I HAVE been thinking about private property rights this week in Canberra, as I proudly stood with Mallee farmers who descended on Canberra to have their voice heard in Question Time about the VNI West transmission line project.
These farmers are first in line for an anticipated nationwide 28,000km of transmission lines and 85m towers looming over their farms and landscape.
Labor’s Rewiring the Nation aims to appease inner-city climate concerns with a vast array of pylons, panels, wires and turbines, out-of-sight, out-of-mind in regional Australia away from Labor or Greens voters.
Farmers are entitled to be heard, and by no means should their private property rights be trampled as collateral damage.
In the northern part of Mallee, one landholder has lost a section of his land to Indigenous land rights, and some Voice advocates argue that rent or other changes to private land rights will one day be demanded.
In recent weeks, constituents from all over Mallee have written to me about the ACT Labor government’s takeover of Calvary Hospital. This faith-based institution has operated for 52 years in partnership with the government but an ACT parliamentary committee deemed last year that the hospital’s “religious ethos” was a barrier to accessing some services.
The territory government is taking over the hospital despite concerns raised by the Australian Medical Association, Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation, Australian Christian Lobby and the Catholic Church. The Catholic hospital has 70 years to run in its contract.
It seems no matter how many voices are raised, if you’re not in lock-step with Labor ideology, you won’t be heard and your property and constitutional rights are at risk.
The next election cannot come soon enough for voters to tell Labor, as Darryl Kerrigan said in the 1997 film The Castle, “Tell ’em they’re dreamin’.”
