Sadly it took the tragic deaths of 4 Australians due to Optus’ second outage last month for the Albanese Government to bring legislation into the Parliament to properly establish the Custodian.
To mix metaphors, while it is always healthy and good management to not have all your (economic) eggs in one basket, sometimes regional development advocates fail to see the forest for the trees.
When mining occurs interstate on pastoral country the post-mining impacts are less pronounced as what we have seen at Douglas and Ouyen, and potentially at Dooen and other mineral sands prospects.
the Government can compel landowners and homeowners to step aside and let a miner use that resource. Some Mallee farmers are facing losing access to their homes for 40 years.
The Albanese Labor Government are behaving poorly, previously signalling Vietnamese workers would be available, but now postponing the Arrangement leaving horticultural businesses scrambling to find workers.
The scales are tipped against local communities - as one former mayor put it to me this week, why can a company can spend 6 years preparing an EES proposal but the public, and their council, get just 6 weeks to respond to a 6,000 pages
I am proud to have taken Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to task in Question Time this week in Canberra on behalf of Mallee farmers
While draconian new powers apply to VNI West to the east of your readership, there are some very important principles in play. First is the fundamental democratic foundation of personal property rights.
How bizarre that the Labor Prime Minister would tell the Ballarat audience that farmers ought to be treated with respect, when Victorian Labor had just legislated to take away their property rights!