FOUR candidates, including Member for Northern Tablelands Adam Marshall, Country Labor candidate Debra O’Brien, Green candidate Mercurius Goldstein and Independent David Mailler, were put through their paces about CSG and mining on farmland at Thursday night’s Meet the Candidates evening at the Riverside Centre. The question came from the audience and was directed to Mr Marshall, who admitted it was a very vexing issue.
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“We shouldn’t have extractive industries where it competes with what we know to be prime agricultural land, and that it doesn’t interfere with aquifers, water tables or potable water use,” Mr Marshall said.
“There’s enormous conjecture even within the science community about water connectivity, and we’ve seen that highlighted this week. In this electorate we don’t have any CSG activity.
“We’ve got a number of sleeper licences, which were granted many, many years ago and the NSW Plan … provides very clear pathways to buy those back or require the companies to hand them back, unless they do any substantive activity.”
Mr Marshall said it was all about location and regulation. He said the industries were needed for the NSW economy, but they needed to go on the ‘goat country’, on the rubbish country where they have traditionally been. Ms O’Brien said Country Labor was quite strong on the issue and was about not giving out any licences at all until CSG is proved safe.
“I can’t imagine how there will ever be a situation where it will ever be safe,” Ms O’Brien said.
“I feel very strongly about separating mining from farming, and I would definitely stand up to my party if they said anything else, but at the moment I’m quite happy with their stance on this.”
Mr Goldstein said there was too much doubt and were too many doors left open by the National and Labor candidates.
“I utterly reject that there is any such thing in Australia as rubbish country. All of the land is what we need to protect our biodiversity and is part of our natural heritage,” Mr Goldstein said. He went on to say that renewable energy, not coal, would provide the jobs of the future.
Mr Mailler said he thought sustainable industries should not be messed with.
“We shouldn’t risk what is a sustainable industry for a short term gain. We’ve seen a swathe of protest by our constituents against extractive industries, against the risk to aquifers, against the risk to agricultural production, and that’s what this is all about; we need to restore that social contract between the politicians and our constituents. At the moment we’re seeing a ‘top down’ approach from Macquarie Street that’s not relevant to this electorate.”
Greens agree with farmers
The Meet the Candidates evening was chaired by NSW Farmers president Fiona Simson, who at one stage joked across the table with Liberal MLC Scot MacDonald.
With a big grin to Mr MacDonald, she formed the sign of a cross with her index fingers when Mr Goldstein rose to speak. It was meant to be light hearted, but tended to leave little doubt about NSW Farmers political preferences, certainly towards the Greens.
Yet Mr Goldstein told the audience that his party held much in common with NSW Farmers and held up one of their own pamphlets to demonstrate his point.
“When I looked at these six policy points in the NSW Farmers brochure, I saw that there are six issues that NSW Farmers want to promote at this election,” Mr Goldstein said.
“I can see Greens policies supporting every single one of those six points.”
The four candidates faced about 25 people who had paid to quiz them.
Mr Marshall said, in his view, politics in the bush should not be about ideology or philosophy.
“For me, living in the bush, politics is about geography. So my politics are pretty pragmatic. It’s about working with your communities and putting people and their issues first, and most of the solutions we can find are pretty common sense.”
Geography is something that also means a great deal to Ms O’Brien. Her family lived in Moree before she moved to Armidale, and Moree will be included in the electorate of Northern Tablelands for the first time at next month’s election.
“As an educator I have seen many things that are disturbing me now.
“The lack of community services and infrastructure of education in the Northern Tablelands,” Ms O’Brien said. “I’ve just done a tour of TAFE, Moree, Inverell, in Armidale, and it’s quite tragic what’s happened to the tertiary education system, quite terrible what’s happened with vocational training.”
Mr Mailler said he had left school in year 11 to attend agricultural college before he returned to manage the family farm in Boggabilla, and he admitted that he was a reluctant candidate.
“I got pushed into standing because I complained enough, and somebody said ‘What are you going to do about it?’.” He said he feared agriculture was not being managed for his children’s generation, and needed to be viewed in a different light.
“Agriculture underpins 14 per cent of our GDP in this country. It’s an important sector in terms our country’s wealth. What I’m seeing is a decline in agriculture viability,” Mr Mailler said.
“What we’ve seen is promises time and time again, and it’s nothing to do with a Coalition or a Labor government, it’s to do with duopoly. The same problem we’ve got in our markets is this duopoly corrupted against agriculture, and we’ve got to realise that if you eat you are part of agriculture.”
