When the greenies did a deal with the Beattie government to call removing regrowth on previously improved pasture "clearing" & require clearing permits just to undertake farm maintenance, they lost me.

When this maintenance was included in clearing figures, & claimed to be clearing virgin bush by those greenies, & the Beattie/Bligh government, we all knew there was no morality in either camp.

Anyone who trusts a greenie, & particularly the Australian Conservation Foundation, WWF or Greenpeace is as the add goes, "a bloody idiot", & will be screwed.

Lindsay you people made your bed with your constant lying & efforts to screw every one else. Now many enjoy anything that stops you & your kind.

"So with no business case, the question remains of who stands to win by winding back our environment protections?"

The Environment!

So long as protecting the environment remains the business of government (both state and federal), people no longer realise that it should be their own business, for their own good.

At best, some say "no worries, I needn't care or do anything because the government already takes care of the environment", but others go further and say: "Environment is a government thing - so to hell with the environment!".

It would be much more effective if environmental issues would be left to the people. If developers knew that treating the environment badly means that ordinary people wouldn't want to do business with them or with any other companies that deal with them, supporting their environmental destruction, if they knew that black-lists are part of the culture.

People are not born idiots - it is governments that try to turn them into such.

One thing that government can and should do for the environment, is to sell the underground minerals to the farmers who own the land above, rather than to unscrupulous mining companies. Besides the environmental issues, farmers (and other land-owners) should never suffer the invasion of greedy and polluting corporations into their private land without their consent. Unsurveyed under-land should be sold to farmers for the estimated average value of the minerals in their region, while under-lands that were already surveyed are to be priced according to the survey-results. Farmers should be able to obtain their under-land before anyone else, with about 30% discount if they do so within the first year. If they want to allow mining companies to survey/mine their land, it is then up to the farmers and according to their own terms. As a side-effect, Australia's debt would turn into surplus overnight.