From Jo Nova: Tyranny: How to destroy a business with environmental red tape
[Note: I visited with the Thompsons at their farm during my visit to Narrogin. While time did not permit me to do the full scale story that Jo Nova does below, I’ll point out that I grew up in farm country of the Midwest, I milked cows when I was 11. I also cleaned toilets at the county fair at 14 (a job nobody else would do but it paid $100 for the week, a fortune for me then). I know what smells and how. If you want to smell a poorly waste managed feedlot, try driving on I-5 near Coalinga, and get a whiff of the Harris Ranch feedlot.
While I’m on the subject of issues in Australia having to do with environmental red tape, I’d like to remind everyone of this story from Australia’s terrible wildfires: “We’ve lost two people in my family because you dickheads won’t cut trees down…” – Anthony]
Matt and Janet Thompson are at the end of the rope
Did you know in Australia it’s possible to ruin a business if you don’t like the way it smells? This is a heartbreaking story — that a government could effectively ruin a family by slowly strangling them in red tape, and that they would have apparently no protection from the courts or the ombudsman. It eats away at our sense of justice. Can we speak freely? Are we all treated equally under the law, or are some laws only enforced according to a capricious whim?
This is the price we pay for vague laws where business people can run ventures, do everything to the letter of the law, with best-practice procedures, winning customers and contracts, yet go broke despite all that because of onerous, impossible-to-meet conditions, that are unmeasurable, and change suddenly, with the added bonus of inordinately long delays. At the moment, Janet and Matts farm, Narrogin Beef Producers, lies empty, unstocked, while debts accrue by the minute.
This is also a story of sovereign risk. Investors in Australian industry beware.
Unused equipment that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars lies idle.
How can any business survive the need to get two-yearly licenses which take more than 12 months to arrange; where after four years of planning and preparation, capacity can be suddenly halved without warning; where an appeals process can take 18 months and when the original capacity is finally restored, not only are many new stipulations added, but the expiry date is not extended. After 30 months of a grinding process, the farmer is only left with 6 months before the amended license expires and no way to take out loans based on such an uncertain future.
If the government were a private business paid to arrange licenses, and expected to be evidence based and to respond in a reasonable time, then they would have no customers. Indeed, they could be sued.
Matt and Janet were told their license would be a formality, and they took out loans and contracts for water and grain in advance. Their input costs last year added up to around $10 million dollars. When the capacity was halved there was no way under the laws of biology and commerce that they could bring in the cash flow to meet those costs. When they appealed, there was no timeframe, no indication it would take 18 months to be resolved, so they took out loans, bore the costs, the interest, and paid for water they did not use, and grain no cow would eat. Their money was effectively squandered by the unpredictable rulings of the state government.
Bear in mind, the Thompsons have broken no laws. Most of this case boils down to a small number of complaints about odour. I would not wish foul smells on anyone, but the evidence there is suggests the problem is minor, and the level of complaints has no relation to the number of stock on the Thompson’s farm in any case. There is the troubling possibility that if someone took a dislike to another party, or had another vested interest in property nearby, or in a competing business, theoretically they could solicit complaints and exaggerate. How would we know? It’s hard to photograph a smell. It’s an avenue ripe for exploitation. Lets keep things in perspective, Janet and Matt live at their farm, closer than anyone else to any odours and emissions, and their farm is next to a piggery (ferrgoodnesssake) which has been there for more than 20 years.
Read the whole story at Jo Nova: Tyranny: How to destroy a business with environmental red tape
Wilky says:
July 8, 2010 at 10:25 pm
So what happens if they just ignore the government and operate without a permit?
So what happens if you stop paying your taxes?
A legion of Jackbooted Government Thugs –armed to the hilt– comes to pay you a friendly visit …
Need I say what happens next?
Oh, and in Aussie land, they have very strict gun-control, so self-defence is a rather iffy proposition against an out-of-control legion of men in kevlar who likely couldn’t care less about your matters.
