Dissatisfaction with Bob Hawke’s high-taxing government policies led to 45,000 protesting farmers gathering on the Parliament House forecourt in Canberra in July 1985, dubbed by QCL as a ‘day of rural rage’.
A decade later, leading up to the state election in July 1995, the possibility of land being resumed for world heritage, plus draft tree-clearing guidelines drawn up by the Goss government, were big issues for rural voters.
The government planned to convert 3.6 million hectares of Cape York cattle country to a wilderness conservation zone, resuming 750,000ha of private land in the process.
The chairman of the far northern branch of the Cattlemen’s Union, Allan Holmes called it an arrogant political plan to win votes.
The Liberal-National Coalition won a majority of the two-party preferred vote in the election, primarily in the rural heartland, which gave the ALP a one-seat majority.
Before the result was overturned, leaving the Coalition forming a minority government, ALP Primary Industries Minister Bob Gibbs promised that controversial tree-clearing guidelines wouldn’t be “driven by the whims of the Green Movement”.
UGA spokesperson Gus McGown said the election outcome meant governments would have to reassess a growing tendency for a top-down approach to environmental issues.
That was reiterated by Birdsville’s Nell Brook, a member of the Lake Eyre Basin Protection Group fighting proposed world heritage listing in 1995.
She said they’d tried to get the message through to the federal government that it should start from the bottom up, not the top down.
QCL documented the introduction of the Cattle Council of Australia’s on-property quality assurance scheme, Cattlecare, in the 1990s, with Jon Condon reporting that the response had been guarded.
People were shying away from suggestions of compulsion, and were worried about the cost, suggesting at a South Burnett meeting that they’d be happier with a separate initiative to identify and eliminate chemical residues in Queensland herds.
A joint state government-grazing industry initiative to eradicate cattle ticks was reported as gaining momentum in 1995.
The areas targeted for action covered almost 3.3m ha of the state, and its success was put down to producers working together and the regulation of stock movements.
Most of the ‘No cotton on the Cooper’ bumper stickers have faded these days, but the fight put up to oppose the plan announced in 1995 by NSW farmers to grow cotton on Currareva Station near Windorah is still firmly in the memory of many.
As Sarah Jeffrey reported for Queensland Country Life, the plan by the group of three growers and an earthmoving contractor was to grow up to 2400ha of irrigated cotton and 1200ha of rotation crops on the 22,267ha property at the headwaters of Cooper Creek.
Spokesman Hans Woldring said they picked Windorah because of its hot climate and favourable picking conditions.
Locals vented their concerns at a public meeting about the use of chemicals in an area with a budding organic meat industry and about the amount of water that might be used.
Mr Woldring said they’d submitted a water licence application that would see them pumping 1.5pc of the river’s average annual flow.
“At Windorah it will all be high flow pumping so when Cooper Creek runs above agreed levels, we will be able to pump water,” he said. “This would be one of the lowest extractions in any river system.”
UGA spokesman Gus McGowan slammed the idea, saying the introduction of an intensive agricultural enterprise would not be tolerated in an area that could be included in a world heritage listing.
Not everyone was opposed to the idea – writing a letter to the editor, PJ Connors urged Channel Country producers to try and find a way to fight drought instead of “allowing precious water to flow into the desert of South Australia”.
The potential for large-scale water extraction was subsequently limited through legislation such as the Water Act 2000.
Read more on Queensland Country Life
