CJ is that just your personal opinion or are there references?

I'm just interested in both sides of this story and also why the press have not been onto it the way they were when some Canberra based eco types had a hunger strike recently.

There were regular updates all day long on "our" ABC. (Are they biased? /sarc, of course)

This person's story seems to be being ignored.

Is it because it is not causeworthy (i.e. not the right eco slant) enough for our media, or is it because there is more to it?

The PNG angle is interesting .. how long was he in PNG?

Peter, along with many other farmers have had their land stolen. No doubt much of this land would never have been cleared anyway, and people like Peter were planning on using part of their land for agroforestry. The point is they cannot use any of their land now.

The story is not about the credibility of Peter Spencer or CJ Morgan, but it most certainly IS about government theft, and government at all levels is complicit in it.

In May 1992 - around the same time the environmentalist's "Earth Summit" was held in Rio - the Commonwealth & States signed an agreement called the "Intergovernmental Agreement on the Environment". It states that the principles of ecologically sustainable development "should inform policy making and program implementation".

In NSW at least, the state government wasted no time carrying out this agenda. The Native Vegetation Act was bad enough, but even worse has been the way that these communistic principles have infested the Local Government Act and Environmental Assessment & Planning Act like a cancer, drastically undermining the principle of private property rights. In the case of the NSW EP&A Act, legislation to effect this was introduced in 1997, and one large council was so keen on it that they amended their local environmental plan to comply, 3 weeks before the legislation became law!

For environmentalists and others who believe that individuals should be subservient to the almighty state in pursuit of whatever they declare is in "the public interest", this was nirvana. Now in most of Australia, owners of private property no longer truly own their property; rather, they are now forced to act as custodians and caretakers, bound to follow government-set management plans that are becoming more onerous and restrictive by the month.

It is an absolute outrage the way this has happened, and it must be halted and reversed before we wake up to find ourselves living in the same conditions as those in other countries where private ownership has been abolished, such as Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela.

CJ Morgan, regardless of your opinion of Peter Spencer, the fact is that many rural landowners, and in general the 'green' rural landowners have been robbed of land use rights. Most of the so called 'environmental vandals' in the bush cleared the land in accordance with government policy and government requirements in the past (for leasehold, they were told to 'clear it or lose it'. I challenge you to visit a property such as ours to see how ludicrous and unfair the decision re land clearing is. On our property we merely wanted to replace trees with fruit trees.
Fickle Pickle, your ideas may sound good but how does one plant trees when the land purchased for farming cannot be touched (because it has trees on it) yet the landowner cannot claim carbon credits for them.
In Queensland, while the mapping was and still is grossly inaccurate, regrowth was classified as remnant (using dubious criteria), land was locked up for endangered species without compensation (while the Nature Conservation Act provides for compensation) and now regrowth (also incorrectly mapped) is also locked up and Beattie gloated about meeting Kyoto targets...at our expense.
And we are left with an unsaleable farm, where 40% would have been left in its natural state and a $2million+ per annum food producing farm developed! Justice...I think not.

He's hardly being ignored, rpg. Various far-right, farmers', anti-environmental and even Christian groups have this clown's name splattered all over the Internet. About the most comprehensive and balanced discussion I've found is at

http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/12/23/tower-of-hope-or-vale-of-tears/

Much of Australia's environmental degradation is a direct result of ignorant or greedy farmers and agricultural companies engaging in unsustainable practices like broadscale land clearing for short term gain. Governments have a responsibility to ensure that the excesses of the past aren't repeated in the future, which is why the kinds of environmental rape and pillage that created the disaster that is the Murray-Darling Basin are now heavily restricted.

As for 'ownership' of land, try asserting your 'property rights' if a rich coal seam or gold or uranium deposit is discovered underneath your patch. It seems to me that a vocal minority of rabid right nutters are piggybacking on Spencer's cause to try and reverse environmental legislation that was overdue when it was proclaimed in various States.

Of course, Peter Spencer could have avoided his problems if he'd managed his land instead of just leaving it to its own devices while he was off playing 'big man' in PNG.

Meanwhile we whiteys stole the entire continent from the "aborigines". And most of the rest of the world too. New Zealand, Canada, the USA, South Africa, etc etc.