This shooting lies on the head of Bob Carr and the former Howard Government

by Robert J Lee

It had to happen sooner or later. A prying government official was shot dead on private property by an angry landowner yesterday near Moree in the north of New South Wales.

He was found on farmland assessing the actual number of trees that allegedly had been ‘illegally’ cleared by dryland wheat farmer, Ian Turnbull, aged 79.

The now deceased Environment Department employee, aged 51, had pushed Mr Turnbull too far.

A nearby neighbour told Cairns News soon after the shooting that Ian Turnbull was well respected in the community but had become embroiled in a long-running dispute with the State Government over vegetation management laws.

The neighbour said the elderly farmer “had enough” and was in effect forced into a corner because he was unable to clear his land to protect his livelihood.

Mr Turnbull has been taken into custody by police and will appear in court in September.

This festering sore infecting all farmland in the nation has been allowed to creep through the agriculture industry since former Liberal Prime Minister John Howard forced the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 onto the states.

Labor state governments had a ball. They amended their environment acts allowing their socialist regimes to halt forthwith any new agricultural development or vegetation management under the guise of biodiversity protection.

The ALP/Green nexus had a win of nuclear proportions, prosecuting farmers for the most minor infringement of their native vegetation statutes. Their victory in sterilising farmland was delivered to them by a supposedly conservative Liberal National Party Government.

The Queensland socialists had waited for years to take revenge on the National Party’s token squattocracy.

The owner of one of Queensland’s largest family run cattle operations, the late Graham Acton was fined $110,000 for allegedly clearing brigalow regrowth without a permit.

Hundreds of others were mercilessly hounded by ‘compliance officers,’ usually disgraced, former police officers whose bent was to trespass on private land and apply entrapment to catch hapless primary producers whose only indiscretion was to protect their property by clearing regrowth and noxious woody weeds.

Reminiscent of scenes of a Gestapo interrogation in Nazi Germany, a refusal by a landowner or any person present on the property to answer questions from these thugs resulted in immediate arrest and prosecution.

This is the modus operandi of a Labor Government and the dumbed-down city populace of the Sunshine State want to elect another bunch of international socialists?

It should be noted the present Liberal National Party Government disbanded the ‘tree police’ in 2013.

Bob Carr the communist

Vegetation laws introduced by the Carr Government in NSW, initially in 1995 and tightened up after the 1999 state election, stymied rural production for a decade and continue to thwart development to this day.

Former NSW Labor Premier and Federal Foreign Affairs Minister, Bob Carr

This ABC radio interview at SOS-NEWS with Bob Carr in 1997, after making amendments to the environment act, gave credence to cries of communism by farmers:

 

“We protected native vegetation and gave John Howard the right to boast about how Australia was protecting its Greenhouse targets.

“There are restrictions on private property rights. You stick a right to private property in your Constitution then you have a conservative court saying no you can’t place those restrictions on private landholders.

“Leave it to the parliament, leave it to a free society don’t congeal it in a final constitutional statute. Nobody can be deprived of their property arbitrarily, there must be compensation paid.

“Well that’s an invitation for a conservative leaning court to strike down, for example the measures that are protecting native vegetation on private farmlands.

“No government should pay compensation to farmers when they intervene to say you can no longer rip out your vegetation,” Carr stated.

There have been no moves to date by the Liberal Party Government in NSW to relax these laws.

The Liberal Party traditionally hates firearms. NSW farmers are now predicting their guns will go.

For our international readers, “welcome to Australia today.”