Letter to the Editor

Dear Editor,

During debate in the House of Representatives last night on a Government motion to ‘protect’ our so-called ‘national parks’ from being grazed by starving cattle, I was prompted to observe how some inner-city suburb MPs are all apparently experts in both North Queensland’s cattle industry and the region’s national parks.

If these people are so naive as to believe that a three-strand barbed wire fence will stop cattle who are hungry and have no grass, then these people must believe in the tooth fairy as well.

Whilst that might be humorous, the subject of national parks in North Queensland is not.

What they ostensibly refer to as national parks in North Queensland are, to the contrary, actually nurseries for destructive feral animals and wildfire-starting weeds, such as prickly acacia.

And if there ever is a destructive animal for which something needs to be done, it is the pigs. In one area alone between Tully and Innisfail we were getting 800 pigs a year.

It’s a combination of these feral pests that are destroying our landscapes and killing off Australia’s most-endangered species – like the Julia Creek Dunnart.

Before they were neglected national parks, the land was sustainably managed by people like First Australians or pastoralists, who were grazing cattle for nearly 150 years.

On a cattle station, you burn regularly. That has been the blackfella way, and then the whitefella got it off the blackfella, so we have been burning for all of our history.

These traditional land managers, who for more than a century have worked hard to battle the threat of feral intruders to their livelihoods and the northern communities they support, have been left powerless and devastated as they watch our magnificent remote areas become nothing more than pig pens.

But this pandering to the ‘greenie monster’ by successive governments has future economic ramifications too.

Thanks to the greenies having managed to tie up Shelburne Bay, we now have a dune worth some $4000 million a year to the Australian economy blowing into the ocean, and it will all be gone within 100 years. They put a national park straight over the top of the Laura coal basin, so we will not be able to use any of the coal in that basin.

Now, it is mostly First Australians who live there. They are the ones who would have been getting the jobs.

Sincerely,

Hon Bob Katter MP
KAP Federal Leader