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Legislative Council - Fifty-First Parliament, Third Session (51-3)
2009-09-23 Daily Xml
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ENVIRONMENT PROTECTION (RIGHT TO FARM) AMENDMENT BILL

Introduction and First Reading

The Hon. R.L. BROKENSHIRE (17:47): Obtained leave and introduced a bill for an act to amend the Environment Protection Act 1993; and to make a consequential amendment to the Land and Business (Sale and Conveyancing) Act 1994. Read a first time.

Second Reading

The Hon. R.L. BROKENSHIRE (17:47): I move:

That this bill be now read a second time.

This bill is based in part on models adopted in northern America but also based on calls made by Australian farmers federations for the protection of farmers' rights to farm. Throughout the world, as we see increased urbanisation, increasingly we have farming enterprises continuing to operate at the fringes of urban sprawl or otherwise close to where people have moved for a farm change, sea change or green change.

I declare my personal interest here as a farmer. My family are farmers but I speak for constituents generally in agriculture. The frustration of farmers not only here but the world over is that they are then the victims of noise complaints, air pollution complaints or other nuisance complaints when all they are doing is continuing their usual farming activities in the same place where they have carried on farming for generations.

Family First considered the legislative models from northern America and those proposed by farming federations here in Australia, and we believe we have captured the two least controversial and important elements of those. First, it will be a defence to an EPA complaint if a farmer is conducting a protected farming activity—namely, a practice condoned by a code of practice or by generally accepted standards and practices in the farming industry. The obligation will be on the EPA, not the farmer, to establish that defence.

Secondly, persons who buy land in farming areas will be notified when buying land in the area that there are farming enterprises operating in the area. This will serve as notice to purchasers to prevent nuisance complaints in the future should they decide they are unhappy with the noise, sight or smell of farming machinery rolling past their home. When I was the member for Mawson, I put on notice the Adelaide Mushroom Farm at Woodcroft which had been there for a long time and was ultimately a headache to both governments—this one and the last one—until it was finally moved. But the question is: why should it have been moved if there were proper buffers and notification to purchasers of subdivisions around the farm?

I believe this bill is about valuing our primary producers, providing them with certainty in difficult economic times and providing natural justice to those who by and large have farmed in their area for generations and are given trouble by new residents who want the rural lifestyle but not the primary production activity. Those people seem to misunderstand that you cannot have one and not the other. You cannot go into the country and live on a nice hobby farm and not have farmers farming around you. Farmers, at times, have to work 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

I look forward to our country members of parliament, the South Australian Farmers Federation and those who are sympathetic to family farming supporting this bill as a timely encouragement to farmers of the value of their activity in the South Australian economy. I commend the bill for the right to farm to the council.

Debate adjourned on motion of Hon. J.M. Gazzola.

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