Unshackling the greens legacy

Humphreys boatyard near the Southport Yacht club, like hundreds of boatyards around the nation, was a boat storage area either side of an ancient railed slipway and cradle. Inside the slipway shed were lots of used maritime accessories. Old propellor shafts, rudders, engines, gearboxes, all spread in an untidy mess amongst paint tins, rollers and assorted junk, which appealed to yachties such as myself.

Living on a boat near this slipway in the late 1970's, I got to know John quite well. Being involved in marine surveying, I knew many of the boatyard and slipway operators on the northern NSW and Queensland coasts.

So it came as a surprise, that during the 1980's, the national environmental authorities decided to check the levels of "environmental vandalism", by doing core soil samples around old boat slipways and boat storage yards, in search of trace elements of copper and later tributyltim (TBT) based antifouling.

Antifouling paint was in those days, as is today, very expensive and so it was that low budget yachties like myself, used the paint very sparingly.

What was mischievous about these investigations, is that the core samples were quite deep and while people had already moved on to more environmentally acceptable antifouls, the old ones were just not available any more. All these old boatyards were found to have "minute trace elements" of copper antifouling at depths of two metres and certainly no threat to the environment. A contamination order was then issued, not just to the owner of the boatyard, but to the holder of the mortgage.

This of course, encouraged these miserable, scrooge-like bankers to behave more miserably and withdraw the loan facility and I watched in dismay as many of these boatyards, mainly family run, closed down forever.

The emergence of the Greens party from its roots in the early 1980's in Tasmania, saw the creation of a plethora of rules, regulations, and environmental science courses everywhere.

While the persuasive narrative of saving the environment was spruiked by the Greens, I watched the nation's coastline become imprisoned in national parks, sensitive fish habitats, mangrove no-go areas, no-go anchoring areas and no-go fishing areas. The amount of these no-go areas has risen proportionally with environmental bureaucrats in Federal, State and local councils and are inversely proportional to the industrial waterfront investment around the country.

1996 saw the Greens flexing their jaw muscles without engaging their brains, by demonizing dredging on the Brisbane river. They convinced Mayor Soorley, that if he stopped the one hundred years of dredging, which provided most of the sand and aggregate to make concrete, bricks and paving and thus providing the cheapest house building in the country, that this would turn the color of the Brisbane river from a tea brown, to blue. Fifteen years later in 2011, the shallowing river exacerbated flooding and killed 38 people in a heavy rain event and the river, like every other river on the planet to this day, is still tea brown.

The same result happened in Lismore, after stopping the river dredging (see my Speccie column "Lessons for Lismore", Nov 2022) where one hundred years ago, a 60 metre vessel could navigate all the way up the Richmond and Wilson rivers to Lismore, due to a constant dredging program. Not any more!

The rising Greens vote empowered their true ambition of destroying the nation's prosperity and defence capability, with ideologists such as Senator Sarah Hansen-Young of South Australia and in 2016, the Great Australian Bight Protection Bill 2016 was introduced by the Greens to prevent offshore oil and gas research.

In 2017, Hansen-Young was a key motivator in placing SA as the world's renewable crash test dummy and wasted no time in demolishing their last viable coal power station, the 520mW Port Augusta unit, to lock in their ideological pursuit of an energy future free of fossil fuels.