Vikki Campion: Satellite spies will destroy farming as we know it

Sneaky new regulations will allow authorities to monitor farmers by satellite and prevent them from caring for their own land, writes Vikki Campion.

There is a vast difference between the government having road rules and the government having an official sitting on your lap with their hands on the steering wheel and their foot on the brake as you try to drive to work.

In NSW, regulations changed by stealth under the last state government – influenced by new climate tsar Matt Kean and others who perversely claimed to be Liberals and Nationals – will enable farmers to be monitored by satellite and prevent them from controlling woody weed infestations on previously cleared land to graze the stock that helps feed Sydney.

Apparently, if you cover it in black photovoltaic fields of glass or blow it up for a wind turbine, the same laws that handcuff farmers do not apply. However, remove a seedling that grew up after a bushfire and wait for a stiff penalty to land in your inbox.

While the state Liberals and Nationals brought it in, NSW Labor is pushing through moves that reduce land ownership to merely peasant tenancy. Farmers have to negotiate with the tangled mess of government bureaucracy to obtain permits just to get rid of weeds or collect firewood.

A draft native vegetation regulatory map, first published with as little publicity as possible on August 8, has been sneakily “made available” for landholder review. If you don’t respond because you don’t know about it, you apparently agree to it.

The draft native vegetation regulatory map — the yellow areas are proposed ‘regulated land’. Picture: nsw.gov.au

Vast swathes of farmland on the digital map are “regulated” in untouchable yellow or “vulnerable regulated land” in untouchable orange. Much of it will mean the operational farming country will become like a delinquent neighbour, pest-ridden and weed-infested but locked up by bureaucracy, which will decide which plants can be cut and why, from Sydney and Canberra.

If you force the farmers off the land, you’re also forcing off the people who cull feral pigs, wild dogs and lantana.

Drought is no longer the biggest threat to farmers, writes Vikki Campion.

Imagine if, for climate reasons, your garage was outlawed and enforced by government satellite observation, or you were fined for mowing your lawn, monitored by AI-enhanced satellite imagery of your yard and car.

Yet the Minns government has warned it will be doubling down on “better monitoring and reporting of Allowable Activities through satellite imagery and ground-truthing” of farmers.

In government surveys, more than 80 per cent of landowners said biodiversity was important to them.

Nature in rural life is not a vista only viewed on the nature channel or a computer desktop. It is the kangaroos in your yard in the morning and the birds on your veranda. It’s watching turtles, lizards, and echidnas grow up. It’s your children bringing in half the paddock stuck to their clothes. It’s recognising the beauty in the brutality, the awe of an enormous raptor ripping guts from its prey. It’s the closest thing we get to sanity. It’s our connection to God.

Even if they could, farmers would not cut down all the trees for the simple reason they live here too. That is why there is so much bush in the bush.

But this new map means landholders would incur a raft of fines if they don’t comply with obtuse and poorly defined guidelines.

Senator Jonno Duniam.

If the farmer identifies as Aboriginal, he could cut down trees for “cultural reasons”.

One landholder, who is white, doesn’t have that choice.

His entire property is marked as yellow on the map. He says he won’t be able to graze cattle any more and feels forced to hand his property over to the one group allowed to rip and woodchip as many trees as they want – perversely hosting wind factories just to pay back the bank.

That’s the latest from their cement landscape on Macquarie St, while on Parliament Dr, Capital Hill, the Albanese government’s pushing new green cops in a new federal Environmental Protection Agency, which at least has a Coalition figure in Senator Jonno Duniam raging against laws to create yet another bureaucrat behind a computer making decisions to save biodiversity without even coming to ground level to see it, or get muddy themselves.

How do you plan on feeding people, including the new migrant the Albanese government is bringing in every 42 seconds, with arbitrary targets to lock down 30 per cent of Australia’s land and sea by federal bureaucracy, policed by green cops, and then wrap it in another layer of state bureaucracy, policing via satellite every time a weed is killed without a permit?

How do you plan on housing these people, the 1.15 million migrants who have arrived in just 27 months, if the only metric for development approvals is environmental?

Taking local knowledge out of land management is a recipe for failure. Senator Duniam shares an example from Tasmania where land managed by experienced foresters is thriving, while an area handed over to environmental groups has become a gravel pit.

But apparently they know best.

Another proposed federal law seeks to force farmers to report scope three emissions from January 1, with farmers having to supply emissions data to banks, insurers, suppliers and customers.

They do all this for a pitch to Green votes in the most industrialised, least natural urban landscape in the cement hearts of the city.

Our farms have never been so under threat – and it is not the weather you need to worry about.

Do you have a story for The Daily Telegraph? Message 0481 056 618 or email [e-mail]