899 says:
July 8, 2010 at 11:15 pm
Well, you know? All of what you speak has everything to do with the way our governments have been ‘designed for us.’….
What all of that accomplishes is: NOBODY in government will be bribed, because they won’t have the ability to make things happen, and those with the wherewithal won’t have the ability to influence the outcomes of matters.
_______________________________________________________________________
Not too bad an idea although we do need some government and you plan would make the federal government very hard to run.
I would very much like to see,
no lawyers may run for office (conflict of interest),
the sunset clause in all laws.
the read the bills act,
term limits of four years max,
no bill idea allowed to come up for vote more than once every ten years,
the ability of voters to do a vote of no confidence on the whole blasted government and demand a complete re-election if needed (like now)
no megacorporations, no cartels or corporate lobbying, a maximum size limit to corporations, no interlinking corporate boards, no corporate/government revolving door. If you serve on a Congressional Committee or bureaucracy you may never ever be employed in that industry again – period.
The biggest thing however is to keep Congress from delegating law making to bureaucrats. NO MORE blasted bureaucratic regulations like the EPA CO2 endangerment finding or the USDA NAIS regs or the FDA HACCP regs. And above all get rid of the Federal Reserve blood suckers.
Gail Combs says:
July 8, 2010 at 11:22 pm
[–snip for brevity–]
MA has strict gun control laws and “the foremost Marxist scholars in the world” Those strict gun laws and the “critical mass” of progressives in MA made them much bolder, so you see the “progressives” with the polite veneer pealed of and it isn’t pretty. This was 15 years ago and one of the reasons I left the state. I could not stomach the insanity any more.
You too, eh?
My parents escaped from Taxachusetts soon after I joined the USN, and later I bought 45 acres of land adjacent to theirs which I gave to them.
When they left (Marshfield), they were paying over U$1200 a year in taxes for a measly 1/2 acre of land and 12oo sq. ft. house.
They bought a two-story 10 room house on 5 acres of land with a stream, for less than it cost to buy the one in Marshfield, and the taxes were less than U$400/year.
When I left, I never looked back.
What really tweeks me though is for them to come here and complain and whine about how different things are, like they want to ‘homogenize’ the whole nation to be like Taxachusetts …
Blech!
Gail Combs says:
July 8, 2010 at 11:43 pm
[–snip for brevity–]
Not too bad an idea although we do need some government and you plan would make the federal government very hard to run.
[–snip rest–]
As Thomas Jefferson once said: “The government which governs least, governs best.”
And yes: Let’s –PLEASE DO– get rid of that fed res.
Andrew Jackson fought like the dickens to get rid of the Second National Bank, and won, but he didn’t go far enough to expose the perfidies endemic.
Anyone familiar with the matter, will know that Nicholas Biddle was connected directly to the Bank of England and its cadre of banker insiders.
Some interesting quotes:
“History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling the money and its issuance.”
~ James Madison
“The system of banking we have both equally and ever reprobated. I contemplate it as a blot left in all our constitutions, which, if not covered, will end in their destruction, which is already hit by the gamblers in corruption, and is sweeping away in its progress the fortunes and morals of our citizens. Funding I consider as limited, rightfully, to a redemption of the debt within the lives of a majority of the generation contracting it; every generation coming equally, by the laws of the Creator of the world, to the free possession of the earth he made for their subsistence, unincumbered by their predecessors, who, like them, were but tenants for life.!
~ Thomas Jefferson
“We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debt, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our calling and our creeds…[we will] have no time to think, no means of calling our miss-managers to account but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers… And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for[ another]… till the bulk of society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery… And the fore-horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.”
~ Thomas Jefferson
“The few who understand the system, will either be so interested from it’s profits or so dependent on it’s favors, that there will be no opposition from that class.”
– Mayer Amschel Bauer Rothschild
“The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it.”
