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Vikki Campion: Cops deployed against farmers as Australia devolves into a police state

Why analyse the lack of methods or supplies available to firefighters when all the PM wants to do is use motherhood statements to thank the volunteers, writes Vikki Campion.

NSW RFS concerned over the upcoming bushfire season

It’s summer fire season with yet another PM who turns out for the press conference to proffer thoughts and prayers, but didn’t give a lot of speeches about planning for fires beforehand.

Any fire investigator, like my father Peter Campion was, will tell you it would help if the government would allow sensible fire-fuel management techniques such as firebreak construction and maintenance, grazing, slashing, and cool-season controlled burns.

It would help, if they actually built dams, which would require rewrite of environmental laws, rather than the current practice of filling them in once they are declared a national park, leaving only far away town and farm dams for firefighting purposes.

The recipe for destruction in out of control, high-temperature wildfires is a combination of high fuel load and limited capacity to control it.
The recipe for destruction in out of control, high-temperature wildfires is a combination of high fuel load and limited capacity to control it.

The recipe for destruction in out of control, high-temperature wildfires is a combination of high fuel load and limited capacity to control it.

At one fire in Ogunbil, in northern NSW, this week a chopper was flying 50km to Tamworth town water and 50km back to the blaze with a bucket off a long rope.

The planned dam at Dungowan, one of a whole swag of dams that the Albanese government pulled the funding for, would have been moments away, accessible by fire truck had it ever been built.

But why analyse the lack of methods or supplies available to firefighters when the PM wants to use motherhood statements to thank the volunteers?

BULLYING OUR FAMERS IN THE NAME OF PROGRESS

We have gone from arresting pregnant mothers to threatening to arrest farmers who have the temerity to ask what corporations are doing on their property.

So soon after nightmarish government overreach during Covid, we have hype overstepping logic.

In rural NSW, farmer James Petersen is told he can no longer go onto parts of his farm without an induction; he has to get a workplace health and safety lecture before he accesses a section of the paddock that he has been going to since he could walk.

When cops arrived at his door, it wasn’t to protect his rights, but for the threat of arresting him, to give muscle to private security guards enforcing compulsory acquisition of his land for an intermittent power transmission line from one state, which has blown up it’s baseload power, to another state with a policy to do the same.

Private enterprise relies on private ownership but, in this socialist wonderland, the government-backed corporate bully rules. We have devolved into a police state on behalf of the Zeitgeist. Again.

Farmer James Petersen has to get a workplace health and safety lecture before he accesses a section of the paddock that he has been going to since he could wal.. Picture: Ash Smith
Farmer James Petersen has to get a workplace health and safety lecture before he accesses a section of the paddock that he has been going to since he could wal.. Picture: Ash Smith

Remember when they arrested people in parks for having a picnic, when they incarcerated people in their flats for weeks, and padlocked the playgrounds, and the politicians told us this was a moral good and fooled us into handing over our freedoms?

Now the state is effectively chopping up farm businesses to build transmission lines, to launch us into a doomed experiment that Australia will prosper on a total energy diet of wind and solar and feed other nations on its green energy.

A farmers’ rally against transmission towers. Picture: Zoe Phillips
A farmers’ rally against transmission towers. Picture: Zoe Phillips

Mr Petersen is not an isolated case, as the intermittent power industry will try to paint.

But he is a brave one for speaking out when most have been kicked into submission, who whisper what happened to them but won’t want their name published for fear of further reprisals.

Farmers clash with Transgrid over transmission towers

Security guards, obviously part of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s 600,000 promised regional “green jobs”, are deployed to intimidate those who resist the transmission lines, and landowners who lock the gate.

Videos were posted of AusNet contractors cutting a padlock to gain access to a neighbour’s property.

This is your teal-driven “progressive change”.

Farmersprotestt outside Parliament House in Melbourne. Picture: Zoe Phillips
Farmersprotestt outside Parliament House in Melbourne. Picture: Zoe Phillips

Like others, for Mr Petersen, the compulsory acquisition process all starts with assertions.

Don’t worry. This won’t hurt a bit.

It will save the planet.

Then your lambing paddock is cut off, milking ewes die of mastitis trying to access their young who’ve run under Transgrid’s fence.

Primary producers who have worked their whole lives, sometimes for generations, to pay off a farm, have had no choice in the government chopping huge chunks out to hand to a corporation.

If this compulsory acquisition were for a lifesaving hospital, or crucial to the nation’s defence, we’d at least understand it.

But this is theft of thousands and thousands of kilometres of land, defilement of the right of private ownership, an economic knife to the guts of farm businesses, all for a highway to a dry swimming hole.

We are deploying cops on to farmers to take a business that does work, and rip it up to build something that does not.

All so politicians can parade around in Question Time telling people how clever they are to address “global boiling”. Test the veracity of their authenticity.

A farmer drives his tractor beside transmission lines. Picture: AusNet
A farmer drives his tractor beside transmission lines. Picture: AusNet

If, once we have subsidised the destruction of Australian productive agricultural land for foreign “green” industries, will they resign if all the droughts, fires, floods, and cyclones they blame on climate change don’t stop?

If a dentist said they could fix your teeth and ended up pulling them all out and throwing them all on the floor, would you recommend them to your friends?

Yet all these politicians are saying they can change the climate.

So why won’t they resign when it inevitably doesn’t?

Instead of standing up for farmers, bureaucrats and politicians are on the side of energy companies because high-voltage power lines are apparently more important than growing food.

The giant transmission line stretching from South Australia to NSW and over Mr Petersen’s and thousands of other farms, the $2.3 billion Project EnergyConnect, ­­would not be needed without this perverse self harm we call the “transition”.

We must build transmission lines here, apparently, because South Australia has blown up their power station to rely on intermittent power, and we will be transmitting power from NSW, a state with a grand plan to shut down our coal power stations for intermittent power.

Just like Covid, the government’s first step is to call the police to those refusing to follow its doctrine.

Just like Covid, the government’s biggest weapon is to silence dissent.

Just like Covid, the apocalyptic projections will be proven, in hindsight, ridiculous.

LIFTER

Woolworths for allowing Australia Day inside its stores, with Australian flags mad here.

LEANER

Canberra, which has now decided rather than build dams to drink treated sewage.

Vikki Campion
Vikki CampionColumnist

Vikki Campion was a reporter between 2002 and 2014 - leaving the media industry for politics, where she has worked since. She writes a weekly column for The Saturday Telegraph.

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Original URL: https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/opinion/vikki-campion-cops-deployed-against-farmers-as-australia-devolves-into-a-police-state/news-story/c15841c3123e008a85e6756399a7d04b