Playing wild rivers wild card

SENATOR Fielding’s backflip has angered indigenous leaders.

FAMILY First leader Steve Fielding will leave an unfortunate legacy when his Senate term expires next month. His eleventh-hour change of heart over Tony Abbott’s bill to wind back Queensland’s controversial Wild Rivers laws will almost certainly see the Opposition Leader’s legislation defeated, along with the aspirations of Cape York traditional owners who want real employment opportunities to break the cycle of welfare dependency.

Nobody denies the importance of pristine Cape York rivers and their surrounds, which traditional owners were looking after long before white settlement. But they do not need heavy-handed legislation imposing severe restrictions on any development near the rivers or catchment areas to ensure their environment remains healthy. They desperately need the chance to achieve self-sufficiency.

At stake are important projects such as the cultivation of native pongamia trees near the Lockhart River to provide diesel biofuel, an ideal niche industry for the area. A bauxite mine that would have provided more than 1300 jobs for unemployed indigenous people at Pisolite Hills near Weipa on the western Cape has already been scuttled by the Queensland legislation, which was imposed by the Bligh government to appease urban green groups such as the Wilderness Society.

As Cape York Institute director Noel Pearson wrote on Saturday, Senator Fielding travelled to Cape York with Labor senator Mark Furner but did not visit the people most affected by the laws, who live near the Lockhart, Stewart and Archer rivers. The senator rejected an approach to meet representatives of the local communities.

On its website, Family First claims to understand “that most of us have simple yet important aspirations. We want to earn a living doing work we like so we can provide for our families and someday own a home.” In siding with urban, anti-development environmentalists to sink Mr Abbott’s bill, Senator Fielding will ensure that Cape York remains locked up from productive enterprises that would give local people the chance to aspire to the very values Family First purports to uphold.

There is, however, one crumb of comfort from Senator Fielding’s late discovery of the wilderness. It is there that his political career is heading.
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