– John Kenneth Galbraith
1858: Lionel De Rothschild finally takes his seat in parliament when the requirement to take an oath in the true faith of a Christian is broadened to include other oaths. He becomes the first Jewish member of the British parliament.
1861: President Abraham Lincoln (16th President of the United States from 1860 till his assassination in 1865) approaches the Rothschilds to try to obtain loans to support the ongoing American civil war.
The Rothschilds agree provided Lincoln allows them a Charter for another United States central bank and are prepared to pay 24% to 36% interest on all monies loaned. Lincoln was very angry about this high level of interest and so he printed his own debt free money and informed the public that this was now legal tender for both public and private debts.
1862: By April $449,338,902 worth of Lincoln’s debt free money had been printed and distributed. He went on to state, “We gave the people of this republic the greatest blessing they ever had, their own paper money to pay their own debts.”
That same year The Times of London publishes A story containing the following statement, “If that mischievous financial policy, which had its origin in the North American Republic, should become indurated down to a fixture, then that government will furnish its own money without cost. It will pay off debts and be without a debt. It will have all the money necessary to carry on its commerce. It will become prosperous beyond precedent in the history of civilized governments of the world. The brains and the wealth of all countries will go to North America. That government must be destroyed or it will destroy every monarchy on the globe.”
“The best way to take control over a people and control them utterly is to take a little of their freedom at a time, to erode rights by a thousand tiny and almost imperceptible reductions. In this way the people will not see those rights and freedoms being removed until past the point at which these changes cannot be reversed”
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
Stephen Brown says:
July 9, 2010 at 12:43 am
“The best way to take control over a people and control them utterly is to take a little of their freedom at a time, to erode rights by a thousand tiny and almost imperceptible reductions. In this way the people will not see those rights and freedoms being removed until past the point at which these changes cannot be reversed”
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
No ‘change’ is ever irreversible.
Hitler, along with that other cadre of fools –the Fabians– thought the same thing.
When enough people wake up to the facts, there’s only one sure way to put them down, and that’s a pogrom.
But that won’t get very far here in America, not anymore.
“Once the Constitution is gone it becomes rule of Judge meaning however the judge feels today is what the law is. ”
I live in a country without a constitution, and we do not have rule of law but, as you point out, rule by judges. They take any liberty they want.
The horrendous circumstance outlined in this posting is located in the state of Western Australia; across the other side of the Australian continent is the state of Queensland. Here the regulatory goal posts are always on the move. For an update into only one of areas severely impacting farmers go to this youtube link,
The horrendous circumstance outlined in this posting is located in the state of Western Australia; across the other side of the Australian continent is the state of Queensland. Here the regulatory goal posts are always on the move. For an update into only one of areas severely impacting farmers go to this youtube link, Unlimited Power of the State and Contempt of Court </a
Gail Combs says:
July 8, 2010 at 6:32 pm
‘and many farmers’ lives ended in suicide’
In the early 1990s the banks were foreclosing on rural properties as wool prices and the meat market bottomed out, any ideas and ventures for secondary on-farm businesses were, as the suicide numbers for young men skyrocketed (by census accounts which are only taken 5 yearly anyway), held up by red-tape and bank interests.
Austalia was fed a false story. And one based on weather (climate) rather than the ingenuity of our rural population to strive for success.
Those that lived in rural areas knew that young men were dying in extraordinary numbers. Families lost their young people, often in horrific circumstances. The deaths and injuries of these young men was put down to other ‘accidents/injuries’ or catalogued under other excuses.
Rural Australia was lost, and deaths, deaths of young working people and young men married, surged, as the environmental and feral thinkers controlled the local rural Councils and planning and regulatory regimes and there hence other local businesses and services – to do their deeds and ultimately lives were lost.
Presumably the boutique industries continue in these rural areas, serving the urban tourists?
