who will be raising the next generation of Victorians will continue to be neglected, teenage girls will continue to get pregnant and abortion clinics will get fat off the deaths of Victorian babies.

Lunatics are entitled to political representation but they should not be entitled to be the representatives.

One is tempted to hope that The Greens will be having their next party convention in a native forest when a firestorm hits.

The Victorian Greens Party has released its policy on animals in the lead-up to the November state elections.

As you might have expected it's mostly a load of inflamammatory nonsense that involves abolition of the status of animals as "property" and elevates them to that of "beings" with recognisable legal rights.

Whether animals will themselves will be bound by law to recognise those rights is not mentioned. And how animals are to be informed of their rights is not mentioned.

The implications of these policies are more pressing for people, however. If an animal can no longer be legally considered property how can it bought or sold? Conversely, if it can be sold and it has rights basically commensurate with those of human beings does this mean the Greens approve of slavery as a concept?

Wouldn't it be nice to privatise Bob Brown, the other Green senators and all Green candidates and flog them off to a Sudanese slave driver at a price he can't refuse?

Victorian Labor MP Joe Helper says he knows intuitively that cattle spread weeds.

And last Sunday at a public meeting at Merrijig he appealed to his intuitive beliefs in support of his government's ban on alpine grazing.

Those who attended the meeting in the hope of hearing the real reason the Bracks Government destroyed the heritage of the Mountain Cattlemen were left disappointed. Mr Helper frustrated the audience to the point that he was accused of obfuscation.

Not that he could he speak with any authority on the issue, at one point appealing to the fact that he was a motor mechanic by trade. Nevertheless, one would have hoped that as a Member Of Parliament charged with voting on the future of alpine grazing, he would have acquainted himself with a few facts first.

However, as he more or less confessed to the meeting it was his intuitive feelings and the seed laden cattle pats he saw in his mind's eye that turned him against us.

Challenged to name a noxious weed that cattle feast on Mr Helper settled for thistles but then asked where the thistles were on the high plains he had to rely on his intuition again.

After frustrating the audience with his government's spin it was Mr Helper's turn to become frustrated. He claimed that alpine grazing had never been a right, even when it was a licenced activity. It was an agistment licence to graze a few cows.

Again he was wrong. Fourteen years ago in a case brought by Tom Groggin Station, Supreme Court judge, Mr Justice Nathan, handed down a judgment in which he said in reference to alpine grazing licences:

"The entitlement referred to in the Act is again a word which has a plain meaning and it is "to give title." Entitlement means exactly that. It is a right, not a privilege."

When that fact was pointed out to Mr Helper he suggested a QC should have been invited to the meeting in his place. It seemed to have escaped him that it was his government, with his support, which legislated to evict us.

Mr Helper did admit one fact which is not likely to please Environment Minister, John Thwaites. He said that the legislation ending alpine grazing did not annihilate existing licences but rather banned their renewal once they had expired. That is good news for an existing licence holder.

He also asked what kind of process Mountain Cattlemen would like to see put in place to assess alpine grazing that would lead them to accept an outcome.

The answer is a truly independent review panel with half the members selected by the government and half by mountain cattlemen. Previous so-called Independent Panels have been selected soley by the government with the objective of obtaining a desired outcome. Such panels are the source of "the science" the government used to justify our eviction. In future we might choose to call it "intuitive science."

Steve Bracks today referred to the Kokoda Trail as a sacred site. That was odd, coming from him, but I happen to agree.

Here is an acknowledgment that white Australians are entitled to their own cultural heritage and sacred sites, even outside of Australia.

So, now that this light has penetrated Mr Bracks' head I wonder if he is prepared to acknowledge the rights of Mountain Cattleman to our sacred sites and to our heritage and culture. We know the answer, don't we?

Bracks is a man who will be relying on every vote he can shake from greens, deer shooters and others to keep his grip on government this November. And he still hates the cattleman for costing the ALP control of the Upper House in 1985.

No matter that there were sons of mountain cattle families fighting in New Guinea and elsewhere. My mother's cousin, whom she was close to, was beheaded at Sandokan prison camp while trying to save his brother from a vicious beating.

He and and all the other Australian servicemen were fghting for the Australia they loved and the freedoms it enshrined. So am I. So is the Mountain Cattlemen's Association Of Victoria.