they made a marine park but then didnt close of the southern part of the whales breading ground so the gas industry wouldnt be affected! its just political BULLSHIT! Just like all the other marine parks they are planning

How effed up are the Greens???

The Greens have inflicted their brand of zealot politics on a weak Gillard government with the fallout being felt by families, businesses, entire communities – and in particular regional areas.

A team of 10 Nationals MPs and Senators were already into another two day regional visit – this time to the Northern Rivers region of NSW, taking in the seats of Richmond and Page, when the word came that Senator Milne was saddling up to ride into country towns.

(Of course, she wouldn’t be riding a horse, that would be cruel to animals.)

In fact, part of our team was at the Big Rivers timber mill in Grafton. I strongly recommend Senator Milne have a look and a good listen.

Big Rivers Timbers is one of the biggest employers in town, supporting 160 local jobs. Managing director Jim Bindon is justifiably proud of the mill’s environmental record, which takes a renewable resource and turns it into high quality, beautiful and tough plywood.

The business generates 40% of the heat for drying timber from steam, firing the boiler with the biomass waste the plant generates through timber off-cuts so nothing goes to waste, while saving on electricity use.

But then Jim tells us the Labor-Greens government has refused to fully credit the biomass the plant reuses as renewable energy. Using the off-cuts for biomass is ‘unethical’!

It’s not the only weird anomaly. The carbon tax will add $200,000 a year to the mill’s electricity bill. That’s bad enough, but we are left shaking our heads as Jim explains the carbon tax will actually double parts of the mill’s power bill.

The Labor-Greens tax is applied at a $23 tonne flat rate, so while the plant’s daytime power bill will increase 25%, his environmentally more friendly off-peak bill will increase by 100%.

His frustration peaks, lamenting ‘it’s just a massive new bill to pay that does nothing to change production practices because the mill is already doing everything it can to be sustainable’.

Overnight, the mill will be less competitive. Imports are already cheaper on wages alone and now there is to be a carbon tax that Australian mills must pay but imported products will not.

It’s just one story from one business doing the right thing in one local town, but we’ve heard the same story again and again in regional communities across the country.

In Casino, another part of our Nationals team were being told of abattoir freezer bills going up $260,000 a year under the carbon tax, and a nonsense carbon tax trigger which means an abattoir emitting 24,999 tonnes of CO² does not have to buy carbon permits, but if it emits one tonne more it must fork out $575,000 for permits – higher every year. It’s cheaper to close for a week than pay the bill!

As the architects of the carbon tax, the mining tax and the green tape strangling regional business and local developments, copping an earful from real people affected by the Greens agenda is the reality check the Greens need.

The Greens have never had more than a ‘fly-in and fly-out’ attitude to regional areas. They fly-in when there is some local protest they can join, but when it is over they fly-out. The next thing regional Australians hear from the Greens is that they want to take away their irrigation water, ban their farm chemicals and fertilisers, close their fisheries, ban the live animal trade and modern animal husbandry practices, ban rodeos and horse sports, declare their properties national parks, replace their farm land with trees and ban culling pest animals.

If a farmer can survive these green policies, then they will have to live with higher income taxes, higher fuel and energy prices, the world’s biggest carbon tax, and bans on selling their produce overseas.