Where then will the governments allow greenies to put up their rotting towers that’s supposed to be the next big thing for bio fuel I wonder?
in australia its the y generation with there i pods in there ears and texing 24 /7 thay seem to think, why should we worry about who is in government thay don,t give a hoot about what’s happening with over regulating the way we live our lives. if labour gets gets in again god help us . thay will try to bring carbon tax in again
It is far better to have politicians “on the take” than idealistic ones. At least the politicians “on the take” make sure that there are good profits from which they can get their cut.
The huge numbers of idealistic politicians that have been elected in all nations of western culture have passed legislation which are profit destroying, and in many cases have been with the intention of destroying profits.
The hue and cry lately is against “big oil” and “big coal”. Just take a peek at history and see what terrible conditions people (including the “elite”) had to live under before “big oil” and “big coal”.
I was reared on a farm, in my case, northwest Iowa, and until after my 5th birthday we had no electricity. (REA came through in 1941) There were teens in my high school as of 1950 and later who lived on farms which still didn’t have electricity. We managed to live that way, but it sure wasn’t pleasant. Heat for the whole (small) house in the winter from a wood/corncob burning range in the kitchen, and sometimes some heat from a fireplace. Unheated(!) upstairs bedrooms. No refrigeration of course, and even after we got “wired up” even a simple thing like a fan was either unavailable (during WWII) or, even after the war, way too expensive to purchase. Once a week bathing, and once a week change of underwear.
There is a huge negative economic cumulative effect building up which will soon reach a climax which the citizens of the US are not prepared for and for which we can’t prepare.
We are indeed living in “interesting times” (as in the old Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.”)
The catalyst for the victimisation of the Thompsons may possibly have been their handing out copies of Great Global Warming Scam DVD at a farmers meeting addressing bureaucratic problems engendered by the Australian National Environmental Protection Measures, with officers of the Department of Environment and Conservation – DEC – seemingly noting this and becoming interested in the Thompsons. It need hardly be said that DEC has apparently caused bureaucratic nightmares elsewhere – for small mining companies proposing to develop minerals projects through apparent imposition of seemingly arbitrary constraints and regulations. It is difficult not to assert that the DEC contains an individual or individuals of the far left determined to cripple those in the productive sector whose views on the environment, including climate change, conflicts with their own benighted world views. Do we not see a similar syndrome existing in the US Senate, with notables such as Waxman and Markey trying to impose their own benighted world views on the US productive sector through inappropriate and impractical legislation?
Douglas Haynes says:
July 9, 2010 at 3:32 pm
The catalyst for the victimisation of the Thompsons may possibly have been their handing out copies of Great Global Warming Scam DVD at a farmers meeting addressing bureaucratic problems engendered by the Australian National Environmental Protection Measures, with officers of the Department of Environment and Conservation – DEC – seemingly noting this and becoming interested in the Thompsons.
[–snip for brevity–] Do we not see a similar syndrome existing in the US Senate, with notables such as Waxman and Markey trying to impose their own benighted world views on the US productive sector through inappropriate and impractical legislation?
Waxman & Markey are foot soldiers for Gore Jr.
Gore Jr. is that ‘high priest’ of the S&B society who’s doing his level best to scare the hoi polloi –the unwashed masses– into submission.
THINK: When was the last time an uninformed community of souls were scared into believing that if they didn’t submit, that the Moon would swallow the Sun?
How many times throughout history has arcane knowledge been used to enslave a whole peoples?
Well, now comes Gore Jr. and company, and they KNOW that the weather is going to get cold. THEY are on the cusp of that point in time where action MUST be successful for them, or they will lose the window of opportunity to scare the hoi polloi into submission.
Ergo, they NEED to get that ‘cap and trade’ legislation enacted so that they mightIMMEDIATELY jump up and declare that the climate has now cooled –even though it’s already doing such anyway– and that the miserable taxation MUST continue, lest the climate get HOT once again.
Funny thing though: If no legislation happens, and the climate continues its trend, they’ll all be seen for the con men they really are.
