Uber-Conservative Oz Politician Now Left Of Peter Garrett On Environment

[hatrack]

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"People keep talking about the historic "drought" afflicting the eastern states. It is not a drought. It is far more serious than that. Even if good rains come they are not going to change the fundamental problem. The weather pattern has changed. Having mined and altered and channelled and stripped the landscape for the past 150 years in an impossible attempt to re-create Europe, we can't even see the obvious - that when you profoundly change the landscape, when you destroy vast amounts of balancing energy in the soil and vegetation, you change the weather.

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The process is going to make for some strange politics. Take, for example, Senator Bill Heffernan. He can see the disaster unfolding. And because he can see it unfolding, he is now to the left of St Peter Garrett when it comes to the environment. While Garrett is locked into the union-dominated Labor Party, Heffernan has moved to the left of Labor on big environmental issues. Take his views on that most totemic green cause, the clear-felling of old-growth forests in Tasmania, protected under the bipartisan Regional Forests Agreement: "It's a disgrace," Heffernan told me. "They could end clear-felling of old-growth forests tomorrow. And they should. They are over-committing Tasmania's forest resources in a way they will regret in a hundred years ... And in their haste to clear the timber they waste and burn and haven't even done any work on the impact on the water system. Places like Launceston are having a dramatic change in the stream pattern. It could be a long-term disaster."

Yes, Wild Bill Heffernan, the Junee farmer, Irish-Catholic conservative and political knee-capper, who sits impregnably at the top of the Liberal Senate ticket for NSW in the next federal election. He also happens to be driving two Senate inquiries (he is chairman of the Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport Legislative Committee) into national water policy and sustainable forestry practices, and thus inevitably colliding with a raft of ugly statistics and ugly satellite images.

From this vantage point, and after a life on the land, Heffernan can see disasters, all different but all related, unfolding in every state. Sitting in his office in Parliament House, Canberra, late at night, he ticks off the big problems, using exasperated language which has not been vetted by his mate, the Prime Minister: "In Tasmania, they burn everything that's there and 1080 them, it's just a mournful operation and the process of pushing down old-growth forests is a huge waste. They recover only about 10 per cent of the old growth as saw logs, the rest just goes to the chip mill."

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