Lord only knows what happens to them –and their followers– after that …
Looks to mr like a case of discrimination against Americans [ Yanks – aren’t the called septic tanks in Australia, prima facie evidence perhaps]. It looks obvious that a different set of “rules” are being applied to the pig farm down the road.
I would suggest the Thompsons approach it as a case of discrimination and appeal to the government authority that deals with such.
It’s also likely that we have a situation where someone locally would benefit, grandly, from being to buy up their property cheaply. Needs the Australian financial wiz equivalent of, say a Steve McIntyre, to do the forensic investigation to identify this.
Well, i don’t know about just picking on “Yanks” because my family went through a very similar “experience” – young children as well – i can tell you that extreme greens are not discriminating in their mission to “save the environment”.
I also know Janet and Matt – good people, honest hardworking people – this is just wrong – despair is something that we all experience when going through what the Thompsons are living now, but we Aussies will stand shoulder to shoulder with them – the grassroots people. We need help from grassroots Americans – please, please help us.
God help Australia, because our politicians wont – watch this story too…it is a night mare in perpetuity
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGxzbCMQNSI
http://www.thecompletepatient.com/journal/2010/7/6/in-vonderplanitz-affair-sharon-palmer-is-left-to-wonder-if-s.html
read this for govt harrassment of the worst type.
Barry sotero thinks the new food control laws are dandy.
home baked cake stalls are basically banned, and its the same in Aus now, cake days are commercial crap onsold. to have a council inspect and approve your home kitchen is insane, no one dies from fetes , plenty die from big aggro agri products.
If you want to smell a poorly waste managed feedlot, try driving on I-5 near Coalinga, and get a whiff of the Harris Ranch feedlot.
The most offensive odor emanates along Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C..
Tim Clark says:
July 10, 2010 at 10:45 am
If you want to smell a poorly waste managed feedlot, try driving on I-5 near Coalinga, and get a whiff of the Harris Ranch feedlot.
The most offensive odor emanates along Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C.
Agreed! But most specifically from –of late– 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Anthony, thank you for posting our story. And all the commenters, we thank you immenseley. Joanne Nova has actually engaged in investigative journalism as it relates to our story, and there are heaps more details coming out. So if you are interested in “drilling down” on any issues, go for it. Here is her follow-up post:
http://joannenova.com.au/2010/07/smell-that-evidence/#more-9346
Pat D said above:
“I would suggest the Thompsons approach it as a case of discrimination and appeal to the government authority that deals with such.”
I think it’s very important for people to realise that we have NO independent appeals tribunals for environmental issues in Australia. We have just gone through another “appeals convenor” process. The Appeals Convenor is part of the DEC, and he sat in our house and told us that he thought we were right on some things, but that he would not go against the Department. It is Caesar investigating Caesar.
And then, our elected Minister for Environment (the single, solitary person who stands between voters and the monstrosity of departmental bureaucracy), implemented verbatim what the Appeals Convenor recommended.
If one positive thing comes from our horrific story, please let it be the establishment of an independent investigator into complaints against departments.
REPLY: If I had a tractor, I’d drive it into Perth right up front of the DEC and park it and ask others to do the same. The only thing left is protest. – Anthony
Janet H. Thompson says:
July 12, 2010 at 5:58 pm
[–snip for brevity–]
If one positive thing comes from our horrific story, please let it be the establishment of an independent investigator into complaints against departments.
In the U.S., that’s what’s referred to as an ‘independent prosecutor,’ such as has been used to investigate the various foibles and failings of whatever part of the executive branch.
Your travail is evidence enough of the fallacies of the English Parliamentary system of government which many have sought to foist upon the U.S., not –you understand– that the federalist system is much better.
In this case, you appear to be faced with the ironic dichotomy of the fox guarding the hen house, and legally making a killing in the process.
It may not be much, but: All my hopes for you.